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…
Engineering problems are perfectly capable of dooming a technology. Fission's problems are all engineering problems.
this is simply not true. according to IEA https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a mo…
> sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW. For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that - you hav…
In the US, the average capacity factor for wind turbines is about 33%, so your nameplate 34,500 MW capacity is immediately ~11.5 GW actual. Wind makes sense, but deceptive numbers don’t help your argument.
Only if you use the notoriously dangerous breeder reactors – otherwise there isn't enough fuel.
Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are just a little too expensive to justify their construction when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are production-ready and safe.
Fast reactors present the possibility of prompt fast criticality in a serious accident. This could be worse than Chernobyl.
Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30 years away". I think it's very clear, given the past year that NIF has had, that they are very rapidly approaching a point where we have the tech to "solve" inertial fusion. https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-presentations Getting…
>Their most recent article has a ton of great data and next steps: That device in the photo is great. Looks to be about 16AWG magnet wire. Guessing a 10mm ID of the coil, and about 25mm in length. To get to 26 Tesla, looks like you'd need to push about 33,000 A through that coil. Coil inductance might be about 1uH, and if the test lasts ~1us, then you'd need 33kV to push that 33kA through the coil. 30kV/inch insulati…
here's a video that shows a machine at Berkeley lab that makes a high-performance magnet wire, not sure if it's related to this project but still pretty interesting to see how complex just the wire is- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmmNRaKpBTI&t=2138s
Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not actually be a cost effective source of power. Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Not everything is expressed in cost, externalities like the looks and intrusiveness of something do matter. 1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example. But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
Fusion will have plenty of NIMBY once the tritium leaks start. It doesn't take leaking a very large fraction of a DT plant's tritium to reach levels that already cause fission power plants PR problems.
I live near Princeton NJ. Approx 4+ years ago years ago I bumped into a friend one evening at a local restaurant / bar. As it turned out, her date was a top guy at the Princeton Plasma Labs. Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. It's doable. All we need is more funding." I hope he's right. p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.…
Exactly what was the meaning of "it" there? Reaching breakeven? Or reaching practicality? These are not the same problem!
I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of input energy costs. Most notable is the raw energy cost required to power the lasers and control machinery in the experiment. But then there are other costs, all of which must be amortized over time for any real-world use case to exist. I say this because the journalists in this piece imply that net gain is simply based off of the amount of energy pumped into the experim…
Early reports are are not good. For every joule delivered to the chamber, it takes 100 joules of electrical power. Heat to electricity is 50% efficient at best. Reports are that with 2.1mj of input, they generated 2.5 mj of output. Taking inputs and electrical production into account, this means 0.6% is all they are getting out vs. what they put in. These over-unity reports are meaningless, because every damn one of…
NIF people like to call this the “target gain”, but someone there has been whispering “net gain” to the journalists, in their ongoing campaign of deliberately deceptive hype. But “target gain” isn’t even (pellet output)/(laser output). The denominator is laser energy deposited in the hohlraum; the rest of it doesn’t count. And this deposited laser energy is estimated based on a model of laser deposition—it’s not measured. (At least, this is the way it was the last time I bothered reading a paper from NIF. I got bored with it a while ago.) The modeling codes are classified; no one without a need to know gets to examine them, and they are not well benchmarked. So the actual target gain is likely < 1 in any case.
Also this assumes we get 20 years and the science budget will not be eaten by emerging endless crisis and wars.
To be fair, fusion technology is a strategic imperative. The first nation to master it will quickly enjoy defacto Energy independence. Given that many of the crises will likely be energy-eccentric, we may see more investment in the space rather than less, especially if visible progress is being made.
Fusion could end up being a useless waste of effort, not a strategic imperative.