14 ms·
Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]
- boringg 4y agoIm excited to hear the news but the amount of hype already with the scoop out of the bag feels over the top.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoCould someone who understands the science explain how excited I, as someone passionate about clean energy, should be about this, or how big a grain of salt I should take it with?
- dreamcompiler 4y agoIt's yet another "over unity" announcement. The fact that it comes from NIF at LLNL makes it a bit more credible that fusion actually occurred than some of the profit-motivated announcements of late. However it will still take decades (if ever) to turn this into a working electric power system.
- chrsw 4y agoI feel like most of these "breakthrough" announcements are just PR for reasearchers, startups and the energy industry in general. I get it, they need the money. Everyone needs money. But they're going about it in a clickbait-y way: appealing to anxiety over losing our comfortable way of living. Nobody wants to hear about deep sacrifices to recover from reckless human development over the last few hundred years. Instead, people are more interested in hearing about a quick fix that isn't going to require them to lift a finger, however unlikely it will be realized.
- MPSimmons 4y agoI didn't think _fusion_ was the problem, but rather fusion that generated energy in excess of what was put into the system?
- shadowgovt 4y agoCorrect. The two hard problems are sustaining a reaction over a period of time and, given that first constraint, having that reaction generate more collectible energy than is being used to sustain it. We solved the problem of using fusion to create vast amounts of energy in a short amount of time half a century ago, but the primary application for that approach is excavation (and all ways that word can be applied euphemistically), not energy production.
- thereddaikon 4y agoIndeed, you can build a fusor in your garage that fuses quite happily. The hard part is making a practical power generation system from this. Net energy is very hard.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoYes. I should have said "fusion ignition actually occurred" rather than merely "fusion." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition
- ludsan 4y ago> It's yet another "over unity" announcement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there haven't been "over unity" announcements before this -- aside from bombs. The Q of 1.5 here is the story. All Qs before have been under 1.
- whimsicalism 4y agoYou're right up to a delta of maybe some private companies claiming something which was false.
- AlanSE 4y agoHuh, ok. After some quick Googling, Wikipedia paints JET has having tried, and failed, to reach Q=1, only getting 0.67, which was way back in 1997. It's very strange to read that we get Q=0.67 in 1997 in a tokomak, and then Q=1.5 in 2022 with a totally different laser inertial confinement design. That... seems to be the written history. I know Iter would be surpassing the record, but the timelines are long to the point that one loses hope in the project.
- jacquesm 4y agoIt's a breakthrough at a fundamental level, but at the higher level of looking at the whole fusion installation as a blackbox with a grid hookup it is still nowhere near a net energy producer. Rather, the amount of energy required to sustain fusion just dropped dramatically, so we're closer but we are still quite far from actually making this useful. Still, an impressive step. To me the major question is if once fusion is viable (assuming we get there) if it can compete on a cost basis with renewables (yes, base load etc).
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe energy budget alone would naively suggest to me that it can't. Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away? Just throw down more collectors, improve storage, and call it a day.
- wpietri 4y agoAh, the handwavey "just". It has so many uses, here including the exact opposite. "Just improve this breakthrough a bit and commercialize it and we can bypass all the problems with conventional solar."
- RajT88 4y agoSOOOO handwavey. "Improve Storage" is a thing they've been working on longer than fusion energy. It's proven to be similarly intractable, and prone to bad science reporting ("10-15 years away").
- shadowgovt 4y agoOne advantage it has as a goal over fusion-as-energy-production is that gains in storage can be applied to all electrical sources. More meat on those bones for a sustainable future, to my money.
- coldpie 4y agoI'd suggest waiting 4~24 hours (NOT the deluge of breathless 30 minute write-ups that will be coming) for some popular science news outlets to write about it and provide context. Ars Technica is my outlet of choice, but I'd welcome other suggestions.
