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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

#711

Post by dmix »

jboy55 wrote: post #696
floxy wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, Ironically, this experiment was designed primarily to simulate the fusion you have in thermonuclear weapons. That's the NIF's purpose and the purpose of this experiment. From Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7 "Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was n…

From what I can tell this is mostly a useful cover story as a fallback for the moon-shot type energy potential. But are there serious downsides to having this be the case? Does it significantly distract away from the pursuit of energy? Or somehow fundamentally constrain the projects scope?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#712

Post by andrewflnr »

jmartrican wrote: post #443
eklitzke wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Not necessarily, but look up the phosphorus problem.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#713

Post by azinman2 »

jboy55 wrote: post #704
azinman2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To achieve fusion for power production, you need more output than input. For 60+ years this hasn’t been achieved in a replicated fashion. Now it has, and it’s 50% more power rather than 0.1% more power as was sometimes shown for 2 nanoseconds before. So now we know fusion for power is possible. If it can be scaled successfully (now likely not an if anymore, but a function of time), then we have the ability to have cl…

The issue is, we've been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than put in for 60-70 years now. The H-Bomb is very good at doing that. You will say, yeah, but an H-Bomb is a one time use thing, and it has a habit of destroying everything. If you look into how the second stage of an hbomb is speculated to work, its pretty much identical to this experiment, that is by design, not by accident. From https://ww…

*contained fusion

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#714

Post by elihu »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #557
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR is there isn't nearly enough tritium, but fusion reactors can make more (while still generating energy)

Can you collect them easily in the reactor ?

If I understand correctly, tritium is the result of bombarding lithium with neutrons.

I'm not sure how tokomaks are expected to work; do you just add lithium and expect the tritium to get where it needs to go to keep the reaction going, or do you actively remove gases from vessel, filter out the tritium, and re-use it as fuel?

Either way, I don't imagine it'd be too hard to recapture the stuff.

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

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#715

Post by emmp »

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?

These are federal jobs so all of the pay bands are public knowledge.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#716

Post by DesiLurker »

supergirl wrote: post #571

everyone should watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY to put this into perspective. for some reason, all the news articles are extremely misleading. previous output ratio for this fusion method was something like 70%, now it is 150%. it's a useful improvement, but not a major breakthrough. the whole system still consumes 100x more energy than it produces. 100MJ of energy is needed to power the laser. the…

as somebody already explained to you earlier, the NIF uses arcane lasers because their focus is not lasers at the moment, it is fusion. At current tech level we have about 20% laser efficiency (with some types as much as 50%, not sure if they apply). this experiment specifically was about energy positive from a fusion reaction which has never been done except for uncontrolled things like hydrogen bombs. as far as a fusion milestone goes, this is a big deal.

Also, the other thing most commenters are missing here is the remaining problems are incrementally solvable so we should see steady improvements in laser efficiency and pellet optimization going forward. this is even doable with VC money (which we have some now but not significant). in that sense it is a pretty decent development.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#717

Post by palata »

Balgair wrote: post #574
mustacheemperor wrote: post #2

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how f…

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…

Let's be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2/3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.

The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that's the climate change problem. And it is big.

Now let's pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won't change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.

We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that's the only way.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#718

Post by OJFord »

ohyes wrote: post #671
OJFord wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, sure, it's just still a breakthrough or so (or at least work, I don't know how within grasp it is) away from what one may have (as did I) initially assumed.

Tangentially, it does seem fairly intuitive that it should be non-linear in that 'jump start' as it were: a fire can be grown arbitrarily large having started from a single match (or flint or whatever).

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#719

Post by pmarreck »

MrFoof wrote: post #573
pmarreck wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fission power you probably meant "fusion" > My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch. Well, except for the front-facing camera, but that's trivial to add at this point. And as a 50 year old, I agree. I feel like being incarnated in '72 has gotten me ethereal tickets to the greatest technological expansion/brouhaha in all of human history, and I don't know what my soul did to…

Yes, fusion. I 1000% blame mobile autocorrect. > What was the movie that actually featured a scene with those, btw? I think it had Morgan Freeman It was specifically a SimCity 2000 reference.

I played Simcity 2K and apparently completely forgot that "disaster" sorry lol

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#720

Post by Robotbeat »

px43 wrote: post #617
Robotbeat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...

I'm not really seeing any convincing numbers there. Mercury lasers seem to only be 10% efficient. I get that this is better than the lasers that were just used at NIF, but that still seems pretty far from useful.

It’s useful enough to produce significant net energy if they continue with the gain scaling that ignition allows.
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