6 ms·

“However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s 192 lasers consumed 322

“However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy in the process.” Well that says it all right there and really cuts through all the fluff on this story. Sounds like a nice milestone that has absolutely nothing to do with our ability to get a useful amount of energy back out. We are still at least 2 orders of magnitude away from a power source.

d23 4y ago
Do you have a background in this field?
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I do not. I would say if I did.
  - d23 4y ago
    To be blunt then: your comment does not add to the discussion in a substantive way.
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      And plainly, if we all needed to be nuclear physicists to talk and think about this, there would be no comments and no articles. Your comment also does not advance the conversation.
TheCondor 4y ago
This is closer to pure science. This is in a lab. They aren't even attempting to make a "power source" so much as testing and verifying the theory.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  And that is great! My issue is the way the science is reported in the media making it sound like we are on the cusp on some kind of energy revolution, when we very much are not and don’t even have a line of sight on it yet. But then I suppose public hype will lead to Congress dollars and nothing gets done without those.
  - TheCondor 4y ago
    Seemed like this article in Nature did pretty good. They explicitly said: “I don't want to give you a sense that we're going to plug the NIF into the grid: that is definitely not how this works,” and “Although positive news, this result is still a long way from the actual energy gain required for the production of electricity,” said Tony Roulstone, a nuclear-energy researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, in a statement to the Science Media Centre. Still, “the NIF experiments focused on fusion energy absolutely are valuable on the path to commercial fusion power”, says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. There is a pretty solid disconnect between the public's perception of how science works and happens and how it does. For this to really matter, someone else needs to duplicate the experiment and verify the data. It's a huge win if the hype can lead to that.
    - jboy55 4y ago
      To me this is the most important part of the article, “It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
The next steps in the story are, how easy is it to make this process more efficient? Is there something fundamental that is lessening the efficiency, or is it a matter of needing to buy part X or laser X or variant y to improve efficiency? Most research achievements are wildly inefficient because efficiency is not really their goal, they're looking for proof of concept. Once the concept is proven, you step into a whole different ballgame when efficiency is the goal. (Hopefully, who knows.)
- rini17 4y ago
  There's a reason for optimism as for the lasers' efficiency. But there are many other aspects that were only approached theoretically so far, such as how to get useful energy out of the reactor.
sigmar 4y ago
No one at this lab is saying it is ready for commercial sales. The technical Q&A even featured them saying high energy lasers might not be the best tech for driving the fusion in a commercial setting- https://youtu.be/Eke5PawU7rE?t=5250 https://youtu.be/Eke5PawU7rE?t=5250
dahfizz 4y ago
We already have lasers which are an order of magnitude more efficient than the one the lab was using. This is about a proof of concept, not about being an actual power plant. Also, as I understand it, the whole thing scales up very well. Now that we can "ignite" fusion in the little pellet used for testing, we can scale up to ignite a larger amount of fuel in order to get out much more energy.
carabiner 4y ago
They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we've gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion was impossible, the fact they can said they did it, despite 1980s era technology and a shoestring budget for decades, really says something. ICF is just one fusion technology, and probably not the best one, but fusion in general will probably see a massive budget increase worldwide now that it's been proven it can be done. I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030, assuming funding increases. Once we get them commercialized; coal, wind, solar and other power production will be obsolete for the most part. We can also use fusion heat to separate waste into it's base elements (you can recycle anything!), and help make any process needing a lot of thermal or electrical energy more efficient.
- boppo1 4y ago
  How much easier to build and safer are they than fission plants? Otherwise they will still be politically bottlenecked.
  - ep103 4y ago
    IANAScientist, but I believe I read that fusion requires a steady input of energy to continue the reaction. So much, much safer than fission, which is a chain reaction that can go out of control at any time, fusion, you just turn off the power and it stops. IIRC
simplicio 4y ago
Not useful for commercial energy production, but useful if you want to study self-propagating fusion explosions in a bomb, which is the actual purpose of the facility. NIF is really confusing the issue (I think this is the first pop-sci article Ive seen that even mentions nuclear weapons, and its relegated to one sentence surrounded by discussion of commercial energy). They're (justifiably) excited because after a decade of trying, they've finally managed to fulfill the facilities primary purpose and recreated an important aspect of the conditions inside a thermonuclear bomb. But they're obviously reluctant to foreground the bomb stuff, so instead they hand-wave in the direction of energy production, which doesnt make a lot of sense, and leads to a lot of folks pointing out that the energy needed to get the reaction going is more then just the laser pulse itself, which would make a big difference for commercial production, but doesn't really matter for the experiment theyre trying to perform

d23 4y ago

Do you have a background in this field?

dougmwne 4y ago
I do not. I would say if I did.
- d23 4y ago
  To be blunt then: your comment does not add to the discussion in a substantive way.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    And plainly, if we all needed to be nuclear physicists to talk and think about this, there would be no comments and no articles. Your comment also does not advance the conversation.

