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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#561

Post by leephillips »

floxy wrote: post #538
steve_avery wrote: post #255

I have personally taken a tour of the NIF at Livermore. The guide was an old hand, who constantly remarked about the efforts of NIF towards "stockpile stewardship," ie the maintenance of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed like NIF was all about the stockpile stewardship first, and fusion research was a secondary consideration. The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy that they impart…

I'm a complete layman when it comes to ICF, but I'm assuming that there is a scaling factor between surface area and volume that would eventually help here? As in, the lasers initiate fusion on the surface of the fuel pellet, which propagates the fusion into the interior of the pellet in a chain reaction / positive feedback kind of way. So that if you increased the surface area of the pellet by a factor of 10, you'd…

That won’t work, I don’t think. You can’t make the pellets much larger because laser nonuniformities and hydrodynamic instabilities will kill the implosion; there will be no fusion at all. But that’s not a problem, you see, because in a commercial reactor you’ll have a pellet factory making the required one million targets per day, and they will be injected into the chamber 10 times per second, with practically no down time. And each shot will have gain > 100 to get net energy out.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#562

Post by willis936 »

ibejoeb wrote: post #381

Very encouraging to see at least some enthusiasm for this. This is the real way forward. We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives in the first plac…

Sure we can. Nothing is given. We are very likely on a path of contraction over the next century. Humans are resilient, we probably won't have a full societal collapse, but we might.

If we could pick a World 3 track to be on, which one would it be? Now, what can we do to try to push ourselves onto that track? That's what gets me up in the morning.

https://youtu.be/kVOTPAxrrP4

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#563

Post by hyperbovine »

SantalBlush wrote: post #533
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #447

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…

>Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. We see these comments on every science thread because almost all of these people lack the requisite expertise to weigh in on the actual details, so instead they make a high-level criticism to give the appearance of having some kind of knowledge on the subject. Moreover, they think that crapping on things equates to being a critic…

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#564

Post by leephillips »

DennisP wrote: post #390
floxy wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone have insight into how this new development differs from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal" https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...

Back then they were comparing to the energy actually absorbed by the fusion fuel. This is indirect drive, the laser hits a metal container first and only some of the energy gets to the fuel pellet. This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams. They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better o…

> This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.

How do you know? Nothing has been published yet; it’s science through press release. In the past, published papers from NIF have been a real wake-up call after absorbing the misleading hype (the papers are most honest than the folks taking to the reporters).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#565

Post by [deleted] »

robocat wrote: post #545
crote wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the 100-year lifetime? Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue. Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by rep…

> manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint. If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I woul…

[deleted]

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#566

Post by IX-103 »

SuperFine wrote: post #52
acidburnNSA wrote: post #49

After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation. At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that wil…

>After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?

I think we just haven't found the right fusion design.

If we use a reaction that primarily produces beta radiation or other high energy charged particle, sending it through a coil of wire would induce a voltage that we could extract as electric energy.

For that matter, appropriately located coils could be used to extract thermal energy from the plasma directly. The trick there is that we can't get much with the current tokamak and stellarator designs -- the thermal energy is too disordered to use a large coil and the plasma flow is not sufficiently confined to use small coils. There are almost certainly better configurations, but the electrohydrodynamics simulations are tricky. If we keep at it I'm sure we can find a stable configuration with fewer degrees of freedom.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#567

Post by willis936 »

amai wrote: post #34

Mandatory video by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .

And a mandatory response that highlights how her ignorance only hurts general society's understanding of the shape of the problem.

https://youtu.be/KtqC8W0_Ups

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#568

Post by taneq »

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.

> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians

no it's not

( /s but also many of us have seen enough 'fusion breakthrough' and 'battery tech breakthrough' and 'medical breakthrough' and 'AI breakthrough' announcements that it's difficult to give anything much credence without at least a production prototype showing real world performance.)

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#569

Post by cameronh90 »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #543
crote wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the 100-year lifetime? Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue. Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by rep…

well i guess a 100 years lifetime was kind of pulled out of my ass, what i was trying to communicate is that you can I'm theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years but i guess if you'd just let it run without doing anything it would probably run for 30-40 years. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc... solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the…

> if you'd just let it run without doing anything it would probably run for 30-40 years.

Let it run? You mean, presumably, the huge amount of testing and preventative and planned maintenance that is scheduled in as part of a reactors expected lifetime, plus anything new discovered along the way. That doesn't come for free.

> In theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years

Sure, given enough effort you can fix anything. But extending a fission plant's lifetime can require massive overhauls, replacing reactor components, replacing materials that have experienced radiation embrittling and activation, etc. Keeping a plant running indefinitely is so complicated and expensive that we haven't managed it so far.

Extension is something we should absolutely consider but it's not a magic fix all. Sometimes it's not worth it to keep an old thing running.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#570

Post by uplifter »

DennisP wrote: post #302
steve_avery wrote: post #255

I have personally taken a tour of the NIF at Livermore. The guide was an old hand, who constantly remarked about the efforts of NIF towards "stockpile stewardship," ie the maintenance of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed like NIF was all about the stockpile stewardship first, and fusion research was a secondary consideration. The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy that they impart…

Seems like energy extraction would be similar to other D-T designs: surround the reaction chamber with molten FLiBe or lead-lithium and run some coolant pipes through it.

> surround the reaction chamber with molten FLiBe or lead-lithium

So manufacturing fusion reactors would use a lot of lithium, which is already in short supply. That would be an interesting complication with the demand of lithium for electric vehicle batteries. Maybe the Li supply situation will be eased by then.

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