Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

energy.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#761

Post by willis936 »

mclightning wrote: post #675
dsign wrote: post #608

HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument. It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus. Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve C…

I have been a HN user for a long time. Honestly, I disagree. Most HN users commenting here with smart stuff about fusion, just read it on another page a day or a week ago, from a bite-sized article or a reddit comment. Everyone, for the most part, parroting what they read on a short note somewhere else. Some more committed ones read the synopsis of a few papers before writing something smart. Anything you read on the…

Some commenters have devoted their career to it.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#762

Post by yreg »

oittaa wrote: post #657
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing company that makes trucks with a company that makes precision scientific instrumers, and you are declaring that truck companu is more efficient per kilo of produce. this is stupid. Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.

> Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system. https://www.whereisroadster.com/

Not your typical space vehicle

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#763

Post by infogulch »

spullara wrote: post #165
bmmayer1 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?

If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom: 2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron: 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configu…

> It is also why there is so much iron as it is kind of the base state of both of these reactions.

I always thought this is the interesting takeaway, both fusion and fission funnel their constituent matter towards iron, as the final stable state of matter. Far future civilizations will have a lot of iron on their hands.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#764

Post by iamgopal »

opportune wrote: post #584
bioemerl wrote: post #20

Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#765

Post by lifeformed »

adventured wrote: post #317
chasd00 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad

> they're working on getting you to click on an ad They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not bril…

A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#766

Post by iamgopal »

gene-h wrote: post #108
panosfilianos wrote: post #39

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn't find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually). Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$…

[0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant. They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized cost of energy could get as low as $25/MWh. For this one really needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically competitive in some cases. While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason to expect it can be sca…

1000 time gains is double performance every 2 year, means in 20 year we would be able to achieve fusion with hydrogen from water at home scale min power plants.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#767

Post by xbmcuser »

moloch-hai wrote: post #736
dmix wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly the opposite: their task, assigned by Congress, is weapons work . Period. 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 p…

If they can get a continuous fusion reaction going converting the heat energy from that to electricity won't be a problem. Getting a contained fusion reaction that gives out more energy than input is the problem how to convert that into electricity is not going to be a problem.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#768

Post by yreg »

adventured wrote: post #292
jpeter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion

Given it's Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla's stock compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth); but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting Star…

He didn’t pay 44B. 13B are bank loans (that need to be paid back by Twitter, not Elon). For the other 31B he had some co-investors as well.

But yes, it was clearly a mistake.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#769

Post by arbitrandomuser »

carabiner wrote: post #707
w0mbat wrote: post #577

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.

They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we've gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion…

No post body was provided.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#770

Post by agumonkey »

867-5309 wrote: post #328
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…

we are all made of star stuff

yet we all want to be
Post reply on HN