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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

#651

Post by adaml_623 »

phtrivier wrote: post #565
S04dKHzrKT wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Engineering recently made a video that covers fuel needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzK0ydOF0oU

And the (otherwise excellent) channel is supposed to soon post an adv... I mean informer... I mean "exclusive documentary" about "repeat after me we're totally not a scam - we just play one on YouTube" fusion startup Helion. Which I'm going to watch, because even though everything I hear about this company gives me insane Theranos vibes... Well, if they pull it off... They might light a bulb with fusion in my lifetim…

The Helion approach seems plausible to me. Can you point me towards some of the sources that give you vibes?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#652

Post by vlovich123 »

opportune wrote: post #580
Balgair wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into my old age. Even if we don’t get commercial fusion until the 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still need to pay for likely massive capex, R&D, and transmission) and its repercussions! At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no need for fission plants, radically r…

I think you're hand waving too many of the problems away and letting your imagination run way ahead of reality.

> no need for fission plants

Not sure why this is a goal in and of itself. Everything you said is available today with fission and yet still too expensive to remove CO2. Fission has a more real shot at getting to the right price point before fusion even gets off the ground so why not push for more arrows behind something that's likely to help in our lifetime?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#654

Post by vlovich123 »

bitcurious wrote: post #230
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…

Wind and solar have a max theoretical output that is constrained by physical space and competition for its use, in addition to weather patterns, etc. Fusion energy has a theoretical max that’s orders of magnitude higher. Wind+solar is the path to decarbonization and sustaining our current world. Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - socie…

> Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict.

Except this is also true for fission. So if fission has failed to transform society, why do you think fusion will?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#655

Post by caf »

matt-attack wrote: post #458
jmartrican wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that means that for life to form, we probably need a star to die so that the heavier atoms used in complicated life forming chemical reactions (correct me if i am wrong here as what I'm about to say depends on it), hence it could be the case that if the universe is 13.5 billion years old, then we humans are appearing in the universe at the earliest possible time. 13.5 billion years seems like the time required to…

I have zero ability to answer your question but I would love to know about about this. If life (like we know it) requires the explosion of aged stars, what is the earliest it would take. What is the minimum time needed to form, grow and explode a single star? Has there been time for this to occur 10s, 100s of times since the Big Bang? (obviously they can happen in parallel, but I'm thinking about how many in series).

There's a large range of stellar lifetimes, from a few million years up to trillions of years.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#656

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#657

Post by oittaa »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #499
kortilla wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with funding. SpaceX had far less than NASA. For another example from a different angle, the military has limitless supplies of funding but innovates even less than NASA.

You are comparing company that makes trucks with a company that makes precision scientific instrumers, and you are declaring that truck companu is more efficient per kilo of produce. this is stupid. Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.

> Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.

https://www.whereisroadster.com/

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#658

Post by marcyb5st »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #533
marcyb5st wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. First generation stars were, theoretically, enormous both due to low metallicity of the collapsed medium and a higher average concentration of said medium. These stars lifespans were extremely short, shorter that blue giants we see today. So novas due to the death of these stars happened fairly early in the lifespan of the universe (talking about few million years after the big bang). Therefore, life…

Basic life (single-celled?) requiring the elements above lead might have a chance at that time, but complex life like us wouldn't do so well if there were still supernovas going off left and right. There's a theory with decent evidence that at least one of the mass extinctions was caused by a supernova: https://www.space.com/supernova-caused-earth-mass-extinction... That being said, I wasn't aware of how LIGO changed…

You are right about supernova hampering life evolution, but it's unclear how long the fireworks lasted. In my comment I argued that it is possible to have the conditions of life emerge much earlier than 13.5 billion years. Not that it necessarily happened.

Regarding the second point have a look at https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW170817Kilonova/in... . That isn't my field of specialization, so I am not sure about recent publications. At the time though this was a big deal as kilonovas seem to be the primary source of heavy nuclei in the universe. That particular event crested between 1/100th to 1/1000th solar masses worth of heavy ( heavier than iron) nuclei. This is a greater rate than supernovas estimations.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#659

Post by discordance »

markasoftware wrote: post #625
opportune wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there’s a glut of cheap electrical energy, there would be a rapid push to electrify things like iron and steel production (8% of emissions), heating (10% of emissions) and transportation (10%)… and so on.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#660

Post by postingawayonhn »

vlovich123 wrote: post #647
opportune wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price

$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I cou…

Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
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