- Robotbeat 4y agoIt’s a big deal because it demonstrates scientific break even for the first time and confirms that the process of achieving ignition is repeatable. Ignition is important because it’s how the process can be scaled in a chain reaction where the heat of the reaction sustains the reaction, not just laser energy alone. To get useful electricity, you usually need an energy gain of 25-50. NIF is a scientific demonstration facility, not in any way designed to be a power plant, nor should it be. it’s wasteful to build a steam turbine and boiler and efficient lasers when you haven’t even demonstrated ignition yet. Now that they have ignition, they can start thinking about the power plant a little bit more. But they still need to increase the gain to like 25-50 by leveraging ignition. Article on an actual power plant demo follow on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
- Balgair 4y agoYou should be very excited about this. Fusion promises the energy density of fission (traditional nuclear power) with very-little/none of nuclear waste and dirty bomb problems. Compared to oil/coal, fusion is free and clean energy. Compared to traditional nuclear, fusion is ~99.99% free and clean energy. This is the first little ember of that promise of fusion power. It's going to take a lot more research and time, but they have proved that it is possible. It's all 'just' engineering from here. Think 1-4 decades. It's not a working plant by any means. But if this continues apace, your children are likely to spend most of their lives in a world with free and clean energy for all the nations of the Earth. Energy so abundant and clean that your children will be able to reverse climate change by powering machines to filter out all the excess CO2, for starters. After that, who knows?
- throwaway4aday 4y agoI'm hoping that this is confirmation that inertial confinement is a viable path to fusion and that it will herald a surge in investment in the technology.
- moloch-hai 4y agoIf it does, those collecting and spending such investments will be equally as fraudulent as the current crop of magnetic confinement outfits. There is even a second-level scam, collecting money from the first level to build fraudulent demos. It is all perfectly legal.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoWhat is your reasoning for believing that fusion research will not produce a workable power plant?
- throwaway4aday 4y agoI think my wish has been granted > I’m also proud to announce today that I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough
- osamagirl69 4y agoUpdated link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eke5PawU7rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eke5PawU7rE
- elondaits 4y agoAccording to the NY Times: "The government official, who spoke anonymously to discuss results that are not yet public, said that the fusion experiment at NIF achieved what is known as ignition, where the fusion energy generated equals the laser energy that started the reaction. Ignition is also called energy gain of one." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/science/nuclear-fusion-en...
- O__________O 4y agoRelated Wikipedia on Fusion Ignition: - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition And additional news source: - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthrough-in-nuclear-fusion-could-mean-near-limitless-energy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthr...
- radford-neal 4y ago
- fnordpiglet 4y agoIf they fired everyone who leaks we would have no public officials.
- nonethewiser 4y agoSo be it.
- Tepix 4y agoGovernment officials leaking things is one of their essential functions.
- wpietri 4y agoYou're joking, but I think this is true and often good. The government works for us. The press is there to inform us. An informed citizenry is a vital component for democracy. In my view, government generally shouldn't be keeping secrets.[1] The worse government is at keeping secrets, the happier I am. [1] Yes, reasonable exceptions apply, including ones relating to privacy, national security, and criminal investigations where an element of surprise is needed.
- kieselguhr_kid 4y agoI'm a nonexpert and don't have time to develop expertise, even lay expertise, in this field. What I want to see before I get excited about fusion iss a practical application of the technology. I'd like to see it power something real: a factory, a server farm, or some other energy intensive facility. Hopefully this is an important first step, but this seems like an extraordinarily hard problem. Often, scaling these technologies is the most challenging part of implementing them.
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 4y ago
- wpietri 4y agoMaybe Dang can use ChatGPT to pre-generate some standard low-information replies on every post? It could save a lot of time. I volunteer to help train it to do the "I can build this in two weeks" and "why does company X need so many people" replies.
- NickRandom 4y agoI don't want to be 'that guy' buuuutttt can you turn down the hostility a few notches please? I understand that HN is a multicultural place and that people across the globe express their opinions in different ways however, a quick look through your previous comments before deciding to down-vote or flag made me take a look at your previous comment history before deciding whether to down-vote or flag it. We are all new to HN at some stage which is why I've taken the time to write this in an attempt to be kind, gentle and guiding.
