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> 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, dem
by jkelleyrtp 4y ago
> 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)
Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05.
With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.
The jumps to get here included
- 40% with the new targets
- 60% with magnetic confinement
- 35% with crycooling of the target
The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.
> 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.”
It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.
- pfdietz 4y agoThe Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000, not because of energy breakeven, but to produce enough energy that the shot is financially positive. The amount of fusion energy produced in this shot is worth a penny or two. (And even then, it's dubious a laser fusion scheme will be competitive with other energy sources.)
- echelon 4y agoIt will get there. It's just a matter of time and resources. The destination will be a milestone for humanity, so we should not give up.
- pfdietz 4y agoWhy should I agree with this article of faith? The obstacles appear quite grave to me. Moreover, even reaching that Q doesn't mean we're there. That's a necessary, not sufficient, condition. A large, complex machine that explodes the equivalent of 500 lb. bombs to generate heat to drive a turbine sounds like an engineering nightmare.
- azinman2 4y agoBecause sustainable positive energy out has never been achieved before in 60 years of research. This is gigantic. It’s potential to decarbonize the world is massive, and now it became a whole lot less theoretical. It’s an incredible milestone, not a solved problem.
- pfdietz 4y agoThat's a circular argument. It's big because the people doing it call it big. Why should I, an outsider, care about their internal goals, their egoes, or their status in their field? What does it do or imply for me?
- azinman2 4y agoTo achieve fusion for power production, you need more output than input. For 60+ years this hasn’t been achieved in a replicated fashion. Now it has, and it’s 50% more power rather than 0.1% more power as was sometimes shown for 2 nanoseconds before. So now we know fusion for power is possible. If it can be scaled successfully (now likely not an if anymore, but a function of time), then we have the ability to have clean and safe energy 24/7. That would help mitigate the worst of climate change, and if cheap, turbocharge the entire economy. What’s the circle or not big milestone here?
- pfdietz 4y agoI'm asking why this somewhat arbitrary line being crossed is something I should care about. It doesn't imply fusion will reach a state of practical application. Why is this more exciting that achieving a ratio of .1, or .5, or 2, or 10? It seems entirely arbirary to me, and smells of an argument that somehow this has made the end goal significantly more attainable.
- azinman2 4y agoBecause until now contained ignition has never produced anything meaningful. We've had failed experiment after failed experiment. Now we finally have an experiment with a meaningful more amount of energy out than in. Is this the right approach? Who knows. There are many fusion designs in the works, and those may ultimately be the right call. Or some yet-to-be-created design. That's even probable. The NIF is for simulating nuclear weapons, not creating energy. None of that takes away from this breakthrough - we've never had meaningfully more output than input on a repeatable basis. It's proof that contained fusion for energy isn't just hypothetical, which will also mean funding & interest will generally increase from this point on. I think you're setting too high a bar. It's like saying no milestone should be celebrated until we have a working metropolitan-size plant running that's cheaper than anything else. Punch cards in the 1950s are insignificant compared to modern SSDs, yet they were an important step even though we don't use anything like it now. Breakthroughs are breakthroughs.
- pelorat 4y agoIt will get there, but it won't be from NIF or via any technology developed for this experiment. What they are doing is not viable for a rector, won't ever be viable for a reactor, and won't even be considered a starting point for any future rector. It's a fusion plasma research experiment. It's not a program that is being run with the goal of creating a usable fusion energy power plant.
- hackernewds 4y agoOffset the financial viability with the cost of freedom from energy reliance and the need (more like craving) for military interventions
- pfdietz 4y agoThat would be a valid argument if the only alternative to fusion was petroleum.
- orthecreedence 4y agoI'm confused by this. Does the US have the productive forces and resources to replace petrolium with solar panels (and the required energy storage)? Does it have the nuclear fuel to replace petrolium with fission reactors? What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it does not rely on others for?
