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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

#671

Post by ohyes »

OJFord wrote: post #541
whimsicalism wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to find someone saying it sounds like fusion power reactors are right around the corner, but I have found lots of people shadowboxing these people and attacking the scientists for misleading press releases. Seems like an overcorrection to something I haven't even seen anyone here say.

I think to a lot of the technically minded, but non nuclear physicists here, it initially sounded like less (paid for/electricity) energy was used than was put out. That's extremely exciting, and the actual news is still fantastic, it's just that 'actually, we needed to pay for over 100x more energy than we counted as the "input" energy [and it's possible to do 10x but not 100x better than that]' is quite a massive c…

Not necessarily, it depends on how the reaction scales. If the reaction does not scale linearly (as is claimed) you don’t necessarily have to get more efficient, you just have to up the power until the output curve has increased past the input scaling. How big that is is determined by the efficiency of the input device itself, but it isn’t a question of if it will ever happen.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#672

Post by kragen »

Aeolun wrote: post #623
jcarreiro wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

300 megajoules is 83 kilowatt hours

a typical power price at trading hubs is US$40 per megawatt hour, though this varies considerably depending on many factors and is sometimes actually negative

a typical retail price is US$120 per megawatt hour

so this is about US$10 worth of electrical energy

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#673

Post by tgflynn »

metal_am wrote: post #479
tgflynn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones. I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may…

This particular research is literally built off of weapons research (National Ignition Facility).

Yes but, as far as I know, research into achieving laser induced fusion hasn't itself run into many classification hurdles. I suspect that may not be the case with the scaling phase.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#674

Post by cheriot »

lostmsu wrote: post #426
brianyu8 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you have experience in software, then https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...

Aren't they required to post salary ranges by some Californian law?

Is it enforceable on the Feds?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#675

Post by mclightning »

dsign wrote: post #608

HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument. It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus. Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve C…

I have been a HN user for a long time. Honestly, I disagree. Most HN users commenting here with smart stuff about fusion, just read it on another page a day or a week ago, from a bite-sized article or a reddit comment. Everyone, for the most part, parroting what they read on a short note somewhere else. Some more committed ones read the synopsis of a few papers before writing something smart.

Anything you read on the internet, explaining any advanced scientific concepts like fusion etc... take it with a huge grain of salt.

We are all parrots.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#676

Post by cheriot »

exmadscientist wrote: post #307
jerf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you…

> None of this research is necessary for bombs. And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google. > All of the difficult problems fusion…

> And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research

It's not the only thing they do.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#677

Post by ncfausti »

LarryMullins wrote: post #548
petilon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I captured from the press conference: 300 megajoules was used to generate the laser (this is also captured in [1]). They also mentioned that newer lasers have 20% wall plug efficiency. If so, they need to improve the energy output by 5x in order to break even relative to wall plug energy consumption. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/world-record-fusion-experi...

That's just the lasers, the rest of the plant needs power too. Big water pumps are big power hogs, as is the rest of the supporting equipment that any power plant requires to operate. Far over "wall plug" break even is required for commercial viability.

Just bootstrap a second fusion power plant with the first, then continue on, similar to how compilers for a language can be written in the language itself.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#678

Post by elif »

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?

to answer essentially,

because matter is energy, you can use conversion energy to turn matter into its stored energy.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#679

Post by hackbinary »

w0mbat wrote: post #577
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…

Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don't start celebrating yet. Source: New York Times.

300 MJ is about 83 KWh.

In the UK is 1 KWh is £0.34

So, this costs £28 in electricity to run this experiment. The experiment is a momentary thing.

Clearly there is now some work to, but now this is becoming an engineering problem of how to extend, sustain, and scale this process.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#680

Post by kennend3 »

unnouinceput wrote: post #606
BizarroLand wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, all you need to turn lead into gold is a moderately powerful collider and some hydrogen. The conversion is also very slow. And expensive. To make it this way it would cost a Quadrillion dollars an ounce. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

Quadrillion now, but costs will drive down and once is turned to gold, it stays gold. In the far future where all gold was mined this will be the only process left to get more. Or explode stars and capture gold from them.

I joke with my Son all the time about turning Mercury into gold (He works in the nuclear industry).

Once you get past the enormous energy costs to do this you have a secondary problem, all the gold produced this way is radioactive and it beta decays to.. Mercury.

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