24 ms·
Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion
- djrogers 5y ago> Herrmann noted that in previous experiments, neutrons exiting the capsule on one side of the implosion arrived a few picoseconds earlier than did those flying off the opposite way Let’s all just take a step back here and marvel at this statement. We (science-humans) are capable of building a machine that can detect and quantify picosecond level variances in neutrons traveling in an enclosure. We can do amazing things. Side note - the lab is just down the road from me, I’m proud of my fellow Livermorons, and continue to hope they keep all those megajoules contained.
- k0stas 5y agoFor context, in wired chip-to-chip communication electronics, femtosecond variations are (statistically) measurable. Picoseconds are rather pedestrian. A 56 Gbaud signal has a single-symbol duration of about 18 picoseconds and perturbations on the order of 1 picosecond are rather large 5.6%. Not to downplay the achievement of the article or the innovation in fusion physics and engineering in general, just a bit of context for the timescales.
- aDfbrtVt 5y agoFor further context, the fastest oscilioscopes commercially available (Keysight UXR) samples at 256G with 20fs (rms) of jitter. Modern coherent optics runs at over 100GBaud, a picosecond is 1/10th of a symbol period.
- jhallenworld 5y agoMSRP of $1.3 Million US dollars https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/something-amazing!-keysight-uxr-110ghz-256gss-10-bit-scope-teardown-exp/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/something-amazing!-ke...
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoAKA roughly one Brooklyn apartment.
- typon 5y agoUsed a similar scope during my grad school tenure for measuring 200GS/s ADCs. RF electronics is a wonderful field.
- lizknope 5y agoIn a 5nm semiconductor chip a standard cell inverter (like combinational AND / OR gates) can switch in 5 picoseconds. These things are characterized with at least 2 more significant digits so we feel we know how they respond at the 10's of femtosecond level of precision.
- dredmorbius 5y agoA considerable number of post-1960 Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, as well as a fair bit of the medicine ones, come from sensor-related discoveries. Either they're directly applicable to sensing phenomena, or they form a substantial part of a sensor technology. Contrast with the pre-1960 period which was dominated by discovery of fundamental particals, elements, and laws or principles. Disclaimers: this is based on a somewhat casual review of awards, and even if my own assessment is reliable, the Nobel award process itself has numerous opportunities for bias and trend-based behaviours.
- Florin_Andrei 5y ago> I’m proud of my fellow... The part after that, was it a typo? :)
- WookieRushing 5y agoNope, looks legit: https://www.google.com/search?q=livermorons+site:www.reddit.com&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=mvin&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXu-aHzbjyAhU4CzQIHe8qC-wQrQIoAnoECB4QAw&biw=390&bih=776&dpr=3 https://www.google.com/search?q=livermorons+site:www.reddit....
- credit_guy 5y agoTo be honest, Livermorans sounds a bit more natural to me than Livermorons. And it does appear that some people from Livermore call themselves Livermorans, like "Cheryl is a native Livermoran" [1]. [1] https://www.lvwine.org/blog/winemakers-talk-harvest-favorite-california-wines-today-eagle-ridge-vineyards/ https://www.lvwine.org/blog/winemakers-talk-harvest-favorite...
- CobaltFire 5y agoI think you miss the point: it’s a friendly in-joke that the people who stay in that area are “morons”. You see this in places where there isn’t much to keep you there except your profession, typically government. I’m aware of Livermore and Lemoore, but I’m sure there are others.
- philwelch 5y agoAnd to completely explain the joke to death, it's also ironic to self-deprecatingly call yourselves "morons" when you work at a scientific laboratory.
- djrogers 5y agoNo, this has nothing to do with those of us that choose to live here being stuck because of our professions, what the heck gave you that idea? Everyone I know who lives here LOVES Livermore. It’s decent commute distance to most places in the Bay Area, is surrounded by beautiful hills, 40+ wineries, an award winning downtown, and the friendliest people of any biggish California city I’ve lived in. It’s a joke, but related to the awkward sounding and looking term Livermoran. There is a LOT more keeping the 100k of us in Livermore than our professions.
