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US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

energy.gov

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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#581

Post by galangalalgol »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #478
MayeulC wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all, is there anything better to create new elements than a hot, dense neutron soup?

I'm always fascinated by the sheer and unfathomable amounts of energy that is thrown around in these events. Just thinking about the fact that a single spoonful of neutron star matter contains more mass than Mount Everest fills me with wonder about the world we live in.

What happens whena tablespoon of neutron soup gets thrown out of the well of a neutron star? Does it suddenly expand to the size of everest? Where do the electrons come from?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#582

Post by BoGoToTo »

Balgair wrote: post #574
mustacheemperor wrote: post #2

I 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…

I agree. This is a Big deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or polio-vaccine big. My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and…

> My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.

Unless you're in your early teens and don't plan on having kids until you're in your 30's this proba

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#583

Post by petilon »

TeeMassive wrote: post #490
petilon wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As was pointed out in other comments, their lasers and electrical equipment were not efficient as it was not necessary to get the scientific knowledge.

In the press conference they mentioned that modern lasers have "20% wall plug efficiency". That means fusion has to generate 5x more energy than this experiment did, for you to get more energy out than you put in.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#584

Post by opportune »

bioemerl wrote: post #20

Here's your most exciting paragraph > 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). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth.

$1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#585

Post by dublin »

yonaguska wrote: post #445
subsubzero wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tritium is very popular on gun sights as well- as it's a glow in the dark sight that doesn't need to be charged. I'm now questioning the practice of appendix carrying with tritium sights.

Well, it lasts for several years, but considerably less than even a human lifetime: Tritium's half-life is only about 11 years, so gun sights, dark-proof glow-in-the-dark signage (usually reserved for critical industrial plants, ships and offshore platforms due to expense), etc, will become seriously degraded in just a few years. (Since the glow is directly proportional to the remaining low-level beta radioactivity, which can barely penetrate the glass envelope in the first place - you'd get more radiation (from radium) living in a brick house than carrying 24-7.)

FWIW, tritium and a phosphor granule encapsulated in glass microspheres have been developed for self-illuminating runway paint, but again, no one really uses it because tritium is stupid expensive, and again, it' loses half its brightness in only a decade.

On the other hand, I've been told that Trijicon will replace their tritium gun sights for the lifetime of the original owner. I plan to live long enough to cost them money...

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#586

Post by ufmace »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #344
azinman2 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?

yes. fusion funding has been sliding downwards for decades which is a large reason why it takes so long to do anything. It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything. 1. Shortage of funding 2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding 3. extremely low risk tolerance 4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high 5. projects are over engi…

"Funding" isn't really a good answer IMO. I don't know a ton about Fusion research specifically, but NASA is horrifically inefficient with money compared to private competitors. Giving them more money won't magically make them more efficient. Reasons why include:

- Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication and the need to constantly ship things around

- Public approval is the goal and failure is the worst possible option, so things tend to be optimized to take as few engineering risks as possible and have huge amounts of bureaucracy to spread the blame for any possible failure

There's a reason why SpaceX started landing rockets with a fraction of the money that NASA spent on building ridiculous boondoggles.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#587

Post by kelnos »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #508
beowulfey wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a proof of concept. Upgrading lasers that already work is not necessarily the best use of limited funds.

They could get higher power out of more efficient lasers, enabling research at higher energies or bigger targets

That's not the purpose of the research, though. They are solely focusing on the energy transfer between the lasers themselves, and the output from the reaction. It's not clear that higher energies or bigger targets will teach us anything new.

Upgrading the lasers would slow the project down as new hardware is installed and issues are worked out. Not to mention I doubt the new hardware is cheap, and may be more expensive than burning excess energy using old laser tech in the meantime.

Other research groups work on laser efficiency, and the "final product" using this method (if it ever proves viable) would put together all the best pieces to get the best efficiencies.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#588

Post by Analog24 »

zardo wrote: post #192
brofallon wrote: post #30

I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In compariso…

> But maybe I'm missing something important about the economics? I think you've understood it. Imo fusion is never going to be able to compete with renewables+storage with the energy being captured from neutrons. Maybe reactions that release energy in charged particles or photons could, but they're even harder to do.

Could you elaborate on your point a bit more? If you're talking about utilizing the weak force vs. the residual strong force then I'm not sure this argument holds up.

Also, when comparing to renewable+storage you have to consider how much land has to be dedicated to energy use in these scenarios. Wind and solar require orders of magnitude more than a potential fusion reactor (or an existing fission reactor).

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#589

Post by moloch-hai »

ericmay wrote: post #69
Buttons840 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333346-ignition-confir... Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?

A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it? If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?

The hype machine is fully engaged, and may lead to an influx of budget, something of deadly seriousness to DoE. They have had trouble getting funding increases for this kind of weapons work when it was represented as weapons work. Pretend it's not, and people fall all over themselves to praise it.

But it is weapons work, first, last, and always.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#590

Post by low_tech_punk »

freediver wrote: post #38
puttycat wrote: post #25

2022, not ordered by importance: Dall.E 2, Chat-GPT, Fusion Ignition. Can't wait for 2023.

Putting these in the same basket is hardly justified.

AI can be quite useful in real-time computation for magnetic confinement. But sure, that's beyond GPT-3's current capability.
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