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 4y agolol
- arez 4y agoit's not about powering something powerful, I'm not sure if you're actually a "kid" like your username suggests, but when generating energy we're looking about the input and output of Watts or Megawatts. So how much energy do I have to put in to get to which output. What you do with that energy doesn't matter, it can be a server farm, it can be your grandmas kettle
- jmyeet 4y agoThe positive about this is that it's inertial confinement. The tokamak design as is being built in the massive boondoggle that is ITER is (IMHO) fundamentally flawed. When dealing with a superheated plasma, you fundamentally have the problem of turbulence. So as neutrons escape (and lose energy while they do it) they destroy your container (aka "neutron embrittlement", one of my favorite terms). Add turbulence for something at 100 million degrees and I just don't see how that's viable. Inertial containment essentially wraps the fusing mass in something to absorb the neutrons. Still, even though exceeding the laser energy as direct energy output is significant, we're still nowhere near positive electricity output. There's efficiency loss with lasers, operating costs and degradation with lasers and efficiency loss in converting that energy to electricity. The most obvious way is boiling water and turning a steam turbine. It's tried and true but is also a process with its own efficiency limits. There's a lot of talk of direct energy conversion but this still seems like pie in the sky. For the record, the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines. I personally support non-ITER methods of further research in this area. Hopefully something will come of it. I'm not yet convinced commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic but I'd like to be proven wrong. I still see space-based solar power collection as the most likely future of humanity's power generation.
- baq 4y agoRe solar, also fuel cells?
- danans 4y agoFuel cells store and release energy chemically (analogously to batteries), they do not generate it. So they aren't comparable to methods of electricity generation.
- conradev 4y agoDirect energy conversion is not as pie in the sky as you might think. Several startups are working on aneutronic fusion[1]. This is a great video explaining (and showing) what Helion is up to at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJtGpvE1sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJtGpvE1sQ [1] For those not familiar, aneutronic fusion releases charged particles from which energy can be captured directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Energy_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Energy_captu...
- rogerallen 4y agohttps://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY explains the difference between Qplasma and Qtotal. I hope this presentation will be as forthright.
- Robotbeat 4y agoI think people should just read the Wikipedia article about the proposed successor to NIF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
- baldfat 4y agoIt's a big deal but its decades away. To do this they need to repeatably do it every few seconds. Right now they can do it once per week. BIG CAVIET: The energy to power the laser is greater than the return. The return in energy is just greater than the energy the laser put in. So net loss. We need more efficient lasers and be able to make this repeatable and reliable. We are not closer except theory is being proven.
- RajT88 4y ago> We are not closer except theory is being proven. I think by most definitions that means, "closer". Proof of concept is a huge deal. POC doesn't mean it will be viable, even once they manage to make it net-positive. Let's say they get the lasers to be more efficient - there are other inefficiencies in the system further upstream you have to account for. So, yes, there is a long way to go still, and there's no way to be sure it will be economically viable at the end of it. As an example - look at algae biofuel. That was a working example, not just proof of concept but working at scale - but it couldn't compete on price with petroleum when it was below 4-5 dollars or so. We won't know until we get there. But the promise it holds (easily obtainable fuel, which won't blight the land if the plant fails) is worth the investment.
- johnbellone 4y agoI have been reading these comments like yours for days. I am not picking on you. But the research program isn't being funded to build more efficient lasers. Those already exist. The lasers at the NIF are decades old and haven't been updated because it isn't the point of the research.
- d23 4y agoI'm baffled by the comments on this topic in particular. Do people just spout off in the comments now despite no background in the field? I don't really recall a time in the past where this was so prevalent on HN. I used to be able to trust that some industry expert would be in the comments section fact checking headlines and adding nuance, but now I see far too many contradictions, strange takes, and obvious red flags (see: "BIG CAVIET").
- dgsm98 4y agoCould someone explain to me why this does/does not break the first law of thermodynamics? Is more energy being created from less?
- dgacmu 4y agoBecause mass is being converted to energy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dboreham 4y agoEnergy is released in the fusion reaction just like in an H bomb. The "more energy out then in" thing is about the difficulty of creating a fusion reaction that's not a bomb. It takes a large amount of energy, typically more than you're able to release from the reaction.
- rufusroflpunch 4y agoNo, think of it like burning oil. Imagine it took >1 barrel of oil's worth of energy to burn a barrel of oil. That would be inefficient. So, we're trying to find solutions to trigger that burning with less input energy. They're not creating energy, they're basically releasing energy stored over from the Big Bang. Triggering that release with less input energy than output energy is an engineering problem.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vesinisa 4y agoThis sounded like a very flashy hiring event and a political rally. I turned off when they started advertising job openings - after thanking the President so, so many times and making clear how this was only possible thanks to the funding from the current administration. The findings themself seem like scoring after moving the goalposts. This is still very, very far from even a path towards realistic fusion-based energy production. What a farce.
- knicholes 4y agoI started wondering why the beginning was an advertisement for diversity and inclusion, along with a constant back-patting of the current administration, even though this was a decades-long endeavor spanning both republican and democratic leadership.
