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US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

energy.gov

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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#861

Post by fosk »

stonepresto wrote: post #661
opportune wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Way more than that. This would shift the entire geopolitical structure of the world. Humanity would never be the same.

Good riddance.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#862

Post by mclightning »

willis936 wrote: post #761
mclightning wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’re a tiny tiny minority if any, compared to what we are seeing here in comments.

I’m sure they would agree with what I said when they scroll through the comments.

I would not want to wander into HN comments section if I am doing any kind of divergent innovation, challenging the limits of what's technically possible. People here just parrot the status-quo as the absolute truth. If that was the case, humanity would have made zero progress.

Some nerd in some quiet corner, working hard in disbelief of the rest of the society, is the one changing the course of history. Not the ones, parroting established textual truths. There is GPT-3 for that.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#863

Post by Valakas_ »

pauljurczak wrote: post #821
carabiner wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030 Right. The first law of fusion physics: working fusion power generation in 10 years. It has been proven true for the last 7 decades. Rock solid.

At some point, people will still be predicting fusion in the next 10 years, and then it will happen in the next.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#864

Post by valine »

willmadden wrote: post #787
iamgopal wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Solar can't do that without massive batteries that don't exist. Even then it's not viable in areas where there isn't sufficient sunlight.

The batteries do exist, but it’s better to use them in cars. If we start diverting our battery supply for grid storage it will drive up the price of EVs.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#865

Post by Tade0 »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #843
joe_the_user wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can invest enough and make solar equivalent to continuous power. Solar + reverse hydropower, solar + synthetic fuel manufacture, solar + appropriate sized batteries, solar cranes-with-weights, etc. Solar is so cheap that all those are plausible. Fusion is still far from ready.

I suggest we do not lay all of our eggs in one basket. Climate change can be best countered if we use the sweet spot of all current available and anticipated technologies, including photovoltaic, long & short term storage solutions, and fusion. There is no need to bet on one technology at this stage.

There is a market need.

Solar panels are cheap and the market appears to be fine with unreliable power[0] if it's cheap enough.

[0] Unreliable, but predictable that is. You can estimate with decent confidence what the weather will be like tomorrow and you can definitely tell what it's going to be a few hours from now, so energy auctions a day ahead are feasible.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#866

Post by danw1979 »

eru wrote: post #794
tuatoru wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have a hope of supplying grid power, they need to scale up the energy gain by four orders of magnitude and reactor run time by 12 orders of magnitude. Those are just two of the engineering problems. It'll be a while, and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage.

> [...], and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage. Maybe not on earth, but there are applications in deep space.

This is exactly why we need to keep plugging away at fusion - one day we’ll need it in space. It doesn’t have to be cheap, it just has to work.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#868

Post by mansoor_ »

A couple points:

- Yes the efficiency of the laser is poor and modern tech is more efficient, but not enough to make it an energy producing process. The best lasers are ~50% energy efficient.

- This can only be maintained for short periods of time and the time to restart the process in long. Not only that, tritium is a rare isotope. These are probably the largest challenges to overcome.

- The energy is released in the form of high-speed particles, and there is no efficient energy capture process.

The significance of their achievements is overblown. Yes, they achieved ignition, but no it is just an incremental process towards commercial fusion power.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#869

Post by nothis »

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #33

> 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) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…

Naive question: Once they get out more than they spend, can they just loop the generated energy back in and keep increasing this exponentially?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#870

Post by bearmode »

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…

Regular fission plants take 5+ years to construct. So in the next 2-3 years you're expecting this technology to become mature enough to roll out and hook up to the power grid?
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