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Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721
by e1g 4y ago
Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721
My TLDR (from a layman):
* The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even.
* Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to break even end-to-end.
* The scientific equipment requires immense & expensive maintenance.
* Plus the $3B facility around the equipment, that theoretically could deliver just 2.5 MW.
So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
- bombcar 4y agoThe thing that would be surprising is if they discovered something new to do; but this seems like more refinement of what they already know how to do. Continual refinement may finally get us where we need to be, but it's going to take a long time.
- yuuu 4y agotemper
- e1g 4y agoWhat if my expectations are tamper-proof, can you still temper them? Thanks, edited ;)
- carabiner 4y agoProbably 5-10 years if this turns out to be the key unlocking it. If it is, the floodgates will open for funding, public and private, and we'll see a race to build the first reactor. Similar to how the first COVID vaccine was predicted to take 2-3 years and it took 8 months instead because it was a priority.
- ShivShankaran 4y agoIt took only 8 months because covid has been in existence for decades. Covid 19 strain was new and the vaccines had to be adjusted to new strains not created from ground up
- pianoben 4y agoNot so; the mRNA technology used to develop and deliver the vaccine has been in progress for decades. The hardest parts were done before SARS-CoV-2 ever existed, but it's wrong to claim that "the vaccines" needed to be tweaked - they never existed.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoFor people confused about this, there were prior commercial attempts at coronavirus vaccines, with mixed success. They were not RNA vaccines. The COVID-19 vaccines built on that research (regarding what proteins to target, in particular), but the COVID vaccines that were rolled out were completely novel technology.
- dools 4y agoHelion tech seems to be interesting in that they use the electricity directly so avoids the costly conversion via steam/turbines etc.
- DennisP 4y agoAnd right now they're building their seventh reactor, for a net electricity attempt in 2024.
- moloch-hai 4y agoIt's the only one with a ghost of a chance. Still only a ghost, and the 3He supply problem looms.
- pfdietz 4y agoThey'd make their own 3He by also doing DD fusion. It's properly a DD+D3He concept.
- moloch-hai 4y agoI would like to see a demonstration that the synthesis method would exceed consumption. It should be possible with current tech, if at all.
- pfdietz 4y agoWell, they can operate on just DD, so they can start from no 3He and make 3He. This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei per DD fusion, on average. It takes a while for some of those 3He to be produced though, as the tritium has to decay (halflife of 12 years.) https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_DKirtley/1_9p8c7d85 https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_D...
- SilverBirch 4y agoTo be honest, looking at those numbers, that doesn't look 10-20 years away. We'd need Moore's law style improvement in efficiency and to productionize it. So we're really saying 20 years at best for the technology, and then let's look at quickly we can build Nuclear power plants today... uh oh. In the UK for example it has taken 12 years to even agree to build a new Nuclear plant on a site that already has Nuclear plants!.
- billiam 4y agoNo, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a lot of the research money will move to lasers now.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoI mean, you nail it on the head. It's not "congrats on limitless free energy" but more "looks we might still get value in the future if we keep pouring money into this." Positive indicators at milestones are good. Onward.
- zamalek 4y ago> looks we might still get value in the future if we keep pouring money into this. Maybe this could also open up more avenues for money.
- naasking 4y ago> so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing returns applies.
- kelnos 4y agoThe NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of magnitude. > So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always! I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-40, who knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy is actually possible to do with our current understanding and technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get more energy out than put in, at least not without technology that's significantly out of reach.
- floxy 4y agoAnyone have insight into how this new development differs from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal" https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-milestone.html https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...
- DennisP 4y agoBack then they were comparing to the energy actually absorbed by the fusion fuel. This is indirect drive, the laser hits a metal container first and only some of the energy gets to the fuel pellet. This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams. They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.
- leephillips 4y ago> This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams. How do you know? Nothing has been published yet; it’s science through press release. In the past, published papers from NIF have been a real wake-up call after absorbing the misleading hype (the papers are most honest than the folks taking to the reporters).
- serverholic 4y agoI'm getting really sick of the "always 20 years away haha" jab. Look, it's really simple: 1. This is a very hard and expensive problem. 2. Progress IS being made. It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.
- e1g 4y agoI wasn't diminishing the achievement but clarifying its place in the context of how far we are from commercialization. The director of LLNL who announced the breakthrough discovery said she expects we are 3-4 decades away from commercializing it.
- serverholic 4y agoThen you could have just said that instead of adding the “as always”.
- pfdietz 4y agoEven if the lasers were currently 100% efficient, the Q still needs to be increased by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. That's because they're making less than a penny's worth of energy here, and the system cannot be economically feasible with that little energy per expendable target.