- irrational 4y agoFollow the money? It is the current administration that holds the purse strings.
- nutate 4y agoAs someone who graduated into our country investing in air bases, cafeterias, supply chains, bullets, diesel and barracks in 2 occupied countries instead of this, I'd say thanking the president is in order.
- MengerSponge 4y agoBecause the people who worked on it decades ago aren't making daily decisions about their careers any more. Young people are, and it would be really dumb to recruit people to solve the real and hard problems of improving this technology from only like 25% of the population. > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. --Stephen Jay Gould
- Robotbeat 4y ago
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoEven without diving into technical reports, I'm sure that the denominator here is some quantity of energy that's measured after a bunch of tremendously inefficient conversion steps, which, if they were included, would make the ratio much less than unity.
- Robotbeat 4y agoWell yes, because it’s not designed as a power plant but a demonstration device to demonstrate ignition, which can be developed to allow the 25-50 energy gain needed for useful fusion electricity. This is how you WOULD design a demonstration power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
- SiempreViernes 4y agoThe NIF exists mainly to validate nuclear weapon designs by providing input to models, the ICF thing is more a side gig the nuclear weapons side of the DoE runs to attract talent for the real job.
- Robotbeat 4y agoI’m aware, and yeah this was funded in part because underground nuclear weapons testing was stopped. You could also think of it as fusion researchers figuring out how to use military-scientific-complex funding to pursue fusion energy.
- ngvrnd 4y agoIt's not real.
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoto the question when this becomes practical - "five decades"
- choxi 4y agothe answer was (paraphrasing) “not six decades, not five decades. Maybe in a couple decades we’ll have a functioning plant”
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoHmmm... Possible that I have heard incorrectly. I will have to wait for the transcript, as close captioning did not work. edit: You were correct. The "not" before the "five decades" was spoken muted and I missed it. Dr. Budll talking - "... probably decades, uh not six decades, i don't think, i think not five decades, which is what we used to say, i think it is moving into foreground... "
- Kalanos 4y agosomeone pick up the flag for crying out loud
- _justinfunk 4y agoMy perspective on why this is so contentious is because two things are true: 1) This is one more step on a long road to viable fusion power plants. Every step is important and we've been taking steps like this for a long time and will continue for a long time. 2) This step is being cheer-leaded as the step in order to score political points. Since #2 is happening, it is preventing reasonable celebration about #1. just my persepective.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoDon't forget the context where the NIF is foremost a nuclear weapons research facility (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc793622/ https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc793622/) so them cheerleading a small step which is very significant for the nuclear weapons research as a purely civilian achievement is extra grating.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoIf we can learn everything we need to know about nuclear explosions using something that approximates them without having to actually detonate them then this is still a good thing. Nuclear weapons are terrible but advancing the study of nuclear explosions may have many unforeseen uses that we would be worse off without.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago> Nuclear weapons are terrible You hold this view but also that actively performing research and development to support their future use is a price worth paying for maybe getting some unexpected benefit? How dear a price on the means you willing to pay for an entirely hypothetical end?
- throwaway4aday 4y agoIf humanity is ever going to advance beyond grubbing around on the surface of this planet then we are going to have to continue to create and master extremely dangerous things. Nuclear energy is one of those, both fission and fusion. If it's possible, we should also find a way to control gravity. The weapons applications of such a technology would be far beyond anything we are capable of doing with a nuclear bomb. Does this mean we should ban all research into gravity? Even something as innocuous as orbital mechanics can create a weapon much more powerful than a nuclear bomb. Get a small rocket engine and enough fuel out to a big enough asteroid and you could obliterate an entire continent and nearly all life on earth. Should we ban space travel and exploration?
- vfclists 4y agoAnother clean energy boondoggle, which means we will be using more and more carbon in the future. People forget that until recently France managed to generate 75% of electricity from fission energy using 1970s technology. French nuclear activists even managed to shutdown a much improved fission energy reactor when an inquiry had given it clean bill of health. How much cleaner could fission energy be if all the money invested in fusion energy had been invested in fission energy instead? You know where all the drive towards fusion energy comes from - the carbon industry secretly funding activists and channelling resources from the best form of clean energy to one which for the last 70 years has been promising to be available in the next 30 years. More chance of the sky falling on our heads.
