4 ms·

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.”

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.”