- choeger 5y agoLivermorons? Really?
- AlotOfReading 5y agoIt's the correct demonym for people from Livermore and also a bit funny. One of the breweries in the area even named a drink after it.
- wolverine876 5y agoMaybe they have a sense of humor about themselves.
- hijinks 5y agoyou need to with the heat there in the summer
- CobaltFire 5y agoFor those questioning the “Livermorons”: I can’t speak directly to that but can say that Naval Aviation uses a similar term for those who elect to stay at NAS Lemoore: “Leemorons”. It’s not a perjorative; the people I’ve talked to use the term affectionately.
- ezekiel68 5y agoIn a large enough community, these two (perjorative and affectionate) are not mutually exclusive. c.f. Yankee Doodle, etc
- HPsquared 5y agoA nice rule of thumb for these kind of timescales (courtesy of a lecture by Grace Hopper) is to consider the speed of light: 1 nanosecond at the speed of light is about 1 foot (300 mm). A picosecond is then 0.3 mm.
- _Microft 5y agoWhich is also a method to shift light pulses by the shortest of durations! Insert an optical delay line into the setup and by varying the path length, you can delay a light pulse by a tiny amount of time, e.g. for a pump-probe experiment (a pump-probe experiment works like this: first pulse does something to the system ("pump"), second pulse comes a short time later and reads out ("probes") the state of the system at that time. Changing the time delay gives an idea of the dynamics). Here is a drawing of an optical delay line: https://www.thorlabs.com/images/TabImages/Delay_Line_Kit_D1-780.gif https://www.thorlabs.com/images/TabImages/Delay_Line_Kit_D1-... The part labelled "V-Block" can move along the "translation stage" which changes the length of the optical path by twice this amount. Use the speed of light to calculate which delay the pulse incurred over the distance. You can now send pulse after pulse through your setup while changing the delay by tiny amounts to see how things (e.g. chemical processes) happen on these time scales.
- CobaltFire 5y agoRelevant video for those who haven’t seen the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw
- blueprint 5y agoWe can do so much and yet so little. All of this progress may amount to nothing if we cannot overcome our internal obstacles to our collective survival. Awaiting the downvotes but it's true.
- blueprint 5y agolol yeah y'all aren't in denial, sure....
- jjk166 5y agoAnd it's important to note that these developments in sensor technologies can be carried forward to future experiments even if the NIF is ultimately incapable of being improved much further. The quest for fusion is not simply achieved or failed, working on tough problems like this leads to technological progress at every step along the way.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taf2 5y agoIt still amazing how much of the periodic table we owe to this place. https://www.llnl.gov/news/tags/periodic-table https://www.llnl.gov/news/tags/periodic-table
- molyss 5y agoWhile everyone is focusing on the picosend part of this, I’m more impressed by the neutron detection. Electrically charged particles sound much easier to detect, let alone with any kind of temporal precision
- noneeeed 5y agoIt reminds me of the gravity wave detectors. It boggles my mind that we are able to build machines that can measure such staggeringly tiny effects.
- thunkshift1 5y agoLol.. livermorons
- evanb 5y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/science/lasers-fusion-power-watts-earth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/science/lasers-fusion-pow...
- _Microft 5y agoHere is your daily bit of useless knowledge: the energy released by fusion from this single, microscopic target is roughly the caloric value of a McDonald's cheeseburger (~300kCal).
- colechristensen 5y agoA cheeseburger's worth of energy actually extracted from something the size of a spec of dust. It's a good way to make numbers real. Alternatively it's about the amount of energy to raise 4 L of water from room temperature to boiling.
- thereddaikon 5y agoSince any practical reactor will use steam turbines to translate heat to useable energy that last one is actually a good way to think of it.
