US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Uh what US warfare have you been watching? Russia is struggling with Ukraine and the NATO weaponry they've been gifted. 100 mile supply lines proved too much, and they failed entirely to achieve air superiority. There's zero reason to think they'd do better against the US more directly.
Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then struggling not to starve to death
Why do you think a country that isn't capable of properly maintaining tanks is capable of maintaining nukes? I mean, ICBMs are literally rocket science with nuclear physics on top of them.
How can a country that cannot even prevent theft of electronics from their "doomsday plane" in front of the 9th of May parade keep a fleet of ICBMs operative?
In a normal year Russia has a total military budget that is smaller than the part of the US military budged allocated to nuke maintenance. How do you think they keep their nukes ready?
All this is before we start talking about corruption. There is a reason why some Russian military leaders have yachts and/or palaces and US military leaders doesn't have them.
In all fairness, maybe most of the yachts are made of missing winter uniforms (I recently saw Russians wearing Tyvek suits as "winter uniforms"). But if they steal so openly from things that was supposed to be used - why wouldn't they steal even more from things that were never meant to be used?
Before I round up, some hearsay: Some journalist that claimed he traveled throught the former Soviet Union shortly after the collapse (I have forgotten the name and I am in no position to verify it anyway) said that he saw missile silos full of rainwater. And when he asked people said it had already been like that for a few years before the collapse in 1991.
Do I think we don't have to care? Absolutely not. They might very well have a few functional nukes, maintained by enthusiastic crews, sailing around on subs somewhere I don't know (I don't follow the space to closely).
But I am not worried that they will send US back to the stone age at all.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#393> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…
> It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small. Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.
We've had thermonuclear weapons (h-bombs) for a long time already.
Harnessing the energy in a controlled and sustainable fashion is what's hard.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is an example of a run away fusion reaction?
A Hydrogen Bomb. It is basically using a nuke (fission) to trigger fusion instead of lasers.
That is a run away fission reaction that ignites a short lived fusion reaction. We don't even talk about neutron populations or k factors in fusion because there is no avalanche effect possible.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#395I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how f…
When you consider that they laser they used consumed 300 megajoules from the wall plug, in order to send 1.8 megajoules to the target, the fact that they got 2.5 megajoules out looks puny in comparison. Even newer lasers only have 20% wall plug efficiency according to the press conference. So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain. They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only talk…
Energy is conserved in the universe so there is never any net energy gain.
See how pedantic and not helpful that is?
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.
Why are they using these "flash pumped" lasers if more efficient ones are available?
It's a very old lab, and replacing them isn't cheap/easy.
You don't need to use efficient lasers to get the scientific results they're after - other people have already very accurately measured the properties of modern lasers, so we can predict how they would perform without having to actually use them.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#397I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn't find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually). Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$…
This isn't for power plants, this is to model the efficiency of the second stage of a stored h-bomb in place of periodically exploding them, which we can't do anymore due to the test-ban treaty.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#398One more step towards getting away from dirty fossil fuels.
I just hope we have enough time to see it implemented at scale (ie, powering entire states/cities/towns/municipalities, swapping infra in place).
I also hope the O&G industry doesn’t attempt to block this with fake science (ie, decades of climate denial, greenwashing via “recycling” campaigns).
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000 Why wouldn't a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest on capital costs? Other?
Inertial confinement fusion requires fairly expensive targets to collapse. To make it economically viable they have to produce a lot more energy per target destroyed.
> fairly expensive targets
The targets are only expensive because they aren't produced at scale yet.
They are the exact kind of thing a machine could churn millions of per day out, and then use them at the same rate.
Even if the targets were made of expensive materials (eg. platinum), most of that platinum could later be recovered from the reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very expensive.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom: 2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron: 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configu…
Do we know how much tritium is needed for a city's energy generation? What about a state etc? Reason I ask is the only uses I have seen for tritium is on old watch dials made in the pre-90's. Curious how much of this resource is out there.
Real Engineering recently made a video that covers fuel needs.