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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#701

Post by mannykannot »

wahern wrote: post #630
m4rtink wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 putti…

I'm guessing they were referring to phase velocity:

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

You can see the effect shown in the first animation of this article if you keep track of the wave peaks in the wake of a boat. They start at the back of the group of waves, move through it, and fade away as they reach the front.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWi_KpBy8kU

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#702

Post by deathcakes »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #661
zaphar wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colloquially speaking, which your conversation here is, nuke has always meant bombs not reactors. He's not pearl clutching, he's reacting to what sounds like unnecessarily negative terminology.

It unambiguously means nuclear reactor in context and is widely used. The only people who even pretend it doesn't are the ones simultaneously making disingenuous arguments about why renewables are terrible and we immediately need to drop them and wait 50 years for nuclear to save the day. The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke

As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#703

Post by Schroedingersat »

deathcakes wrote: post #702
Schroedingersat wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It unambiguously means nuclear reactor in context and is widely used. The only people who even pretend it doesn't are the ones simultaneously making disingenuous arguments about why renewables are terrible and we immediately need to drop them and wait 50 years for nuclear to save the day. The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nuke

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nuke

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuke

Your mock ignorance is tiresome and transparent

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#704

Post by naasking »

janalsncm wrote: post #629
naasking wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Literally everything has diminishing returns because nothing is infinite.

Edit: to clarify, lasers will have some maximum efficiency that is less than 100% and approaching that maximum is subject to diminishing returns.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#705

Post by BawsMcGee »

crest wrote: post #697
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…

Even a 100x fusion gain wouldn't make the NIF net power producer, because last time I checked the lasers produce ~99% heat and <1% coherent light. The relevant metric is the ratio of energy input into the facility vs its output.

NIF was never intended to produce net power output. It's a research facility. The latest result is a major milestone demonstrating that net energy gain is achievable. LLNL, and other labs, are developing diode-pumped laser systems which are closer to 25% efficient, rather than 1%, and can operate at the high repetition rate required for power production.

That means the reaction would only need a gain of 4, rather than 100, to generate net power.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#706

Post by Retric »

belorn wrote: post #671
crote wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately your examples have been litigated in practice already, and reality does not agree with you. See for example [0], which is a nice writeup on the liability for dam failure. As it turns out, there are very few cases in which the operator would not be liable. Similarly, Pacific Power has been sued for wildfires in Colorado, and PG&E even plead guilty to manslaughter in the Paradise fire - and had to file fo…

The Oroville Dam in California had a failoure in 2017 leading to the evacuation of 188,000 people. Who paid for that? See for example [0], were a very low estimate ends up around 1 billion with the Federal Emergency Management Agency expecting to pay around 75% of that. Who and what funds that department? When a company files for bankruptcy the result is a legal process where the company seeks relief from debt. PG&E…

The Oroville Dam was built by California Department of Water Resources primarily for water supply and flood control with electricity generation effectively a useful byproduct.

As a California government agency it’s self insured by the state government, which is a very different situation than a private company building a power plant exclusively to generate power.

As to bankruptcy, insurance is normally required. Wildfires are an odd case because unlike nuclear the people who suffer damage are partially responsible for failing to mitigate risks as eventually fires will happen.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#707

Post by gjm11 »

htag wrote: post #626
kelnos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People think of Fukushima as (1) one of the very worst nuclear incidents there has ever been, and also as (2) something that cost very few lives.

Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.

So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#708

Post by Brometheus »

ajhurliman wrote: post #623
kelnos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The mutagen in TMNT is chemical in nature, is it not?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#709

Post by Brometheus »

voqv wrote: post #666
moloch-hai wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if fusion would cost orders of magnitude more than storage. "All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.

> "All the problems associated with" what? Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc. > Modern batteries don't burst into flame they literally do > the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Aust…

Germany can has and will very well be building hydrogen and compressed air storage.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#710

Post by Brometheus »

trashtester wrote: post #685
sanxiyn wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that economics doesn't work even with Korean nuclear plants: Korean nuclear is cheaper than Korean gas, but more expensive than European gas, because European gas is pipelined, Korean gas is liquified, and liquified gas is so much more expensive than pipelined gas. European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth ca…

European gas is cheap as long as we're willing to hand over control of Europe's energy supply to Putin. Which most countries in Europe no longer are, and maybe never will be again. Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries. If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" m…

In Germany none, because the Greens are against Putin. So instead Putin finances the people that protest against wind power and solar.
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