- PaulHoule 5y agoNot steam turbines, closed-cycle gas turbines.
- jonplackett 5y agoFor some reason I'm surprised a cheese burger has enough energy to boil my kettle multiple times.
- dralley 5y agoThe definition of a dietary calorie (kilo-calorie) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree Celcius. So the kettle math is actually quite straightforwards.
- stickfigure 5y agoA cheeseburger has enough energy to power you for most of a day. Possibly doing a lot of heavy lifting, and continuously running the largest and most sophisticated neural network hardware on the planet.
- Robotbeat 5y agoThis is fantastic. And I agree with the fellow mentioning direct drive as better. If you can get the same results using direct drive, you’ll have a sizable energy gain above what the input energy was, perhaps enough to drive a (multiple stage) heat engine and produce net electricity. Anyway, I also want to point out that laser inertial confinement fusion bears a not-coincidental (some of the same codes and plasma physics techniques developed for laser fusion were used by Lawrence Livermore and others to develop EUV) resemblance to the extreme UV light sources sold by ASML and used for the highest end computer chips today. Compare the LIFE fusion reactor concept (based on an evolution of the NIF) with the EUV light source of droplets of tin being hit with a pulsed laser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy EUV light source: https://youtu.be/IattxYrc9Go https://youtu.be/IattxYrc9Go (The Hohlrahm of the National Ignition Facility, surrounding the tritium deuterium fuel pellet, is acting like the tin droplet of the EUV light source, converting longer wavelength pulsed laser light to (near) X-Rays.)
- jeffbee 5y agoNIF isn't supposed to achieve net power generation. It's a defense research facility which is intended to test nuclear weapons technology without violating weapons testing bans.
- Robotbeat 5y agoThat is not quite correct. Yes, its primary purpose is “stockpile management,” but it’s not exclusively that. It was ALSO sold as a facility to study fusion power generation, hence this announcement. LIFE was a proposed follow-on project to NIF that would be focused on power generation demonstration (high repetition rates, etc). It never went anywhere and work on it effectively stopped around 2013 or so.
- leephillips 5y agoBut the comment you’re replying to is exactly correct. NIF is not LIFE. Ignition is far from net power generation, by a few orders of magnitude.
- code4money 5y agoReleasing more energy is good, but is it enough of a difference that the delta can be captured (assuming imperfect capture process) + is it able to offset the cost of the expensive laser setup (maintenance)?
- m-watson 5y agoBaby steps, there are any number of issues to address if the goal was to create something that is energy producing for consumption. However, taking out even any aspect of commercialization or scaling this is an important milestone in terms of science and engineering. That's not to say don't ask those questions, it is just allow the excitement of progress while asking future questions.
- modeless 5y agoThe article states that the reaction produced more energy than the fuel absorbed, not more energy than it took to run the lasers. I expect the efficiency of power transfer to the fuel is pretty low.
- jatone 5y agoalso mentioned chain reactions which would be one way to generate more energy than input even if your input was high.
- lambdatronics 5y agoYou're right, they had 1.8 MJ of photons hitting the target, but something like 400MJ of energy going into the laser, which is inefficient (<1%).
- modeless 5y agoWow, I didn't guess that low. I guess it makes sense though.
- credit_guy 5y agoThe US gives about the same amount of money to the National Ignition Facility as to the ITER project, roughly half a billion dollars per year (a bit more for NIF, a bit less for ITER). Of course, the main objective of the NIF is to assist in the stewardship of the nuclear stockpile, not to seek economic nuclear fusion. Still, it's great that they achieved this milestone. Congrats to all involved. And good luck in the future.
- topspin 5y ago"the main objective of the NIF is to assist in the stewardship of the nuclear stockpile" I suspect that's always been a funding fig leaf. The nuclear stockpile stewardship claim is highly dubious. Not that I mind. There are worse things diverted DOD money has been squandered on.
