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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#461

Post by TheCondor »

boc wrote: post #251

It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.

I think the cynicism is linked to the cycles of bubbles.

When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, there were companies just pouring money in to anything related to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be a big deal...

It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe we'll do it next time.

In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we crack the fusion nut, we will change the world.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#462

Post by whimsicalism »

_ea1k wrote: post #284
boc wrote: post #251

It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.

I'm not sure when it happened, but this place has become a lot less inquisitive and a lot more dark in recent times. Possibly its correlated with growth, but it feels like something else.

Think it's correlated with growth. I've seen significant post-pandemic degradation on all major social media platforms I use (mostly here & Twitter), along with large increases in volume.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#463

Post by donquixote25 »

qayxc wrote: post #451
RobertRoberts wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead. My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias is against. Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea? I ha…

> Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea? Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before substance, and raising expectations for something that's still essentially just basic research. This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just poor jou…

Many fusion new articles have this problem but i would argue that this time, how FT categorized this is appropriate. This is literally the first time the scientific break-even (not engineering break-even) has been achieved by any controlled experiment, including MCF. How is that not a breakthrough?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#464

Post by whiplash451 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #436

This is great! Why is this great? It is great because between magnetic confinement and inertial confinement approaches to fusion generation it is the FIRST one to demonstrate energy gain. If you are programmer, think of it like your program compiled successfully for the first time. It means that all of the bits between you designing the program, the program being compiled, and the operating system recognizing it as a…

When your program compiles for the first time is usually when the real trouble starts.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#465

Post by qayxc »

anyfoo wrote: post #450
qayxc wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat. There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if not thousa…

The question is whether this is a breakthrough and a significant milestone or not. It seems to me like your comment suggests that we have hit the "significant milestone" marker only when we have an actual electricity-generating fusion reactor, which I think diminishes the actual breakthrough that a positive net energy gain represents (if correct). It was long sought after, it has now been reached.

Exactly! This is a very good question that requires some context, preferably from within the field. What does it actually mean?

Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in answering that question and providing the necessary context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem ecstatic about the possibilities.

You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.

But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#466

Post by paxys »

dsr_ wrote: post #375
paxys wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted responses to every new product announcement are essentially "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".

That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been debugged in ways the new stuff has not. All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.

If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the small chance that they are in the 10%.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#467

Post by anyfoo »

scottLobster wrote: post #437
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to you?

For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' flight 40 years…

Like the ARPANET? That was even less of a notable Monday to the general populace, because I doubt any significant part of the public had a great interest in some universities being able to connect their at least fridge-size, expensive computers together similarly to how they were already able to do before, but now using "packets".

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#468

Post by serverholic »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #277
root_axis wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity. Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims of amazing scientific breakthroughs.

The older I get the more I think it's just counter signaling that one is smarter than whoever did this work, which is almost certainly not the case.

Yeah I can't help but imagine these same folks would be more than happy to produce a list of common logical fallacies.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#469

Post by rolenthedeep »

To everyone whining about the lasers: who cares? It's an engineering problem, and there are already clear solutions and paths forward. Efficiency of the plant isn't what's being discussed in the announcement. Plant efficiency is an entirely separate problem that we already know about.

The exciting thing is that they've shown a fusion reaction in lab conditions which produces more energy than it takes to start it. Yes, the gain is small. It's nearly irrelevant to the amount of energy used to run the reactor, yes.

But it clearly shows that what we're trying to do is possible, and we've identified one mechanism that can initiate these reactions.

It's exciting. This is a great result that shows the science is progressing and beginning to finally show results.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#470

Post by einpoklum »

DesiLurker wrote: post #377
qayxc wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods,…

> But that's energy, no electricity as far as fusion viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat. Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally m…

> but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself.

Didn't we get to that milestone when they detonated a fusion-based bomb back in 1952?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike

Anyway, I'm not sure it's a significant milestone. It's just a number along a scale. If you were to tell me they've achieved a _sustained_ reaction which yields more energy than goes into it, for a period of, say, a day or so - then you could claim a significant milestone has been reached.

And even with that, some people argue that given how there's basically no sustainable source of tritium for large-scale electricity generation, the whole exercise is pointless unless the process uses other combinations of elements.

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