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This 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, s

This 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Follow the money? It is the current administration that holds the purse strings.
  - nutate 4y ago
    As 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 ago
  Because 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
What a cynical response to a genuine scientific advance. Getting net power from fusion is an incredibly difficult task, and scientific breakeven (and ignition, i.e. where the fusion energy contributes to heating further fusion reactions) is the first step, and this hasn’t been done before. Why not celebrate that? Why such cynicism? We are developing literally a new way of making nuclear fire, a method which previously required an atomic bomb to produce. The first small kindled flame is definitely a triumph, even if we haven’t yet built a power plant for it.
- nutate 4y ago
  The concern over startup energy is like saying we can't have internal combustion engines until the engine can start itself with gasoline. Turns out we've gotten along fine starting cars with electricity for about 100 years, including a long while where we had to hand crank them ourselves. Surplus is just a matter of runtime once you're getting more than you put in to maintain it.
  - scythe 4y ago
    In this case, it's not clear how the analogy could apply, because you can't realistically deliver more fuel to the "reactor" while it's "running". An ultrafast laser pulse hits a target and it undergoes fusion for a few nanoseconds, maybe less, generating a huge explosion. You can't operate a fuel injector on that timeframe. So you need a big gain in terms of efficiency. You can hopefully make a bigger fuel pellet, but that kind of scaling hasn't been demonstrated and isn't guaranteed, because it begins to disperse as soon as fusion initiates in this inertial confinement scheme. So "just" a matter of runtime is harder than it might seem at first. I'm curious if you could power boats like this, though. It might not be economical for electricity. But the power-to-weight ratio is probably pretty good.
    - noobermin 4y ago
      You do not need a continuous stream injecting at every nano second...you can operate much slower than that. If you watched the stream, they said a few hertz is enough. A milisecond is an eternity compared to a nanosecond, you remove the neutrons away from the interaction site well before the next start of the rep-rate when you inject the next pellet / holhraum. You just need to have something to capture the neutrons and convert that into heat to boil water, which will accumulate over various repetitions of course (water boils much slower than a GHz), and that thing need not be where the pellets are blasted. That said, I'd need to think about it the design, I just don't think it's impossible.
bilbo0s 4y ago
Sorry, but if I can get a politician to do the right thing for the wrong reason then score one for me. Political hoopla in exchange for further research into fusion? (Especially now that ignition has been achieved?) I'll make that trade every time. Bonus points if they want to trumpet the heroic effort in the schools to get more kids interested in the science? This nation has to get there first. If that causes liberals and conservatives to snipe at each other and compete to advance the frontier then that's nothing but a win for the US. I hope conservatives are mad. I want you to be butthurt. You're complaining like I care about your cause. I don't. Neither do I care about the liberal cause. I only care about how I can manipulate the both of you and your fellow political fuzzy wuzzies to the benefit of this republic using your pseudo-religious polito-babble.
noobermin 4y ago
I have to wonder if you are an investor in one of the private companies trying to do fusion, because NIF beat all of them. Just a note, no one (really, no one) is doing ICF outside of national labs because no one has the resources to fund ICF other than governments. If you're wondering why your fusion friends aren't excited about this, it's because now the pendulum will swing and people will abandon MCF in droves, because ICF actually achieved ignition whereas MCF hasn't yet. A lot of fools who poured their money into all the trendy start ups are soon to realize they made their bets wrong. Everyone else is playing defense now. [0] I said MCF hasn't "gotten close" but it has, that was a bit harsh. It's just NIF beat them.
- DennisP 4y ago
  They're not as far along as magnetic confinement but there are multiple companies working on laser fusion outside national labs: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.20211020a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102... Broaden to other forms of ICF and you can add First Light Fusion.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
victor106 4y ago
I agree and disagree. I agree about the part of them giving credit to the current administration. While that maybe true to some extent it is not entirely true. I disagree that this is a complete farce. This is a real breakthrough.

