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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#731

Post by pfdietz »

simne wrote: post #643
zaking17 wrote: post #244

Would anyone knowledgeable about the field update their priors about whether we’ll see commercial fusion in the next 30 years, after seeing these results? If not, is there a big milestone we’re waiting for? Or will fusion advancement be a slow grind with many small improvements over decades?

Big milestone is construction materials, could long enough withstand neutron stream, which is about two magnitudes more, than in fission reactors. This is last unknown in this equation. All others are already known, from achievements of last few years. Materials research is one of primary targets of ITER. If good enough materials will not being found fast enough, will need to use clear reactions like boron-carbon fus…

ITER will only operate for a few weeks total at full power. It's not intended for materials development. For that, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) would be needed.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#732

Post by moloch-hai »

mdip wrote: post #718
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…

> 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". The interesting thing here is that every part of what you said I completely agree with. My behavior, however, indicates otherwise. I didn't read the article[0]. I went directly to the HN comments mostly because I want…

The key is that it is not a breakthrough at all. Breakthroughs have consequences, and this will have none. Soon they will claim "Q>5", "Q>10", etc. all equally inconsequential.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#733

Post by e1g »

serverholic wrote: post #478
e1g wrote: post #71

Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to…

I'm getting really sick of the "always 20 years away haha" jab. Look, it's really simple: 1. This is a very hard and expensive problem. 2. Progress IS being made. It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.

I wasn't diminishing the achievement but clarifying its place in the context of how far we are from commercialization. The director of LLNL who announced the breakthrough discovery said she expects we are 3-4 decades away from commercializing it.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#734

Post by yummypaint »

stuckinhell wrote: post #335
yummypaint wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people use the word "reflexive," they're talking about things like conflating business hype designed to attract publicity and VC capital with a press release for a major scientific paper from NIF. I don't think it's unreasonable for HN to hold itself to an understanding of these things. If you actually want to critically examine evidence then you must necessarily read the paper before posting.

"reflexive contrarians" in the context here was being used a perojative rhetorical trick to broadly dismiss valid doubts people have about this research.

What specific issue do you have with the methodology and why? What specific scientific criticism do you claim is being silenced? Merely feeling strongly about this work contributes nothing to the discussion.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#735

Post by 543g43g43 »

moloch-hai wrote: post #691
543g43g43 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss my point. The reason solar is so cheap right now (along with the huge amount of government subsidies) is that the huge amount of energy required to manufacture them is currently done with very cheap coal in China. >Cost of current production is an upper bound. Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.

Power from renewables costs less than from coal.

Maybe - with government grants, and coal-powered manufacture of all of the associated generation equipment.

That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.

Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#737

Post by Schroedingersat »

543g43g43 wrote: post #726
Schroedingersat wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crystalline Solar panels have a benchmark lifetime of 30 years and are consistently outperforming predicted degradation rates. None have worn out yet, but the best guess is a median 40 year lifetime. A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100. You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.

>A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100. I certainly haven't made any claims as specific as this without any backup!

You claimed solar has too low EROI to be viable.

Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#738

Post by pfdietz »

e1g wrote: post #71

Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to…

Even if the lasers were currently 100% efficient, the Q still needs to be increased by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. That's because they're making less than a penny's worth of energy here, and the system cannot be economically feasible with that little energy per expendable target.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#739

Post by moloch-hai »

543g43g43 wrote: post #735
moloch-hai wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power from renewables costs less than from coal.

Maybe - with government grants, and coal-powered manufacture of all of the associated generation equipment. That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels. Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at al…

You make the same mistake fission boosters make. Converting heat to electricity is expensive. Solar and wind skip the expensive step, going straight to electricity. Electric power from solar and wind is already much cheaper than coal, without subsidy, for this reason, and because coal has to be dug up and transported. Coal has a high operating cost. Solar and wind have extremely low operating cost, and also very low capital cost, always falling.

Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.

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