- willis936 5y agoMCF faces a few engineering hurdles. ICF faces several times more. Investing in a facility on the scale of NIF for ICF doesn't make much sense if the goal is economic fusion power on the grid. There are much lower hanging fruits where that money could be spent: such as on new MCF machines or a wider and shallower mix of ICF machines. Ask non-US fusion researchers how they feel about ICF if you want a proper outside perspective.
- topspin 5y agoI don't buy this view. You can see from the quotes these physicists don't really understand why they got this result. We don't actually know enough about what is happening with ICF of MCF or any other xF to rule out approaches. And why should I need to seek foreign opinions to confirm your view? NIF detractors grow on trees in the US. You never, ever get a story about NIF without one chiming in.
- Robotbeat 5y agoMagnetic confinement fusion like ITER is no less of a boondoggle. Maybe even more so because the progress is intentionally slow in spite of not having a dual-role for “stockpile stewardship.” ITER is being funded not just by the US but by many countries, started development in 1985, detailed design in 2001, and construction in 2013, but it’s not even PLANNED to get full fusion until 2035. 2035! Plus, it won’t even generate electricity at all. That’s planned for the DEMO reactor that won’t start operation until 2051 at earliest. It is depressingly slow if you think one of the main reasons we should be developing alternative energy sources is to address climate change. It’s so bad as to qualify as a waste and maybe even a negative investment as it’s pulling a bunch of researchers toward a project that literally has no hope of being relevant to fighting climate change (as its first possible kilowatt-hour of electricity won’t start until 30 years from now, well after we’ve exhausted our carbon budget for 2 degrees C of warming).
- belter 5y agoReading the info so far...I would advise a frugal dose of moderate optimist toned down with a spice of healthy scepticism: "The lab hasn’t yet reproduced this month’s results, and Herrmann cautioned that doing so might not be straightforward. “We don’t know what variability will be in successive shots. It’s a nonlinear process where alpha heating heats up the fusion fuel and creates more fusion, which creates more heat.” Herrmann says the 3.5 MeV alpha particles, which remain in the plasma, produced 20% of the fusion yield, with 14 MeV neutrons accounting for most of the energy." "The lab is still analyzing the results from the shot. It’s not yet known which or what combination of advances to the targets, laser pulse lengths, or other variables led to the leap in performance. Some of the instruments were saturated by the unexpected yield of the reaction. A few that are used in the target chamber for other, non-ignition experiments will need repair." "Herrmann acknowledged that the announcement deviates from the standard practice of peer-reviewed publication. But the results, he says, were leaking, “so we wanted to put it out so people could discuss the facts.” "
- programmer_dude 5y agoProbably need to use more fuel for a sustained reaction?
- bufferoverflow 5y agoThere's no sustained reaction in this setup, it will be dropped targets and lasers pulsing at the right time.
- programmer_dude 5y agoI am sorry I did not mean indefinitely sustained. Surely not all of the fuel "ignites" at the same time? Shouldn't a larger mass of fuel increase the energy output (there's more of it to "burn")?
- lambdatronics 5y agoYes, a larger mass of fuel would produce more output, but it would also require more laser energy to compress it. They're already maxing out the lasers they have.
- lolc 5y agoI like how they didn't expect it: "The lab is still analyzing the results from the shot. It’s not yet known which or what combination of advances to the targets, laser pulse lengths, or other variables led to the leap in performance. Some of the instruments were saturated by the unexpected yield of the reaction. A few that are used in the target chamber for other, non-ignition experiments will need repair."
- dekhn 5y agowow, I remember my friend in grad school working on this.... 20 years ago? They said it would never work and was just funded to keep livermore going.
