10 ms·

Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in

Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization. It's fusion Manhattan project time.

rllearneratwork 4y ago
I would love to see "fusion Manhattan project", this planet is well overdue for new gigantic R&D projects such as Manhattan and Apollo.
- Victerius 4y ago
  Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?
  - chasd00 4y ago
    > Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad
    - rllearneratwork 4y ago
      yeah. But some are apparently working at Livermore Nat. Lab still. Also, I feel like there is a bunch at SpaceX, Tesla, NASA, DeepMind and OpenAI
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        Yeah, I think we have a lot of sleeper geniuses out there I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - euix 4y ago
      Hear hear!
    - phtrivier 4y ago
      They can't exist any more for structural reason. This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker. I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation. It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
      - antonfire 4y ago
        > It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads". "The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
        chrisbaker98 4y ago
        Doesn't mean it's wrong.
        fastball 4y ago
        It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today. People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
        phtrivier 4y ago
        > If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario. Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ? More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones... (Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?) Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.
    - adventured 4y ago
      > they're working on getting you to click on an ad They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives. No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al. They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map. They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink. They're working on fusion. And so on and so forth. Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
      - antipotoad 4y ago
        Thank you for this, sincerely.
      - whiplash451 4y ago
        Wow. That was long overdue. Thank you!
      - lifeformed 4y ago
        A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
        illirik 4y ago
  - rllearneratwork 4y ago
    off-topic, but related. Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician" is an excellent and very inspiring book.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Hiding behind the names of institutions that got smart enough to not give the peons fame or recognition.
  - StevenNunez 4y ago
    Elon Musk ::ducks::
    - vzcx 4y ago
      lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
      - Mistletoe 4y ago
        He's actually the complete opposite based on reports of what it is like to work with him at SpaceX and Tesla in recent years. Employees describe having to avoid him so he doesn't meddle in the projects and screw them up. Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.
simiones 4y ago
That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs. I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
- jerf 4y ago
  Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
  - exmadscientist 4y ago
    > None of this research is necessary for bombs. And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google. > All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner. Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This sort of work is not easy to do well.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. You're both half-right. The NIF is the replacement for nuclear tests. It's necessary to maintain the arsenal in a working fashion, as the warheads degrade over time and have to be replaced with new ones. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6559214 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=655921... The NIF is not for more powerful nuclear weapons, as that's entirely unnecessary. If anything, most interest these days is in less powerful weapons for potential battlefield use.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium. It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them. Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima because they were fairly sure it was going to work and wouldn't have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on the timelines involved. Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki. I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.
jpeter 4y ago
Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  Imagine if we've spent 10% of the current military budget ($600B+) on renewables & fusion. We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.
  - lossolo 4y ago
    > We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources. You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
    - DesiLurker 4y ago
      okay but oil is a fundamental input into everything hence a much bigger threat than say TSMC's nextgen fab. everybody understands that with some effort those outputs of a strong economy can be recreated but not inputs. Arguably lithium or water may become that but we are currently far from it. Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick. people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
      - lossolo 4y ago
        > Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick. Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again. > but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well. The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you. > plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.
dleslie 4y ago
The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?! Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
- brianyu8 4y ago
  Assuming you have experience in software, then https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d659855-5fe3-49dd-a1c7-e75f07f64bb9_mid-senior-level_full-time_livermore https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Aren't they required to post salary ranges by some Californian law?
    - donquixote25 4y ago
      Law goes into effect next year.
    - cheriot 4y ago
      Is it enforceable on the Feds?
    - emmp 4y ago
      These are federal jobs so all of the pay bands are public knowledge.
      - dplavery92 4y ago
        This is not quite correct. LLNL is a Federally Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) which is owned, as a facility, by the government, but managed and staffed by a non-profit contracting organization called Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) under a contract funded by DOE/NNSA. The board of LLNS is made up of representatives from universities (California + TAMU), other scientific non-profits (Battelle Memorial Institute), and private nuclear ventures (e.g. Bechtel.) LLNS pays, with very few exceptions, staff salaries at LLNL, and they are not beholden to the government civilian pay schedule. https://www.llnl.gov/about/management-sponsors https://www.llnl.gov/about/management-sponsors
tootie 4y ago
There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway. No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all, but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-fusion-mit-reactor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-f...
opportune 4y ago
100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization
- markasoftware 4y ago
  Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc. Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.
  - opportune 4y ago
    I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      $600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
sbaiddn 4y ago
TL/DR Lasers are pretty inefficient. How much energy did it take to make 2.05 MJ of lased light? Does this breakthrough have a reasonable path to to make more electrical energy than it puts in?

rllearneratwork 4y ago

I would love to see "fusion Manhattan project", this planet is well overdue for new gigantic R&D projects such as Manhattan and Apollo.

