US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved • Hacker News Board

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#911

Post by speeder » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

_cs2017_ wrote: post #771

jboy55 wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would it help build better weapons? I thought the existing thermonuclear bombs do the job perfectly fine. Sure, the military might want to make them a bit smaller or a bit cheaper, but is it really such a big deal as to warrant a major announcement?

I guess they also don't want to blow up random civilians by accident again.

When castle bravo was tested, we didn't knew that lithium7 fusion was possible and that it would generate energy. The bomb had a lot of lithium7 because it was cheaper than lithium6. Castle Bravo then proceeded to explode with way more power than intended, it vaporized the measurement instruments, ruined the test site, damaged civilian property and caused a horrible amount of fallout that screwed a enormous amount of people from more than one country.

Even during war, I suppose you want your explosions to behave in the way you expect... so you need to figure out all the physics related to them.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#912

Post by mcculley » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #898

mcculley wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere". We are doing both. We are doing more insulating than heating, but we obviously generate more heat.

Did you actually read my comment to the end? If so, how'd you do on the numbers?

Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#913

Post by nova22033 » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

vincnetas wrote: post #881

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

With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?

I'm not going to set my thermostat to 78 degrees because electricity is practically free.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#914

Post by propogandist » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

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

> silver bullet to stop climate change alone

nothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#915

Post by Tade0 » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

liketochill wrote: post #880

Tade0 wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have week long blackouts currently? In any given year you can count on a week where a panel only produces 10%. It just has to be cloudy or rainy. However much solar we add, even with storage to get through a night, needs some other source to get through the cloudy week, unless we are ok with blackouts.

A panel. Panels spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres produce power averaged over that area, so they're much more consistent and predictable.

HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

That's how cheap the combination of solar and HVDC is.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#916

Post by defrost » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

mcculley wrote: post #912

defrost wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read my comment to the end? If so, how'd you do on the numbers?

Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.

Good, so by what rough order of magnitude does the sun heat us up more than human power generation then?

Is it x10, x100, x1000, .. more?

This is after all the part that matters.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#917

Post by ag315 » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

Cool technical achievement, but it has essentially no implications for economically or politically significant energy generation anytime soon.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#918

Post by rnhmjoj » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

elihu wrote: post #813

moloch-hai wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You seem to be awfully certain of that. I'm not an expert in this area, but my…

> There's no plan to hook ITER up to a thermal plant because it's a research reactor not a power plant

Interestingly, that's not really true: IIRC the japanese team working on the WCCB breeder module (that uses supercritical water as coolant) plans on connecting the water loop to a small turbine. If they succeed it would be the first ever electrical power produced from fusion.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#919

Post by ag315 » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

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…

By 2030? Lol. Lmao, even. 2050 if we're lucky--we're still not even close to developing a reactor that can produce meaningful amounts of power for a sustained period. It'll take decades more to get to that point, and once all the technical limitations have been crossed and we figure out how to get enough tritium, the actual hard work begins of getting it online and integrated with our current system. Fusion is distant future technology.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#920

Post by mcculley » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #916

mcculley wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.

Good, so by what rough order of magnitude does the sun heat us up more than human power generation then? Is it x10, x100, x1000, .. more? This is after all the part that matters.

I have no idea. Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own. That does not make your blanket assertion true.

The original question is a good one. We will use more energy as it gets cheaper (see monster trucks, Las Vegas, Dubai). We should be thinking of what we will do with the waste heat when everyone has a fusion reactor.