- blisterpeanuts 5y agoSlightly tangential, but this amazing scientific work makes me wonder how much more we could have achieved over the last 30-40 years, had we diverted even a small fraction of military funding to science and space research. Say, $100B/year. LLNL's budget is $2.5 billion. The entire Nasa budget is around $25B/year; NSF is $8.5B. It's true that there's also military R&D and of course the majority of R&D is private sector[1], but just saying, what a shame that there isn't more of a national focus. Not only should we be spending more on civil R&D, but what did we gain from that military expenditure, for example the couple of trillion we poured into Afghan for 20 years? 1. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/cross-national-comparisons-of-r-d-performance https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/cross-national-compariso...
- ttraub 5y agoRaising budgets don't intrinsically guarantee better results. Would a larger staff of physicists etc. lead to more breakthroughs or quicker results? Or would it just be piddled away in frivolous experiments, nicer Aeron chairs and the like? A physicist friend from NSF told me once that $50 billion would be about right.
- jatone 5y agodepends on where the bottle necks in the research are. I doubt its man power. its most likely production of the various parts. generally speaking you don't get great returns on increasing the number of scientists. you do get great returns by speeding up the production of data.
- Izikiel43 5y agoWith a tokamak, like SPARC (https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc) it's clear how energy will be extracted, the vessel will be heated and the cooling fluid goes through a heat exchanger to get the energy. How would it work here? I imagine something like spiderman 2 where a big ball of fire is suspended in a chamber, but how would energy be transformed to electricity?
- adnmcq999 5y agoWithout any googling, wouldn’t be the same way as a fission or coal power plant? Energy from exothermic reaction heats up water which is then used to turn a steam turbine
- api 5y agoSeems like it could also be mechanical. There are gigantic Diesel engines that have pistons capable of each absorbing this kind of energy. Have a little bit of gas or water near the target and there will be quite an expansion. Also a "thermonuclear internal combustion engine" is kind of retro-futuristic and cool.
- skinkestek 5y agoWow, cool idea!
- willis936 5y agoThis is General Fusion's approach.
- robocat 5y agoLargest Diesel engine in the world[1] burns 160g (5.6oz) of diesel each combustion, within a 960mm (38in) diameter cylinder with a 2500mm (8.2ft) stroke. A barrel of oil is about 160 litres and contains 6.1E9 Joules[2], so each combustion stroke is about 6MJ. The fusion reaction released 1.3MJ of energy. So a single cylinder fusion engine seems realistic! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wärtsilä-Sulzer_RTA96-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wärtsilä-Sulzer_RTA96-C [2] https://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumbers.pdf https://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumb... A Cheeseburger weighs 3.9oz for comparison https://cockeyed.com/science/weight/cheeseburger-mcdonalds.html https://cockeyed.com/science/weight/cheeseburger-mcdonalds.h...
- newman555 5y agois there somewhere a summary of “basic science” problems that need to be solved to make fusion feasible? And - would throwing more money at the problem?
