731–740 of 1001 posts
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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.
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Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
I think a major bottleneck for fusion research from the lay public (including myself) is lack of interest. Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?
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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.
It is interesting that there hasn't been many classification hurdles on something that is pretty explicitly weapons research. My guess is that they achieved high Q values a long time ago in classified research using mechanisms that would give away some secrets.
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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)?
My son has a masters in nuclear physics and i've always been curious as to why iron causes stars to explode. He does an excellent job explaining things and put it to me like this. Elements to the Left of Iron can undergo fusion and release energy, Elements to the right can undergo fission and release energy. Iron IS the line because it needs energy to do either of these. All elements want to find stability, and Iron…
(Yes I know it's technically mesons at the scale we're talking about but it doesn't rhyme so there)
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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.
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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?
But pretending to work on "carbon-free energy" is good for funding, just now. Four years ago, being all about weapons opened the tap.
Make no mistake, there is no story here. There will be no "unlimited free energy" from this, or any other fusion project. The fusion startups are spending down investors' money with zero possibility of payback (Helion conceivably excepted), because if they did get Q>1, they have no workable way to harness it. ITER will not even try to produce one watt-second of electricity. Its follow-on demo reactor won't start building until 2050, if not further delayed.
We know the way to get unlimited free energy: solar. Build more, get more. It doesn't have bomb scientists making inflated claims; it just works, and better every year.
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The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?! Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
Former LLNL employee here, they hire a LOT of foreign nationals. Several people that I worked with there were Canadian.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Plus $10M for the target bead.
The NIF fired 368 shots in 2021:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics
At $10 million per target that would cost $3.7 billion. The annual LLNL budget (which includes NIF) is only $2.8 billion:
https://www.llnl.gov/doing-business/economic-impact
As of 2004, the targets were reported to cost $2500 each: