Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab • Hacker News Board

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#741

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:43 PM UTC

zbobet2012 wrote: post #402

tsimionescu wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICF works for its purpose - research into thermo-nuclear weapons (fusion bombs). It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#As... That's utterly incorrect: "Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require…

I thought Fast Ignition had been abandoned because it was found it didn't work.

HiPER is also dead, I think.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#742

Post by boringg » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

savingsPossible wrote: post #692

moloch-hai wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vacuum is supposed to increase arcing. People who want to prevent arcing flood the cavity with sulfur hexafluoride. Fun fact, it has 25,000 times the "greenhouse potential" of CO2. Dunno if that includes lifetime in the atmosphere, or just instantaneous opacity to IR. All the wind turbines are pumped full of it. There is an effort on to switch to something else of proprietary composition.

Sorry, this is just FUD. Provide links? Also, 25000 times might be ok, if the amount of gas released in the atmosphere is 1/10^6, say, of the amount of co2

SF6 is 23,900 CO2e.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#743

Post by nchi3 » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #704

janalsncm wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Diminishing returns usually applies if you assume there are no major breakthroughs. Can we assume that there won't be any major breakthroughs in this field?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#744

Post by boringg » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

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.

Couldn't you use waste heat recovery to recoup some of the lost heat from lasers? I haven't ever ventured down that route and a I don't know the scale of heat here or quality of it. Think combined cycle gas plants. I recognize totally different tech but offering ways to get some value back.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#745

Post by EthanHeilman » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

moloch-hai wrote: post #713

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The same research that brought us the atomic bomb brought us so much more. Who cares about the motivation of the research? This is such a bad take considering the history of technology evolving out of military development. 2. Again, all technology is expensive in the beginning. Who cares? The important thing here is to climb magnitude by magnitude. NIF climbed many magnitudes in recent history, making it notable.…

"Amazing breakthroughs" have notable consequences. This thing has no prospect of any consequences. It is just one number inching past a second number, the second one of dubious provenance. You may call it a "milestone" if you like, even though it is a milestone on the way to nowhere. The only reason fusion gets any attention is because megaton bombs worked, and already demonstrated Q>1. People are building out solar…

> "Amazing breakthroughs" have notable consequences. This thing has no prospect of any consequences.

The consequences of a breakthrough are often not noted at the time. It is only when the consequences have happened that we recognize them and grasp the change which has been catalyzed by the discovery. Who, other than Mathematicians, cared about Number Theory when it was discovered?

I don't know enough about plasma physics to characterize this one way or the other, but I think looking for notable consequences is very slippy ground to stand on when dismissing a result.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#746

Post by Retric » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #729

Retric wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Wild…

That is just exceptionalism. People view floods and fire as natural events even when they are directly caused by humans. Risk is risk. Insurance and regulations on energy production should be technology neutral. If technology X put $100 risk on society per 1TW/h, and a regulation targeting them reduces that to $1 per 1TW/h, then what technology X is doesn't matter. It is a risk that is carried by society and society…

The point you seem to be missing is that Oroville Dam would still have been created even if it didn’t have hydroelectric generation. The risk from adding hydroelectric generation to a dam you where going to create anyway is effectively zero.

People have been making dams for quite literally thousands of years before we discovered AC electricity. They are useful structures to ensure water security and reduce damage and deaths from regular flooding. So yes the Marib Dam for example produces electricity and it’s failure would pose a risk, but it’s on the same location people a dam failed all the way back in 575 and there is evidence of earlier dams in that location going back to 1750 BC.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#747

Post by 543g43g43 » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

moloch-hai wrote: post #739

543g43g43 wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Converting heat to electricity is expensive.

And? Most of our power usage is not supplied through electricity. Solar panels are never going to heat my house.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#748

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

simne wrote: post #645

dghughes wrote: post #571

What I found impressive was the failure or rather why it couldn't keep going wasn't due to the fusion process it was due to overheated magnets. Generating 59 MJ (11MW) in five seconds was impressive too although I didn't see what the amount of energy that was input. I'm also curious how are they going to heat water for the steam generators? Water can't be heated to 150 million degrees C something has to moderate it d…

With D-He3 process, most energy generates as neutrons (about two magnitudes more than in fission reactors) and as break x-ray. Each will be converted to heat in walls and in shielding blanket, which cooled by water.

No, D-3He produces rather little energy in neutrons, especially if the D ions can be kept less energetic than the 3He ions to suppress the DD reaction. The D+3He reaction itself produces 4He and a proton.

NIF uses DT, not D3He, btw.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#749

Post by Unklejoe » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

upsidesinclude wrote: post #724

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…

Here's the thing: In order to make inertial confinement work, this process needs to occur multiple times per second All the fancy stuff with the hohlraum, magnetic compression, target cryo cooling must be accomplished accurately and repeatedly, BUT ALSO shot out of an "injector" to fall precisely into alignment with the lasers, in vacuum within a plasma field... When you write it all out! Yikes! Then! This has not in…

> BUT ALSO shot out of an "injector" to fall precisely into alignment with the lasers, in vacuum within a plasma field...

It does sound like magic, but doesn't EUV involve some process similar to this? Something about shooting drops of tin with a laser? That sounds like magic to me too but is apparently a thing. Obviously two totally different things, but the level of magic to me is the same.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#750

Post by trashtester » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

Brometheus wrote: post #710

trashtester wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you're right, but there are sources claiming otherwise:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-co...

Just to pick a few random google results.

As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.

It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.