> 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.
don't you think it's nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do.
There's a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself.
If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.
> Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad
They can't exist any more for structural reason. This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker. I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this gene…
This general idea that a previous generation was better because they lead a less pampered life goes back to some of the earliest writing. Yet here we are.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
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.
Lol “spacex makes trucks”. Way to throw on the anti-Musk blinders and completely ignore the back-half of the comment and misunderstand the first half. Also, spacex has launched outside of the earth-moon system. It was a roadster
Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?
Elon Musk ::ducks::
lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
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 is not Tesla. It's disingenuous to call SpaceX a "company that makes trucks". Just like NASA, they also make precision scientific instruments. They're the first privately funded mission to the ISS and run a massive satellite constellation. They may not have the same accomplishments as NASA, but they're far from a "company that makes trucks".
> Just like NASA, they also make precision scientific instruments.
Which scientific instruments does SpaceX make? I have never heard of a single one.
> 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.
I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications. The "breakeven" thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote. The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That's the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.
They could get higher power out of more efficient lasers, enabling research at higher energies or bigger targets
Not to mention the money they would save on electricity bills.
The electricity bill is like $2000. It'd waste more money for a manager to think about how to replace equipment, at California pay rates. This whole thread is making me lose faith in HN.
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.
As I understand it that's largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised. Building a new facility from scratch would result in a much lower power consumption from the grid.
given how long it takes to build these places, I feel like the number of iteration cycles is an important metric, especially when other options are not standing still.
I do understand that with more focus things can happen faster but you can really only pour so much concrete per day. Hopeful that we can figure out "leaner" ways to get this done.
I would love to see progress on this stuff, just don't like the idea of betting on successive megaprojects in the age of "a website is hard".
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.
300MJ ~= 83kWh which is like, $2000 in CA
I think you're out by some orders of magnitude. With the current energy issues in the UK it'd be under £100. Other things suggest in California it's more like 20 cents per kWh so were you thinking ~$20?
Tangentially related, but I think this is an interesting fact, all the atoms in our universe/galaxy/solar system with a mass up to that of iron are formed in the core of stars in stellar fusion. Hydrogen fuses into helium, and as a star nears the end of its lifetime you get heavier elements like lithium, carbon, and so on. Under normal stellar fusion no elements heavier than iron will be produced, and iron is only el…
Iron is always spoken of as the dividing line, but I'd like to know whether iron is exactly on the line, on one side (which?), or it depends. IOW, does fusion of iron atoms release energy (hydrogen side of the line), absorb energy (uranium side of the line), neither, or either (depending on conditions)?
The periodic table is pretty awesome. But I wonder if there's a layout that takes into account this fission/fusion division? Would it just be a line?