9 ms·

They're still a very long way from getting a net gain in energy: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY

willis936 5y ago
This wasn't a high-Q campaign.
prohobo 5y ago
Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it? A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
- epistasis 5y ago
  In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.
  - tinco 5y ago
    Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At least the geothermal plants that I've seen being implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech breaking through there currently? I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now. Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
    - ianai 5y ago
      Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge outlays upfront. Maybe it’d be a clearer choice if energy storage were better solved. It also requires political support to cross NIMBYism.
      - Arrath 5y ago
        Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
        ianai 5y ago
        I think people both aren’t making the logical connection for why they need more power for their current way of life. Also, the NIMBYism against geothermal may be even stronger than that against nuclear because of the governments involved. Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    The idea is that it would cost less and make energy so cheap and abundant that it would completely change society. Fusion would allow you to get 30x energy out vs energy in and has 10,000x the energy density of coal. If you want to explore space, it’s a good option.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      I guess, why is it thought that it could be cheaper than geothermal, for example? Geothermal doesn't have fuel at all. I don't see how fusion produces energy cheap enough for it to be super abundant. And maybe that's just a failure of my imagination, but there seem to be massive gaps in others' reasoning that nobody has been able to fill me in on. Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
      - andruby 5y ago
        Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)? I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
        epistasis 5y ago
        FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time. But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
        thehappypm 5y ago
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy. Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge. Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy. I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
  - Symmetry 5y ago
    Wind and solar are great but they use up a lot of space and ideally we'd have more electric power than can be provided with just those two.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do not have anything close to the storage necessary.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours. So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear. Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > bet for sustainable and clean energy The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences. I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism. Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point. The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
  - malka 5y ago
    > the economic consequences. you mean the death of billions of people ?
    - worik 5y ago
      No
    - time_to_smile 5y ago
      Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die? I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
      - malka 5y ago
        > Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die? There is not one. I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism. > we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make. Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  Going in the wrong direction with development that can never work as intended is always a waste no matter how good the goal. Incorrectly reporting this modest incremental change is the kind of thing that allows doomed projects like this to consume vast resources of money, material and skilled labor that could be used to explore other alternatives.
mirekrusin 5y ago
I'm not quite sure why but I have this flashback-like feeling from blockchain with this Q_total < Q_plasma confusion.
- willis936 5y ago
  Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    But at the end of the day, if this is to be useful, we need the plant to produce more than it uses, right?
    - willis936 5y ago
      Then read the power plant studies published every few years by numerous institutions. There are no showstoppers. Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL: http://firefusionpower.org/ http://firefusionpower.org/
  - mirekrusin 5y ago
    We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.
    - willis936 5y ago
      You should watch the hour long press release and see just how clearly they explain what has been done.
jimworm 5y ago
For those wondering, the Q for this particular result was 0.33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m
- tclancy 5y ago
  We can make it up in volume.
- beefman 5y ago
  He says this is also a world record, but JET got 0.67 in 1997 (according to Wikipedia). The missing asterisk may be that this Q was the average for the whole shot, whereas the 1997 result may have been measured over a short time. Just my speculation, based on slide 21 here: https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_lab_smashes_nuclear_fusion_energy/hw84rid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
Aeolun 5y ago
Haven’t we already had fusion experiments with net positive energy?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beefman 5y ago
  No, unless you count thermonuclear explosives. This experiment didn't demonstrate it either. The fusion only yielded 1/3 the energy used to heat the plasma.[1] That doesn't include the energy needed to run the rest of the machine (magnetic containment etc) and it doesn't include any losses converting the fusion energy to electricity (which was not attempted). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I think this explanation is more comprehensive: https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U

willis936 5y ago

This wasn't a high-Q campaign.

prohobo 5y ago

Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it? A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.

epistasis 5y ago
In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.
- tinco 5y ago
  Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At least the geothermal plants that I've seen being implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech breaking through there currently? I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now. Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
  - ianai 5y ago
    Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge outlays upfront. Maybe it’d be a clearer choice if energy storage were better solved. It also requires political support to cross NIMBYism.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
      - ianai 5y ago
        I think people both aren’t making the logical connection for why they need more power for their current way of life. Also, the NIMBYism against geothermal may be even stronger than that against nuclear because of the governments involved. Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  The idea is that it would cost less and make energy so cheap and abundant that it would completely change society. Fusion would allow you to get 30x energy out vs energy in and has 10,000x the energy density of coal. If you want to explore space, it’s a good option.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    I guess, why is it thought that it could be cheaper than geothermal, for example? Geothermal doesn't have fuel at all. I don't see how fusion produces energy cheap enough for it to be super abundant. And maybe that's just a failure of my imagination, but there seem to be massive gaps in others' reasoning that nobody has been able to fill me in on. Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
    - andruby 5y ago
      Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)? I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
      - epistasis 5y ago
        FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time. But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
        thehappypm 5y ago
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy. Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge. Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy. I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  Wind and solar are great but they use up a lot of space and ideally we'd have more electric power than can be provided with just those two.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do not have anything close to the storage necessary.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours. So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear. Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
time_to_smile 5y ago
> bet for sustainable and clean energy The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences. I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism. Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point. The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
- malka 5y ago
  > the economic consequences. you mean the death of billions of people ?
  - worik 5y ago
    No
  - time_to_smile 5y ago
    Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die? I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
    - malka 5y ago
      > Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die? There is not one. I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism. > we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make. Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
m0llusk 5y ago
Going in the wrong direction with development that can never work as intended is always a waste no matter how good the goal. Incorrectly reporting this modest incremental change is the kind of thing that allows doomed projects like this to consume vast resources of money, material and skilled labor that could be used to explore other alternatives.

mirekrusin 5y ago

I'm not quite sure why but I have this flashback-like feeling from blockchain with this Q_total < Q_plasma confusion.

willis936 5y ago
Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
- SamBam 5y ago
  But at the end of the day, if this is to be useful, we need the plant to produce more than it uses, right?
  - willis936 5y ago
    Then read the power plant studies published every few years by numerous institutions. There are no showstoppers. Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL: http://firefusionpower.org/ http://firefusionpower.org/
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.
  - willis936 5y ago
    You should watch the hour long press release and see just how clearly they explain what has been done.

jimworm 5y ago

For those wondering, the Q for this particular result was 0.33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m

tclancy 5y ago
We can make it up in volume.
beefman 5y ago
He says this is also a world record, but JET got 0.67 in 1997 (according to Wikipedia). The missing asterisk may be that this Q was the average for the whole shot, whereas the 1997 result may have been measured over a short time. Just my speculation, based on slide 21 here: https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_lab_smashes_nuclear_fusion_energy/hw84rid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...

Aeolun 5y ago

Haven’t we already had fusion experiments with net positive energy?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beefman 5y ago
No, unless you count thermonuclear explosives. This experiment didn't demonstrate it either. The fusion only yielded 1/3 the energy used to heat the plasma.[1] That doesn't include the energy needed to run the rest of the machine (magnetic containment etc) and it doesn't include any losses converting the fusion energy to electricity (which was not attempted). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

I think this explanation is more comprehensive: https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U