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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

#621

Post by jkelleyrtp »

zardo wrote: post #549
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #33

> 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) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…

The targets are really the secret sauce right? If there were a civil ICF for power program, would NIF designs and data even be available to help, or is it all classified?

There are pictures of CAD and experimental setups for the targets. They’re also pretty open with the setup numbers, so in theory, you could make your own NIF setup and try to get their target designs working.

From what I understand, a lot of the work from the past years has been trying to piece together geometries, pulse timing, stability, and quality of targets.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#622

Post by yk »

rsync wrote: post #351
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #33

> 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) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…

"Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05." What is the difference between todays announcement and yesterdays ? I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but apparently this news is different than yesterday ?

Yesterdays news was that this result was leaked to the FT with apparently preliminary numbers. And today there was a press conference that had somewhat better looking numbers.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#623

Post by Aeolun »

jcarreiro wrote: post #304
worik wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they using these "flash pumped" lasers if more efficient ones are available?

Because they are researching inertial confinement fusion, not trying to build a working power plant. The efficiency of the lasers doesn't matter, since it doesn't affect their research.

Is energy on the order of 300MJ so cheap? You’d think that cutting it down to 150MJ would allow them to do more experiments.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#624

Post by jasonhansel »

jboy55 wrote: post #406
spencerchubb wrote: post #274

The most surprising thing I've learned from this is we're only allocating $624 million / year to this program. We really need better mechanisms for deciding how to allocate taxes.

Its actually pretty good, since this is primarily weapons testing. The real money is being spent in the EU, where there is at least a chance of getting a sustainable fusion reaction.

Not really. IIRC the NIF needs to pretend that it's about nuclear weapons to secure DoE funding; they (like us) know that it's really about developing fusion as an energy source.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#625

Post by markasoftware »

opportune wrote: post #584
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

Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc.

Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#626

Post by jasonhansel »

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…

If we get an order of magnitude more energy, we can do an order of magnitude more things; fossil fuels gave us the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear fusion may unlock something similar.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#628

Post by anigbrowl »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #103
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #33

> 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) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…

This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?

Y is the energy that was holding some hydrogen atoms together which you have liberated (while destroying the atoms in question but that's OK cause it's abundant).

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#629

Post by geysersam »

ufmace wrote: post #586
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, SpaceX did it 60 years later.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#630

Post by yk »

TeeMassive wrote: post #473
davedx wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had thermonuclear weapons (h-bombs) for a long time already. Harnessing the energy in a controlled and sustainable fashion is what's hard.

H-bombs use the hydrogen to produce more neutrons which boosts the fission process. It still is a fission bomb.

No, you can have a fusion booster, like in the "Sloika" [0] design, but for a Teller-Ulam design, that is a H-bomb, you use a nuclear primer to ignite a fusion reaction and by far the most energy comes from the fusion part. [1]

[0] https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/hydrogen-bomb/page-11....

[1] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html

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