TheCondor 4y ago

This is closer to pure science. This is in a lab. They aren't even attempting to make a "power source" so much as testing and verifying the theory.

dougmwne 4y ago
And that is great! My issue is the way the science is reported in the media making it sound like we are on the cusp on some kind of energy revolution, when we very much are not and don’t even have a line of sight on it yet. But then I suppose public hype will lead to Congress dollars and nothing gets done without those.
- TheCondor 4y ago
  Seemed like this article in Nature did pretty good. They explicitly said: “I don't want to give you a sense that we're going to plug the NIF into the grid: that is definitely not how this works,” and “Although positive news, this result is still a long way from the actual energy gain required for the production of electricity,” said Tony Roulstone, a nuclear-energy researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, in a statement to the Science Media Centre. Still, “the NIF experiments focused on fusion energy absolutely are valuable on the path to commercial fusion power”, says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. There is a pretty solid disconnect between the public's perception of how science works and happens and how it does. For this to really matter, someone else needs to duplicate the experiment and verify the data. It's a huge win if the hype can lead to that.
  - jboy55 4y ago
    To me this is the most important part of the article, “It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago

The next steps in the story are, how easy is it to make this process more efficient? Is there something fundamental that is lessening the efficiency, or is it a matter of needing to buy part X or laser X or variant y to improve efficiency? Most research achievements are wildly inefficient because efficiency is not really their goal, they're looking for proof of concept. Once the concept is proven, you step into a whole different ballgame when efficiency is the goal. (Hopefully, who knows.)

rini17 4y ago
There's a reason for optimism as for the lasers' efficiency. But there are many other aspects that were only approached theoretically so far, such as how to get useful energy out of the reactor.

sigmar 4y ago

No one at this lab is saying it is ready for commercial sales. The technical Q&A even featured them saying high energy lasers might not be the best tech for driving the fusion in a commercial setting- https://youtu.be/Eke5PawU7rE?t=5250 https://youtu.be/Eke5PawU7rE?t=5250

dahfizz 4y ago

We already have lasers which are an order of magnitude more efficient than the one the lab was using. This is about a proof of concept, not about being an actual power plant. Also, as I understand it, the whole thing scales up very well. Now that we can "ignite" fusion in the little pellet used for testing, we can scale up to ignite a larger amount of fuel in order to get out much more energy.

carabiner 4y ago

They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we've gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion was impossible, the fact they can said they did it, despite 1980s era technology and a shoestring budget for decades, really says something. ICF is just one fusion technology, and probably not the best one, but fusion in general will probably see a massive budget increase worldwide now that it's been proven it can be done. I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030, assuming funding increases. Once we get them commercialized; coal, wind, solar and other power production will be obsolete for the most part. We can also use fusion heat to separate waste into it's base elements (you can recycle anything!), and help make any process needing a lot of thermal or electrical energy more efficient.

boppo1 4y ago
How much easier to build and safer are they than fission plants? Otherwise they will still be politically bottlenecked.
- ep103 4y ago
  IANAScientist, but I believe I read that fusion requires a steady input of energy to continue the reaction. So much, much safer than fission, which is a chain reaction that can go out of control at any time, fusion, you just turn off the power and it stops. IIRC

simplicio 4y ago

Not useful for commercial energy production, but useful if you want to study self-propagating fusion explosions in a bomb, which is the actual purpose of the facility. NIF is really confusing the issue (I think this is the first pop-sci article Ive seen that even mentions nuclear weapons, and its relegated to one sentence surrounded by discussion of commercial energy). They're (justifiably) excited because after a decade of trying, they've finally managed to fulfill the facilities primary purpose and recreated an important aspect of the conditions inside a thermonuclear bomb. But they're obviously reluctant to foreground the bomb stuff, so instead they hand-wave in the direction of energy production, which doesnt make a lot of sense, and leads to a lot of folks pointing out that the energy needed to get the reaction going is more then just the laser pulse itself, which would make a big difference for commercial production, but doesn't really matter for the experiment theyre trying to perform