- pfdietz 4y agoWhat scheme do you imagine that fusion could be used to replace petroleum that would not also work when powered by solar? Production of synfuels using hydrogen, for example, would also deal with solar's intermittency, leaving the energy sources to compete on the basis of levelized cost. The levelized cost of solar has become quite low, and it's very difficult to see how any fusion scheme, and DT fusion in particular, will ever compete.
- orthecreedence 4y agoI specifically asked about the production of solar panels. Are you assuming that we already have all the panels we need to replace petrolium sitting in a warehouse? What good is solar in an energy independence plan if we can't build our own panels?
- pfdietz 4y agoWhat? Production of solar panels is just a matter of building and running more factories. There's no significant limit to this.
- floxy 4y ago>The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000 Why wouldn't a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest on capital costs? Other?
- pfdietz 4y agoCapital cost, cost of individual targets.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoInertial confinement fusion requires fairly expensive targets to collapse. To make it economically viable they have to produce a lot more energy per target destroyed.
- londons_explore 4y ago> fairly expensive targets The targets are only expensive because they aren't produced at scale yet. They are the exact kind of thing a machine could churn millions of per day out, and then use them at the same rate. Even if the targets were made of expensive materials (eg. platinum), most of that platinum could later be recovered from the reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very expensive.
- hutzlibu 4y ago"most of that platinum could later be recovered from the reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very expensive. " And recovering comes for free? Every step costs energy (or money). There is no working design yet. It is waay too early to make any predictions about how scaling could reduce costs. Scaling can even increase costs, if it depletes limited resources like tritium.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago> The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000 Is there any calculation to this? What’s the cost of shot? Is there any limetime limit of the laser?
- VLM 4y agoIts worth pointing out that per unit energy a lot of money is made making economically unviable cargo ship power, submarine and other military naval power, space ship power sources, diesel-electric locomotives ... True if you want to replace base load of a civilization size network it needs to be economically viable, but we generate "a lot" of power at higher than market minima. Ironically, "good batteries" are the natural enemy of fusion research. One fun thing about laser fusion is it theoretically can scale down very low and has a trivial "off" switch making it a good resource for engineering tokamak reactor materials or sensors or similar tasks. The inner lining of a production fusion reactor is hard to make, so a laser facility would be ideal for research. Which is why we have one...
- pfdietz 4y agoDT fusion reactors would be terrible for mobile applications, since there are so much larger than fission reactors of the same capacity. In space or mass constrained applications they would be ruinously inferior to fission.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoQ is irrelevant, you need throughput. If your Q is one million, but you are processing one tiny capsule per second, you are producing too little money to pay for the facility. If you can process a tanker worth of hydrogen per second, Q can be just above break even and you will still make money.
- lkbm 4y agoIrrelevant? Seems like Q is one of two factors in that calculation. If the throughput is tiny, you're useless, but if your Q is too small, the same is true. The higher the Q, the lower throughput needed for feasibility.
- bmmayer1 4y agoThis is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?
- ceejayoz 4y agoYou're using X energy to release Y energy from the fuel (the pellet, containing deuterium and tritium). It was there already, just not in a usable form.
- simiones 4y agoThe energy is "released" from the binding energy of the nuclei. It's similar to how throwing a bottle of nitroglycerine can generate a huge explosion, even though you use a tiny amount of energy to throw it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jperras 4y agoEnergy is released when two atomic nuclei combine to form a larger atomic nuclei. There's a threshold of energy required to attain this fusion reaction (otherwise there would be no light nuclei in the universe), and once the nuclei combine there's energy that is released, similar to how some chemical reactions can be exothermic in nature.
- tekla 4y agoYou have a piece of wood. You ignite it with a match. This causes a self sustaining reaction in the form of fire that releases far more energy than the match could ever create. This is effectively what is happening with any energy generator.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karpierz 4y agoYou take a lighter and light gasoline on fire, using X energy. Then once the gasoline catches on fire, it'll burn on its own, releasing Y energy. Same principle, different means.
- tgflynn 4y agoI wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones. I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may encounter national security related obstacles. Obviously a pure fusion bomb would be a game changer for nuclear (non-)proliferation.
