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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#621

Post by tsimionescu »

thehappypm wrote: post #457
tsimionescu wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is like research into TNT being presented as a potential way of creating a power plant by capturing the energy of the explosion. The real purpose is producing better explosives. This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely imaginable applications in energy generation is at the ve…

I’m not following exactly—are the lasers destroyed after each shot? The fuel being destroyed of course makes sense..

No, the hohlraum is, which costs millions of dollars by itself. And it costs so much because it is essentially the piece that handles the synchronization of hitting the fuel pellet perfectly symmetrically. Its also built from solid gold right now, though depleted uranium may also work - either way, the raw material is only a fraction of the cost, the perfection required in achieving its exact shape is the problem.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#622

Post by anshumankmr »

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…

Quite true. And this is something I have been quite guilty of myself.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#623

Post by ajhurliman »

kelnos wrote: post #311
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…

Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotion…

As comical as it sounds, The Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles devastated the image of nuclear energy.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#624

Post by marsven_422 »

moloch-hai wrote: post #594
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…

There is nothing disappointing in skepticism about the importance or value of this work. 1. It is, purely, bomb research dressed up as civilian activity for funding purposes. Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance. 2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is 3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", he…

No post body was provided.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#625

Post by epivosism »

cwingrav wrote: post #578
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones. I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving w…

Fukushima, Kyshtym… those are the other bad ones.

FYI, there were zero radiation deaths from Fukishima, although there were ~2200 from the evacuation. Keep in mind this was during the aftermath of a tsunami.

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

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#626

Post by htag »

kelnos wrote: post #311
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…

Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotion…

> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one.

I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.

In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#627

Post by Schroedingersat »

543g43g43 wrote: post #33
entropicgravity wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar component. And costs will continue to drop. Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.

We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).

So the energy that is cheaper than coal and driving operating coal plants out of business will make the cost of producing it go up when the share increases?

These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#628

Post by pfdietz »

moloch-hai wrote: post #618
pfdietz wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd make their own 3He by also doing DD fusion. It's properly a DD+D3He concept.

I would like to see a demonstration that the synthesis method would exceed consumption. It should be possible with current tech, if at all.

Well, they can operate on just DD, so they can start from no 3He and make 3He.

This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei per DD fusion, on average. It takes a while for some of those 3He to be produced though, as the tritium has to decay (halflife of 12 years.)

https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_D...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#629

Post by janalsncm »

naasking wrote: post #289
billiam wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a lot of the research money will move to lasers now.

> so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing retur…

Why does the law of diminishing returns apply? A lot of things aren’t diminishing returns.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#630

Post by wahern »

m4rtink wrote: post #596
jnwatson wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"magnetic compression hypothesis being a byproduct of white dwarf simulation" That is the coolest thing I'll read all month.

Well, it does happen sometimes - a Nobel price laureate who worked on Pulsar also developed a popular amateur radio modulation that works under the noise floor and makes regular trans-continental connections possible with essentially a cheap SDR and a piece of wire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FT8 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr .

I wish I could remember more specific details and terminology, but 10-15 years ago a friend working at an economic development agency asked me to look over a patent invention submitted by some Los Alamos researchers. I was in no way properly qualified to understand the physics, but it nominally involved a faster than light component, and he thought he'd run it past me to reduce the chance he looked foolish when putting it to more qualified people.

The patent was based on research analyzing the propagation of wavefronts on neutron stars[1]. I forget the term(s), but the critical aspect related to features which travel along the wavefront faster than light. This feature couldn't actually be used to communicate faster than light, obviously, however the patent claimed to be able to use it to defeat active radar jamming--more specifically, radar deception. Because this controllable wavefront feature (modulation? polarization?) could be FTL, and the waves themselves light-speed, it was thus intrinsically impossible to fake a correct return signature.

From a lay geek's perspective, I told my friend that AFAICT this aspect of the invention seemed not obviously flawed: it was FTL only in the sense that you could swing a flashlight across the moon and the apparent motion of the reflected beam could be faster than light. Normally such a phenomenon is merely a curiosity, but apparently the inventors had put it to some practical use, at least in theory.

[1] IIRC, either physical or magnetic waves generated by starquakes.

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