Victerius 4y ago
Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?
- chasd00 4y ago
  > Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad
  - rllearneratwork 4y ago
    yeah. But some are apparently working at Livermore Nat. Lab still. Also, I feel like there is a bunch at SpaceX, Tesla, NASA, DeepMind and OpenAI
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      Yeah, I think we have a lot of sleeper geniuses out there I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - euix 4y ago
    Hear hear!
  - phtrivier 4y ago
    They can't exist any more for structural reason. This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker. I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation. It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
    - antonfire 4y ago
      > It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads". "The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
      - chrisbaker98 4y ago
        Doesn't mean it's wrong.
        fastball 4y ago
        It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today. People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
        phtrivier 4y ago
        > If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario. Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ? More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones... (Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?) Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.
  - adventured 4y ago
    > they're working on getting you to click on an ad They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives. No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al. They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map. They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink. They're working on fusion. And so on and so forth. Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
    - antipotoad 4y ago
      Thank you for this, sincerely.
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      Wow. That was long overdue. Thank you!
    - lifeformed 4y ago
      A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
      - illirik 4y ago
- rllearneratwork 4y ago
  off-topic, but related. Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician" is an excellent and very inspiring book.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Hiding behind the names of institutions that got smart enough to not give the peons fame or recognition.
- StevenNunez 4y ago
  Elon Musk ::ducks::
  - vzcx 4y ago
    lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
    - Mistletoe 4y ago
      He's actually the complete opposite based on reports of what it is like to work with him at SpaceX and Tesla in recent years. Employees describe having to avoid him so he doesn't meddle in the projects and screw them up. Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.

simiones 4y ago

That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs. I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.

ceejayoz 4y ago
Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
jerf 4y ago
Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  > None of this research is necessary for bombs. And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google. > All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner. Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This sort of work is not easy to do well.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. You're both half-right. The NIF is the replacement for nuclear tests. It's necessary to maintain the arsenal in a working fashion, as the warheads degrade over time and have to be replaced with new ones. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6559214 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=655921... The NIF is not for more powerful nuclear weapons, as that's entirely unnecessary. If anything, most interest these days is in less powerful weapons for potential battlefield use.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium. It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them. Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.

aidenn0 4y ago
A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima because they were fairly sure it was going to work and wouldn't have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on the timelines involved. Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki. I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.

jpeter 4y ago

Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion

DesiLurker 4y ago
Imagine if we've spent 10% of the current military budget ($600B+) on renewables & fusion. We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.
- lossolo 4y ago
  > We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources. You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    okay but oil is a fundamental input into everything hence a much bigger threat than say TSMC's nextgen fab. everybody understands that with some effort those outputs of a strong economy can be recreated but not inputs. Arguably lithium or water may become that but we are currently far from it. Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick. people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
    - lossolo 4y ago
      > Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick. Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again. > but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well. The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you. > plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.

dleslie 4y ago

The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?! Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.

brianyu8 4y ago
Assuming you have experience in software, then https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d659855-5fe3-49dd-a1c7-e75f07f64bb9_mid-senior-level_full-time_livermore https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Aren't they required to post salary ranges by some Californian law?
  - donquixote25 4y ago
    Law goes into effect next year.
  - cheriot 4y ago
    Is it enforceable on the Feds?
  - emmp 4y ago
    These are federal jobs so all of the pay bands are public knowledge.
    - dplavery92 4y ago
      This is not quite correct. LLNL is a Federally Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) which is owned, as a facility, by the government, but managed and staffed by a non-profit contracting organization called Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) under a contract funded by DOE/NNSA. The board of LLNS is made up of representatives from universities (California + TAMU), other scientific non-profits (Battelle Memorial Institute), and private nuclear ventures (e.g. Bechtel.) LLNS pays, with very few exceptions, staff salaries at LLNL, and they are not beholden to the government civilian pay schedule. https://www.llnl.gov/about/management-sponsors https://www.llnl.gov/about/management-sponsors

tootie 4y ago

There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway. No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all, but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-fusion-mit-reactor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-f...

opportune 4y ago

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

markasoftware 4y ago
Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc. Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.
- opportune 4y ago
  I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    $600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).

sbaiddn 4y ago

TL/DR Lasers are pretty inefficient. How much energy did it take to make 2.05 MJ of lased light? Does this breakthrough have a reasonable path to to make more electrical energy than it puts in?