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US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#82I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
There are much simpler ways to generate fissile material for dirty bombs. This technology doesn't seem to be weaponisable in any other way that I can tell.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#83I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
I'm not an expert (I'm a physics prof who once took a seminar on nuclear arms control back in college), but what they're trying to do here is much, much harder than making an atomic bomb. If you want nuclear weapons, this work on carefully controlled and contained fusion is close to the opposite of what you'd need to do. (Fusion power is in general much cleaner than fission, at least where lasting radioactivity and waste are concerned.)
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#84I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is wormhole "real"?
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#85I thought we had passed this mark a long time ago, but only during short stints.
However, the way they're realizing it by shooting a fuel pellet with lasers is unsustainable and impractical IMHO.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#86> achieve President Biden’s goal This seems unnecessarily partisan to mention
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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#87I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
Fusion bombs (H-bombs) were functional in 1952
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish? How would it affect the rough calculations above?
> Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).
So, the approach here would be that it would just be a much more efficient process.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#89I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
Like a fusion reactor can be used as a neutron source to effectively make a breeder reactor.
However, most countries can dig up rocks out of the ground with radioactive isotopes that can act as a neutron source. However, this has legitimate uses as well from research to medical imagining. Also any power generating reactor is gonna want to use those neutrons to make Tritium otherwise it would quickly run out fuel so not something you just want use on something unrelated to running the fusion reactor.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#90I hope commercial fusion power generation becomes a reality but I'm far from convinced that's the case. What we see here is just solving one problem with many more to go.
Energy output exceeding energy input produces a surplus of energy. That's a must and that's the breakthrough LLNL is announcing but le tme list the some of the known barriers to producing electricity:
1. How stable is the reaction? What failure modes does it have? While fusion doesn't have the same failure modes as fission does (eg Chernobyl) it could still result in significant damage to the container or even the facility;
2. What's the relationship between capex ("capital expendiutre"), lifetime, maintenance and power generation. An extreme example is if your power plant costs $50B with annual mainteance of $2B and a life of 30 years but only produces 100MW of power then even though the fuel is free it's not economical because those capex and operational costs have to be amortized over the life of the plant;
3. How available are the fuels? Of course hydrogen is abundant but most of it is protium (H1), which is not useful for current fusion research. Most of it is DT fusion, meaning deuterium (H2) - tritium (H3). Deuterium is naturally occuring (IIRC ~1ppm). Tritium is not. It needs to be bred.
4. What about neutrons? Neutrons create two problems. The first is energy loss. High speed neutrons are energy loss from your system. Inertial confinement (ie this result) tries to capture neutrons with a "shell". Older designs (eg ITER) use a tokamak, which is magnetic containment of a superheated plasma. Magnetic fields are great for containing electrons and hydrogen nucei because they're positively charged. Neutrons obviously have no electric charge so just escape. The second problem is the damage these neutrons cause (ie "neutron embrittlement").
5. How do you convert that energy into power? Nuclear fission, for example, heats water into steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. This isn't particularly efficient and greatly adds to the costs. It's another system that needs to be maintained. "Direct energy conversion" would be the holy grail here but that's all very theoretical at this point.
Once you start adding up efficiencies in the different stages of electricity generation you have to do significanlty better than simply exceeding power input.
It's a notable achievement but as the release says, viable power generation is still a long way away (ie decades).