knicholes 4y ago

I 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 ago
Follow the money? It is the current administration that holds the purse strings.
- nutate 4y ago
  As 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 ago
Because 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

What a cynical response to a genuine scientific advance. Getting net power from fusion is an incredibly difficult task, and scientific breakeven (and ignition, i.e. where the fusion energy contributes to heating further fusion reactions) is the first step, and this hasn’t been done before. Why not celebrate that? Why such cynicism? We are developing literally a new way of making nuclear fire, a method which previously required an atomic bomb to produce. The first small kindled flame is definitely a triumph, even if we haven’t yet built a power plant for it.

nutate 4y ago
The concern over startup energy is like saying we can't have internal combustion engines until the engine can start itself with gasoline. Turns out we've gotten along fine starting cars with electricity for about 100 years, including a long while where we had to hand crank them ourselves. Surplus is just a matter of runtime once you're getting more than you put in to maintain it.
- scythe 4y ago
  In this case, it's not clear how the analogy could apply, because you can't realistically deliver more fuel to the "reactor" while it's "running". An ultrafast laser pulse hits a target and it undergoes fusion for a few nanoseconds, maybe less, generating a huge explosion. You can't operate a fuel injector on that timeframe. So you need a big gain in terms of efficiency. You can hopefully make a bigger fuel pellet, but that kind of scaling hasn't been demonstrated and isn't guaranteed, because it begins to disperse as soon as fusion initiates in this inertial confinement scheme. So "just" a matter of runtime is harder than it might seem at first. I'm curious if you could power boats like this, though. It might not be economical for electricity. But the power-to-weight ratio is probably pretty good.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    You do not need a continuous stream injecting at every nano second...you can operate much slower than that. If you watched the stream, they said a few hertz is enough. A milisecond is an eternity compared to a nanosecond, you remove the neutrons away from the interaction site well before the next start of the rep-rate when you inject the next pellet / holhraum. You just need to have something to capture the neutrons and convert that into heat to boil water, which will accumulate over various repetitions of course (water boils much slower than a GHz), and that thing need not be where the pellets are blasted. That said, I'd need to think about it the design, I just don't think it's impossible.

bilbo0s 4y ago

Sorry, but if I can get a politician to do the right thing for the wrong reason then score one for me. Political hoopla in exchange for further research into fusion? (Especially now that ignition has been achieved?) I'll make that trade every time. Bonus points if they want to trumpet the heroic effort in the schools to get more kids interested in the science? This nation has to get there first. If that causes liberals and conservatives to snipe at each other and compete to advance the frontier then that's nothing but a win for the US. I hope conservatives are mad. I want you to be butthurt. You're complaining like I care about your cause. I don't. Neither do I care about the liberal cause. I only care about how I can manipulate the both of you and your fellow political fuzzy wuzzies to the benefit of this republic using your pseudo-religious polito-babble.

noobermin 4y ago

I have to wonder if you are an investor in one of the private companies trying to do fusion, because NIF beat all of them. Just a note, no one (really, no one) is doing ICF outside of national labs because no one has the resources to fund ICF other than governments. If you're wondering why your fusion friends aren't excited about this, it's because now the pendulum will swing and people will abandon MCF in droves, because ICF actually achieved ignition whereas MCF hasn't yet. A lot of fools who poured their money into all the trendy start ups are soon to realize they made their bets wrong. Everyone else is playing defense now. [0] I said MCF hasn't "gotten close" but it has, that was a bit harsh. It's just NIF beat them.

DennisP 4y ago
They're not as far along as magnetic confinement but there are multiple companies working on laser fusion outside national labs: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.20211020a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102... Broaden to other forms of ICF and you can add First Light Fusion.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

victor106 4y ago

I agree and disagree. I agree about the part of them giving credit to the current administration. While that maybe true to some extent it is not entirely true. I disagree that this is a complete farce. This is a real breakthrough.