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US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports
- greggarious 4y agoCan any physics experts chime in? This seems similar to stuff I’ve read over and over but I want to believe…
- Brometheus 4y agoYeah, but you can't since the energy produced is in form of heat and radiation and not electricity. That is like using lasers to start a fire and then saying: Look the fire is producing energy in the form of heat! But the heat has to be turned to electricity to power the lasers. And then the fire better produce enough heat to produce enough electricity to power the lasers...
- marssaxman 4y agoSo far as I am aware, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power stations all generate electricity by producing heat, boiling water, and using the steam to spin a turbine. Once you have heat, the rest seems like well-understood industrial technology. Is there something unique about fusion power which makes its heat more difficult to employ?
- Symmetry 4y agoIt's not that it's difficult, its just that it's not perfectly efficient. So once you include the inefficiencies of the heat engine it not necessarily producing energy on net. But there are also some engineering challenges to work out in employing heat generated like this to drive a heat engine, at least with somethings decent like 30% efficiency.
- greggarious 4y agoIs ~30% what other sources achieve?
- Symmetry 4y agoOther sources can do better but the problem of transferring heat from plasma erupting in a vacuum chamber lined with mirrors seems really hard to me compared to the problem you have in a natural gas power plant, say, so I'd expect even a well developed laser pulse fusion power plant to have a lower efficiency.
- Brometheus 4y agoYes, the fusion needs "huge" amounts of electrical energy input to happen, be it in the form of lasers like here or in the form of magnetic fields like in iter. In this experiment 2.1 units of input energy produced 2.5 units of output energy. That energy has to be converted to electricity. Conversion looses like 40% of energy (escapes unsused) – so you have produced 1.5 units of electricity from 2.1 units of electricity input.
- marssaxman 4y agoSure, that's always been the challenge with fusion. I mistook you to be implying that there was something uniquely difficult about generating electricity from heat produced by fusion, but now I suppose you were simply describing the overhead involved.
- zardo 4y agoIt's energy_out/energy_in, but the energy_in is not the total energy used by the experiment, it's the fraction that is transferred to the fusion fuel.
- greggarious 4y ago>In this experiment 2.1 units of input energy produced 2.5 units of output energy. That energy has to be converted to electricity. Conversion looses like 40% of energy (escapes unsused) – so you have produced 1.5 units of electricity from 2.1 units of electricity input. Thanks for distilling this into one three simple sentences, I know from my brief career in science policy how hard that can be. (You should write 1 pagers for the US Congress :-)) To get back on topic: So basically, if I'm understanding you correctly: this is an increase in efficiency but not one such that it makes sense economically to generate power in this way? Is this a large jump in efficiency from previous attempts? The reason I ask is that I know physics can be incremental, so I don't want to detract from the contributions of the authors... and by all means, it's the type of thing I'd expect to see on HN if so and I'm glad it was shared. I was just surprised to see many more mainstream sites, geared towards a more general audience, running stories about what I'd expect to be more of a niche discovery. (Possibly as more of a geopolitics thing -- much like if someone is arrested no one recalls with equal vigor when the charges are dropped, a PR-y article about a minor but important discovery can influence public opinion and be a tool of geopolitics.)
- EZ-Cheeze 4y agoI recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
- colechristensen 4y agoThe price of energy has always been approaching zero. Restated, the amount of energy available to an individual has generally grown exponentially, with pauses here and there because civilization. We might be resuming that growth in the next few decades. Fusion isn’t and won’t be solved in the immediate future. There is a long path towards commercial viability and a lot of milestones along the way… and not really a great method of associating them in a popular science sort of way that doesn’t seem like “we’ve solved fusion!” Real significant progress is indeed being made and is expected to continue, people are going to be excited then disappointed by milestones being announced because we’re closer but not there. Fusion isn’t just always thirty years down the road though, we can see the destination getting closer.
- EZ-Cheeze 4y agoI think all progress will accelerate significantly with the dawn of true AI. The fusion scientist can now ask ChatGPT for ten (or 10,000) ideas on how to solve a particular roadblock, and a lot of the suggestions will be actually good. The cost of intelligence has suddenly become near-zero, and that will supercharge everything to do with innovation
- est 4y agosee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950289
- jacknews 4y agoIs it really a 'scientific breakthrough' if it's just that they've firing fusion shots with 'net positive energy output'? Good work, but IMHO we're still a long way from using fusion for energy, if ever, even if only because it will be so expensive to build and run these ultra-high-tech plants. But also because of all the downsides of D-T fusion, like, where is the tritium, and that most of the energy comes of as fast neutrons, etc.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agohow do you run before you can walk, and what has this level of cynicism done for you in life?
- tuatoru 4y agoScepticism. Prevented buying crypto, because I couldn't understand how it could be both a currency and an investment.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoyou're mistaking cynicism for skepticism and you're trusting yourself entirely too much (a common flaw for smart people). Consider that even too much water can kill a person and the original computers filled buildings.
- jfengel 4y agoIt saves time. The most you can actually get from such an announcement is to slightly update your priors. It doesn't affect your actions at all. So you see it, note it, become slightly miffed that the Internet will be full of comments that think it's a bigger deal than it is, and move on with your life. The cynicism serves as a mental balance to the hype that might otherwise tempt you to spend more time on this than it merits.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoskepticism does that, not cynicism. They're not the same thing.
- thagerty 4y agoha
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoFor those who are looking for general info on nuclear fusion tech, the real engineering youtube recently put out a nice explainer video on how its done and what the various constraints are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzK0ydOF0oU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzK0ydOF0oU
- jlbbellefeuille 4y agoSounds like propaganda in response to the Chinese buying oil from Saudi Arabia in Yuan. The timing is too convenient.