- apendleton 5y agoThis book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Star-Builders/Arthur-Turrell/9781982130664 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Star-Builders/Art... just came out and is a very accessible explainer. The maybe-tldr version: we can make fusion occur, but it currently (well, until today) takes more energy to make it happen than we get out. We have good models that predict this relationship, and it mostly boils down to maximizing the "triple product": temperature times plasma density times confinement time. The two most popular broad approaches are "magnetic confinement" (holding a plasma for awhile with magnetic fields) and "inertial confinement" (taking a capsule and rapidly mechanically compressing it, with lasers or a railgun or something, which is what this NIF thing is), and each chooses to maximize the triple product by leaning on different multiplicands -- inertial confinement is much shorter time, but higher density as compared to magnetic. For both, the other factor is plasma instabilities: plasmas don't like to behave, and like to leak out of their enclosures or not maintain the shapes you want them to, and lots of research seems to be about controlling those. Beyond that, what the challenges are depend on the approach you choose. For inertial, bumping up the triple product seems to be mostly about building bigger and more powerful systems, and managing plasma instabilities. NIF also uses an "indirect" approach where the lasers get (inefficiently) turned into X-rays which then compress the plasma, and "direct" inertial fusion has even bigger plasma instability problems to solve. For magnetic, the most mature technologies, tokamaks, have well-understood properties in terms of plasma management, and the main still-to-do work had been thought to just be making the machines bigger, which is what ITER is doing, but the recent change is the development of high-temperature superconducting magnets, which might allow for much higher-strength magnetic fields, which would allow for success with smaller machines (that's what, e.g., Commonwealth Fusion, is pursuing). In either case, the goal is just bumping up the triple product until we get to net gain. Other magnetic approaches (stellarators, etc.) are probably at a somewhat-earlier stage of understanding plasma behavior. For both inertial and magnetic, there will also be development needed after net energy gain to get enough of a gain factor that the economics actually make sense and things can be mass-produced (current thinking is that to actually be economical, we need to get to ~30x energy out compared to what went in), and also likely some materials-science innovations needed to keep the reactor from wearing out due to high neutron flux, and possibly some work producing tritium, the likely fuel, from lithium. Beyond those MCF and ICF, there are also a bunch of other less-mature technologies that startups are exploring that might also produce good results, and (the founders think) might do so more efficiently than the big approaches, but they're not as far along, and the work still to do is more basic-science-ish. This would be things like Z-pinch, fuel cycles other than deuterium-tritium, etc. etc.
- binarymax 5y agoThis is amazing! But then... “It gives the US a lab capability to study burning plasmas and high-energy physics relevant for [nuclear weapons] stewardship,” Are you freaking kidding me? How about solving the energy crisis required to reverse climate change? Nope. More bombs :(
- laurent92 5y agoAND to solve the provisioning of fissile-capable material in third world country by having tech that can work on fissiON-capable material, ie non-radioactive. Which makes carrying those to Africa a progress rather than war material. Which means we might need less bombs.
- parhamn 5y agoDon't get too alarmed by this. It's how a good portion scientific progress in America has always worked (especially if the project needs military scale funding). The tech eventually makes it out to civilian space.
- willis936 5y agoFor when every home in America has an aging nuclear warhead?
- leephillips 5y agoIt’s not more bombs so much as maintaining our existing nuclear deterrent without actually testing warheads by blowing them up, something that, thankfully, is behind us. Warheads deteriorate over time; you can’t just keep them on the shelf and claim that they will still work if used. And our adversaries know this.
- beefman 5y agoThe article mentions losses at the hohlraum but doesn't mention losses in the laser. "Ignition" means they controled the implosion well enough to break (almost) even on laser energy, but the laser itself is less than 1% efficient on wall power. Input energy to the entire system is over 400 MJ per shot. Even at max theoretical fusion yield, it wouldn't come close to breakeven. There's also a firing rate issue. Even if the system produced net power, significant production would require many shots per second. Currently, the laser flash lamps are expendable and it takes on the order of a day (and lots of money) to prep for each shot. Some of these drawbacks were addressed in the LIFE proposal, which would use fusion neutrons to burn fission fuel in a blanket around the fusion chamber. You could burn spent reactor fuel subcritically (no fission chain reaction), for example. But then it's a fission machine, and criticality excursions aren't much of an issue in conventional fission reactors. In the end, there are many drawbacks and little benefit with such a setup -- even if it worked. I love lasers, and NIF is a marvel. But there really is no sensical story about power production in it. Even the machine's stated purpose -- stockpile maintenence -- is highly dubious. It is really an elaborate welfare machine, given to weapons scientists in exchange for their support of testing bans.