- spullara 4y agoI mean almost all of the power in a nuclear bomb comes from fusion. The fission part of it is just like the detonator for the real explosion.
- phasetransition 4y agoAlmost all nuclear weapons rely heavily on fission of the tamper for yield. Suggest "Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design" from the Journal of Cold War studies to read about a predominantly fusion device family.
- AlanSE 4y agoThis seems to say to me that D-T reactions produce neutrons, and that the kinetic energy of the neutrons is smaller than what you get by hitting U with that neutron. You already have the energy from the neutron (which will land somewhere in the system eventually), and you might as well get a multiplier by putting a blanket of U-238 in front of it. That could be carbon-copied to a fusion power plant, and indeed, there are many proposals of hybrid fusion-fission plants in the literature that only require Q values marginally greater than 1. But if you go that route, you have radiation just like a fission plant, and one starts to question why you don't just build a fission plant (indeed, why don't we?). My personal pet theory of the future is that, one day, we'll progress so far in fusion research that we get economic energy. But at the same time, the line blurs between both fission and weapons technology, so people are unhappy with the result. This doesn't feel particularly contrarian but no one ever seems to bring it up.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoThis tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required: https://twitter.com/latzenpratz/status/1602686252486217728 https://twitter.com/latzenpratz/status/1602686252486217728 > "had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5 megajoules out, that's still far less than the energy they originally needed for the lasers," says Tony Roulstone of the University of Cambridge. But it's good to finally see progress. Very few technologies can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor could.
- Robotbeat 4y agoThat’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.
- BeetleB 4y agoCan solid state lasers produce the high energy needed here?
- Robotbeat 4y agoYes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
- px43 4y agoI'm not really seeing any convincing numbers there. Mercury lasers seem to only be 10% efficient. I get that this is better than the lasers that were just used at NIF, but that still seems pretty far from useful.
- Robotbeat 4y agoIt’s useful enough to produce significant net energy if they continue with the gain scaling that ignition allows.
- hackernewds 4y agoThe funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
- azinman2 4y agoIs the bottleneck for fusion money though?
- rowanG077 4y agomoney is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYou might be right — we threw enough money and put humans on the Moon. The Manhattan Project was well funded and produced results as well.
- ErrantX 4y agoThey also had a strong ideological element too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dmix 4y agoThe talent + purpose (which drew the talent) was what defined Manhattan. The money came easy when all of the greatest minds in the country were pointing a giant flashing light in one obvious direction. This is big news but fusion will largely be a product of the people it attracts. The people can do the job attracting money and other talent if it's justified. I've seen the Canadian gov try to throw money at trying to build a local tech scene and it all went to hucksters, old school finance suits with megacorp resumes, and administrators. While all the tech talent just kept going to SF where the capital was going into high risk ventures... not expensive buildings, events, 'entrepreneur/small business programs', and propping up old school D-round investors. Money is easily wasted even when the pursuit sounds noble and valuable on the surface.
- rsync 4y ago"Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05." What is the difference between todays announcement and yesterdays ? I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but apparently this news is different than yesterday ?
- highwaylights 4y agoSpeculation. People believed that X:Y was 2.2:2.0, but it's now 3.15:2.05. The 10% EROI apparently wasn't impressive enough, it's now 54% EROI on paper (assuming less because of capture inefficiencies). I'm no expert, but theoretically my understanding is that this ratio should scale along this same pattern for higher values of Y.
- zbobet2012 4y agoThe X:Y ratio should increase for high values of Y in ICF. See https://suli.pppl.gov/2019/course/SULI2019_IntroICF_TMa_20190614_compressed.pdf https://suli.pppl.gov/2019/course/SULI2019_IntroICF_TMa_2019...
- adrianmonk 4y agoThe official announcement (with the real info) was this morning. Before that, the only official word was that an announcement was coming, and all the info was unofficial leaks and rumors.