- yabones 4y agoYou could say the same about any "new" energy technology though. Solar was a 'bondoggle' and a complete waste of time and money... right up until it wasn't. Fusion is at the point Fission was in the 1940s. It works pretty well in a lab using extremely expensive equipment, makes a net loss of energy, and isn't ready for grid-scale production. But that will change if we continue to invest heavily in the commercialization of the technology. The biggest advantages of fusion energy are its safety and non-proliferation aspects. You can very easily produce Plutonium using a commercial nuclear fission reactor plus some reprocessing facilities. That's not possible with Fusion since it uses non-fissile materials that can't be processed into a weapon. There are very few nations that should be trusted with fissile materials, and therefore very few that should be trusted with fission reactors.
- vfclists 4y agoIf fusion is successful will the countries with the technologies make them freely available to other countries? Take the US for instance. They have provoked Russia into invading Ukraine to keep Ukraine from joining NATO and thus permitting advanced NATO weaponry to be placed on Ukrainian soil, and having succeeded in getting a ban on Russian energy exports to Europe and blowing up the Nordstream gas pipelies, they are charging Europe 4 times as much for LNG while profiting from oil imports from Venezuela whose export to other countries they have sanctioned. Surprisingly Europe is not charging US energy companies for massive windfall profits, but they are ready to do it to theirs. Why should we believe that fusion energy will be different? Fusion energy if it becomes available may be "clean", but will it be cheap and freely available? The countries who can be "trusted" with fission energy are the biggest carbon emitters,so why do you and they believe that they can't be trusted with fission energy so no one else should have it? If they alone switched to fission energy that would be a huge drop in carbon emissions, so what is stopping them if they are truly sincere about carbon emissions?
- larryfreeman 4y agoWow. Can't believe the cynicism expressed in the comments here. The big results do not come right away. But they tend to follow an unexpected result, especially one that involves new or state of the art methods. Bohr's atom was wrong in every conceivable way and yet it is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of all tine. In mathematics, even the slightest advance can be monumental if it involves progress in an area using new techniques. Optimization is a separate problem which depends on a small improvement to unleash the flood gates of research, investment, and let's face it: greed and ambition. This may turn out to be no improvement at all: just an indication that with enough power and energy, we get a slight energy payback. Or, this may be a method that can be greatly improved. We'll see. For me, this is why science, math, and engineering are so exciting!
- oldgradstudent 4y agoPeople distrust science by press conference. If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details. There were quite a few results in the last two decades that were announced by a press conference and turned out to be completely false. And I'm not even taking about the details of this specific result. Press conferences are not
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI think I agree and I share the skepticism for several reasons. Especially lately, we face really high levels of distrusts in most institutions. I can maybe see a reason for this approach in the form of "we don't want to just hand over details of this tech to everyone in the world" ( not that is a very good position, but I can at least understand the rationale ), but that is about it. You can mess with stats and so on ( especially in social fields ), but it may be nigh impossible to present results in energy field that are not replicable and still claim a win. Are we being distracted from something?
- donquixote25 4y agoIf you were familiar with NIF, you would know that they absolutely will publish the details of the experiment just as they published the details of the experiment that achieved ignition in August 2021: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.075001 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
- bilsbie 4y agoIs there a way to add more fuel to these pellets or have the initial ignition ignite other fuel around it?
- agapon 4y agoWright brothers make a first flight and people are like, can your airplane carry one hundred people to the other side of the Atlantic? No? Meh.
- zackmorris 4y agoJust so we have it, General Fusion and maybe others are working on a fusion reactor that uses liquid metal to compress the plasma instead of lasers, which is sort of a fusion Diesel engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion Based on designs from 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_(fusion_experiment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_(fusion_experiment) Based on a water hammer reaching such high compression that fusion occurs, so basically anyone could build it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the Q value, they probably either don't know it or are keeping it obfuscated to keep the funding flowing: https://generalfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/aps-mhd-stability.pdf https://generalfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/aps-mhd... My guess is that turbulence and frictional losses in the metal might prevent getting over unity, but since the goal is to heat the metal to run a turbine, maybe that doesn't matter. Also it sounds like they are trying to manufacture tritium rather than generate electricity. Noise could also be an issue, but it's "easy" enough to put it in a vacuum chamber like this one: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1281.html https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1...
- dang 4y agoCurrent thread on the actual announcement: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377
- mharig 4y agoFor german readers, an old but informative article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ange.19891010104 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ange.1989101...