- leephillips 5y agoI think your take on this is accurate, but it’s a little deeper than a welfare program. The government needs to maintain a population of cleared scientists who know how to calculate things like fusion yields, simulated with classified codes. These fake fusion energy programs contribute to that; some of the most capable scientists don’t want to work on weapons, so they can kid themselves that they are working on “energy”. There is no reasonably foreseeable future with fusion as part of the electricity grid. Even if we got fantastically lucky and were able to build a practical (magnetic or inertial) reactor in 50 years, by that time improvements in energy storage and transmission technologies will have allowed renewable energy to dominate, and no government would be crazy enough to permit it to be built. http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
- eloff 5y ago
- brofallon 5y agoI'm honestly not sure why there seems to be so much interest in fusion these days. Wind and solar seem to offer a limitless, carbon-free energy supply with relatively cheap, well understood technology that is already price competitive with coal and gas. By contrast fusion seems super expensive and technologically very complex - even fission plants take 10+ years to bring on line. Does fusion offer some advantage over wind + solar that I'm missing?
- stronglikedan 5y agoMy best guess? Space.
- Roboprog 5y agoMore 9s. Closer to 24x7.
- sbierwagen 5y agoAs stronglikedan said, spaceflight propulsion/institutional inertia. (Stationary space facilities will use solar, just like on Earth. Space transport, unlike Earth transport, will be an awful combo of slow and expensive. Space stations will need to be simple. One type of computer. One type of microcontroller board. Maybe three sizes of screw. Solar panels are simple, identical, and interchangeable. And not radioactive! (Fun fact: every bolt on the outside of the ISS uses the exact same head size: 7/16" hex)) Seasonal variation with solar is a bit of a bummer. If we need to fully electrify everything, (Transport and heating) then winter will be a problem. Either we massively overprovision solar in order to still have heat on the shortest day of the year, or we run thousand mile cross-country transmission lines and enormous battery banks. Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Right now we run aluminum smelters 24/7 because baseload power is fairly consistent, but if solar power is free in July but dear in January you might see multi-month shutdowns. This gives headaches to central planners, and makes them inclined to pour billions into fusion if it can preserve some of the status quo.
- pfdietz 5y ago> Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Or it will move to locations where seasonality is not as important.
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- peter303 5y ago"just around the corner" quote from 1955
- QuadmasterXLII 5y agoFor reference, the hydraulic press channel recently demonstrated what the fusion energy released here looks like. 10^6 joules is basically one hand grenade. Very exciting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDA7EUDOiwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDA7EUDOiwU
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI remember a talk ten years by the director of LL describing how a power plant would potentially need something like liquid lithium walls to absorb the energy and transfer heat to steam. That sounded amazing. Also, ASML did commercialize EUV which relies on blasting a steady drip stream of molten tin, and people 10 years ago said it would never be useful for industry…
- TheDudeMan 5y agoHoly shit, they got the power and energy units correct.
- lambdatronics 5y agoOne would hope, that's the official American Physical Society publication...
- fguerraz 5y agoWhat a great distraction from the real problems! If we had that free limitless renewable energy, and we used it as we do now to fuel "growth" building malls and car parks, extracting ores from the crust, and produce pesticides, then we will have solved no problem at all. Spieces do not become extinct, they are being exterminated. Energy production is but a tiny part of the ecological crisis we're in. We need to solve the energy usage problem, not its production. This is madness.
- avalys 5y agoIt seems like your "real problem" is that you want to tell 80% of humanity that they will never be permitted to achieve the same quality of life we enjoy in Western society today. Good luck with that.
- fguerraz 5y agoNot only that but the West must also regress, that is correct. That is pretty much obvious once you have accepted that current growth is unsustainable and has been for a long time. But we can (and probably will) keep pretending, that's fine, it will just be more and more "to late" and we'll cause more and more irreversible damage. There is no green growth. Heck, I shouldn't care, I have no children and a comfortable life. Let's keep playing music until we sink.