- yk 4y agoYesterdays news was that this result was leaked to the FT with apparently preliminary numbers. And today there was a press conference that had somewhat better looking numbers.
- makestuff 4y ago> It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small. Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.
- p_j_w 4y agoThis is already used for nuclear weapons research, which is why it's under Dept. of Energy.
- davrosthedalek 4y agoNot really. I mean, yes, nuclear weapons are a thing, but Dept. of Energy supports many many directions not related to nuclear weapons. Physics research is mostly funded by DOE Office of Science or the National Science Foundation.
- saboot 4y agoIt's an explicit goal of the NIF to better understand the physics of fusion for weapons research. Not the main one but it's pretty important!
- davrosthedalek 4y agoMy point was: NIF would be funded via DOE whether or not it's relevant for weapon research. Sorry for not have been clearer.
- saboot 4y agoIf it was already decided to be funded, yes it would have been under DoE. Though I believe the weapons aspect had a very major contribution in deciding for it to be funded at all. It was proposed shortly after the nuclear testing ban and has been a big part in fulfilling that area. I'm not trying to correct you, but adding context for the weapons aspect.
- moffkalast 4y ago> demonstrating the scaling laws at work One would think that one look at the sky would be enough to say that "hey this fusion thing scales pretty well".
- IgorPartola 4y agoI keep getting lost in the numbers here. What was the net gain/loss for the entire system? Without the “lasers are 1% efficient at 20% energy loss with 40% energy transfer loss” and all that.
- nine_k 4y agoAFAICT: There's a large net gain compared to the energy emitted by the lasers. There is still a considerable loss compared to the energy consumed by the lasers. While at it: I don't think the NIF approach will ever be applicable to commercial power generation on Earth. But I hope it will be one day applicable to a fusion-based rocket engine.
- jackmott 4y ago
- joosters 4y agoThey needed roughly 500MJ of energy to power the lasers and produce the 2.5MJ of energy, so the net loss was... about 500MJ.
- zbobet2012 4y agoThe net gain of the entire system at NIF doesn't matter, because the system at NIF was never designed to make a net gain. People are estimating how this result moves the equation for an overall system that is designed for power production. Most numbers I have seen still leave a theoretically optimal power plant producing around a 30% loss in power with this number.
- zardo 4y agoThe targets are really the secret sauce right? If there were a civil ICF for power program, would NIF designs and data even be available to help, or is it all classified?
- jkelleyrtp 4y agoThere are pictures of CAD and experimental setups for the targets. They’re also pretty open with the setup numbers, so in theory, you could make your own NIF setup and try to get their target designs working. From what I understand, a lot of the work from the past years has been trying to piece together geometries, pulse timing, stability, and quality of targets.
- nabla9 4y ago3.15 Mj = 0.875 kWh the unsolved issue with laser fusion (ICF) as an energy source is the fast degradation of high powered lasers. High powered beam degrades optics on it's path and those things are expensive. ITER has similar problem with superconducting magnets.
- w0mbat 4y agoTheir total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don't start celebrating yet. Source: New York Times.
- cheriot 4y agoI think the "With modern lasers" part is addressing that.
- poopbutt6 4y agoI agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue celebrations in general.
- postingawayonhn 4y agoAs I understand it that's largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised. Building a new facility from scratch would result in a much lower power consumption from the grid.
- rtpg 4y agogiven how long it takes to build these places, I feel like the number of iteration cycles is an important metric, especially when other options are not standing still. I do understand that with more focus things can happen faster but you can really only pour so much concrete per day. Hopeful that we can figure out "leaner" ways to get this done. I would love to see progress on this stuff, just don't like the idea of betting on successive megaprojects in the age of "a website is hard".
- prpl 4y agoIteration is often overlapping. Day 2 of operations is usually planning the next generation (for a given project) Adding more funding will probably see more parallel projects as well, especially at major institutions
- hackbinary 4y ago
- nothis 4y agoNaive question: Once they get out more than they spend, can they just loop the generated energy back in and keep increasing this exponentially?