- nitrogen 5y agoextracting ores from the crust The Earth has an insane amount of material. It's the greatest tragedy that life occupies only the thinnest film on the thinnest edge of the Earth. The more we can make use of the full potential of the Earth, the more life there can be. It's a waste to just leave all that matter buried, doing nothing more than providing gravity. We need to solve the energy usage problem, not its production. More energy means more solutions. Think carbon sequestration, vertical farming, building megastructures to combat sea level rise, climate engineering, or even just pumping heat into space as infrared. We are indeed in a climate crisis, but 85% of the crisis is that people have given up on the future and just want to panic.
- sb1752 5y agoThere's a long history of fraud and misleading / sensational claims made my companies in the fusion space. The industry is nowhere near break-even (total energy into system == total energy out). ITER is a great example today. This is covered well with in-depth research by journalist Steven B. Krivit. He's put together a documentary exposing ITER's many false and dubious claims that I recommend watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnikAFWDhNw&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnikAFWDhNw&t=8s
- GoodJokes 5y agoWhat does this have to do with the thread or the article?
- lambdatronics 5y agoThere are two different definitions of breakeven, and science journalism is usually not good at making those distinct (and yeah, often the press releases from the institutions don't help). "Scientific" breakeven is the first milestone we'll hit, and that's what NIF is claiming to be close to. You're referring to what's known as "engineering" breakeven, which is harder to achieve and requires yet higher fusion yields. Unless you hear otherwise, assume that anyone talking about breakeven means "scientific" breakeven -- if they'd achieved "engineering" breakeven, they'd make sure to spell that out!
- mmmBacon 5y agoJust for comparison please consider that a jelly donut contains about 1.6MJ.
- willis936 5y agoSo does a 100 kg, 1 m diameter disk spinning at 56 Hz. I'd rather be sitting next to a donut if that disk stopped in less than a second.
- mmmBacon 5y agoSomehow I get the feeling you’re familiar with the jelly donut analogy WRT inertial confinement fusion.
- lambdatronics 5y agoA candy bar is equivalent to a stick of dynamite, energetically. But then, energy and power are not the same :D
- bigbaguette 5y agoI can't help but wonder, with fusion: When we'll be able to harness this energy in a stable and net producing manner, yes that will cut carbon emissions and solve the nuclear waste problem, but also, is it going to be the catalyst that will enable humanity to accelerate wreaking havoc on what's left of our ecosystems?
- colechristensen 5y ago> is it going to be the catalyst that will enable humanity to accelerate wreaking havoc on what's left of our ecosystems? The question is how cheap can it get, can the energy production scale up vs cost, and how much does maintenance cost. This is a good video about fission energy production economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a competitively priced power plant, ok, we can reduce fossil fuel energy production towards zero in a few decades. That's pretty good for the environment but nothing really "new" is possible. If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a 10x reduction in the cost of electricity... then we have something new. Things that people didn't imagine being possible before become possible. Things like desalination instead of taking water from rivers or aquifers because it's cheaper. Tearing down dams because the power isn't needed. "Farms" in skyscrapers packed with artificial light where food can be produced without pesticides or herbicides because it's a controlled environment. Using landfills like mines, extracting tiny amounts of useful materials so ordinary mining becomes much less needed. You can also think of plenty of things cheap plentiful energy could make happen that are destructive too... it is difficult to project and I assume will go in both directions.
- jasonhansel 5y ago> "These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production. It also offers potential new avenues of research into alternative energy sources that could aid economic development and help fight climate change." Well, at least they're pretty honest about the order of their priorities.
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- pontifier 5y agoI'm pleased to say I finally have funds to start construction on my new theoretical fusion reactor. In a loose way it is similar to the inertial confinement at LLNL, but instead of pulsing 3 to 4 times per day, I'll be creating billions of implosions per second. This is possible because of the way I recycle energy that is otherwise lost, not needing a hohlraum(heating only the Deuterium), and ramping up the implosion energy harmonically instead of brute forcing it with a single large punch. I have more information at www.DDproFusion.com
- escot 5y ago> The shot...demolished the facility’s previous record yield Thought 'demolish' was going in another direction there