12 ms·

Their 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.

by w0mbat 4y ago

cheriot 4y ago
I think the "With modern lasers" part is addressing that.
poopbutt6 4y ago
I agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue celebrations in general.
postingawayonhn 4y ago
As I understand it that's largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised.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 ago
  given 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 ago
    Iteration 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
300 MJ is about 83 KWh. In the UK is 1 KWh is £0.34 So, this costs £28 in electricity to run this experiment. The experiment is a momentary thing. Clearly there is now some work to, but now this is becoming an engineering problem of how to extend, sustain, and scale this process.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Plus $10M for the target bead.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    Where did you see this estimate for hohlraum cost? The NIF fired 368 shots in 2021: https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics At $10 million per target that would cost $3.7 billion. The annual LLNL budget (which includes NIF) is only $2.8 billion: https://www.llnl.gov/doing-business/economic-impact https://www.llnl.gov/doing-business/economic-impact As of 2004, the targets were reported to cost $2500 each: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Got it from a comment on here. The 2004 targets didn't work. Neither did the 368 shots in 2021. Maybe ones that work cost more? Even $2500 for 1 kWh is rather steep.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  To have a hope of supplying grid power, they need to scale up the energy gain by four orders of magnitude and reactor run time by 12 orders of magnitude. Those are just two of the engineering problems. It'll be a while, and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage.
naikrovek 4y ago
don't you think it's nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do. There's a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself. If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.
- qwytw 4y ago
  I'm sorry but you sound much more arrogant here with your strange assumptions. AFAIK all of those things he said are based on the data from the experiment. And I've read the same (i.e. that it's very far from being energy efficient). > will believe Wouldn't be better if you were able in to verify stuff to some degree yourself instead blindly trusting every expert (not at all implying that the people who did this experiment are untrustworthy but your bound to run into some bad apples with this attitude eventually)
- Retric 4y ago
  The paper was very clear what was involved and that information was poorly communicated. The experiment used X energy from a laser pulse to get Y thermal energy. The issue w0mbat referred to is to be self sustaining you need to use the output energy to drive the process. Aka the important number is after all relevant losses including electricity > lasers > fusion > heat > electricity, with each of those stages have losses. The reason they don’t communicate end to end efficiency is from a scientific standpoint it’s meaningless as they aren’t converting any thermal energy into electricity. For example p + p Fusion releases neutrinos which then escape any practical device without depositing their energy as heat. This isn’t a concern with DT fusion but again the point is we don’t really care about the actual mass to energy conversion but rather the amount of useful energy obtained.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction. this is about more power leaving the reaction chamber than what entered it. that's all the announcement is about. this is NOT about how much energy it takes to ready the lasers. this is NOT about the electricity consumed by lighting, computers, cooling, or measurement or anything else-- none of that counts when you are measuring the efficiency of the reaction itself. this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in. understanding that is key to understanding the significance of the announcement, and this is significant. and I maintain that the poster I originally called arrogant is arrogant, because they indicated in their comment that they knew how to calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work. I called it arrogant because it is --objectively-- an arrogant position to take. if that makes me arrogant, then so be it. my arrogance is independent of theirs and has no bearing on comments made before my own, and my comment did not influence theirs. (they were being arrogant before I pointed it out.)
floxy 4y ago
I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications. The "breakeven" thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote. The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That's the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.
- jboy55 4y ago
  and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, Ironically, this experiment was designed primarily to simulate the fusion you have in thermonuclear weapons. That's the NIF's purpose and the purpose of this experiment. From Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7 "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.”
  - dmix 4y ago
    From what I can tell this is mostly a useful cover story as a fallback for the moon-shot type energy potential. But are there serious downsides to having this be the case? Does it significantly distract away from the pursuit of energy? Or somehow fundamentally constrain the projects scope?
    - 4y ago
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.
- arbitrandomuser 4y ago
- pauljurczak 4y ago
  > I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030 Right. The first law of fusion physics: working fusion power generation in 10 years. It has been proven true for the last 7 decades. Rock solid.
  - Valakas_ 4y ago
    At some point, people will still be predicting fusion in the next 10 years, and then it will happen in the next.
  - bratbag 4y ago
    The joke used to be fusion was always 30 years away. Then the joke was it was always 20 years away. Now the joke is it's always 10 years away. People paying attention over this time have noticed it getting closer as we improve our capabilities. The next iteration of the joke will be 'fusion was always inevitable'
zbobet2012 4y ago
A quick peruse through this wikipedia article will tell you what still needs done, and what this means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy Give it a read. Intertial confinement fusion with a Q > 1 may very well point the way towards a realistic powerplant. Fusion is at a point it deserves investment. The NIF cost about the same as a single b-2 bomber.
- njarboe 4y ago
  Total annual US public research into fusion that is not ITER or this project (which does not come from the fusion pot. As others have said this project was built for weapons research) is about $300 million per year[1]. We, as a country, do not give a rats ass about having fusion as a power source. VC funding recently (for the first time) supported many fusion startup ideas at or above the $300 million level. Too bad ZIRP is over and private funding is now likely to dry up. The recent private funding in fusion was really amazing. Many new ideas and methods are being tried. This is what fusion research needed. Not spending billions on magnets and cement in France that is ITER. Hopefully some of them have a long enough runway to get promising work done and get follow-up funding. [1]http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/images/f1big.png http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/images...
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    We may be certain, anyway, that all the startups will spend all the money they get. There will be no power generated. The investors will not get any of their money back. That would be fine, except some of the investors are pension funds.
Trisell 4y ago
If it takes 300 one time in the future to start a long term reaction that’s a price I think we would all pay. The fact that we proved the idea now makes this just an engineering problem.
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  I'm not trying to undermine but more just act as a reminder to some folk. There is no such thing as "just an engineering problem". These things do not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of the tripod of economics and politics. If any one of these three buckles, the whole thing doesn't happen. Concord was an engineering problem we solved, but the economics and politics around it made it a white elephant. Here's hoping this doesn't happen to this.
teilo 4y ago
Now add in the 50% efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity (and that's very optimistic), and it's only 1.5 megajoules, or 0.5%, right where I calculated it based on initial information. IANAP, but I see no path forward to sufficient Q-total using plasma fusion to put this to any practical use. Unless the reaction can somehow be self-sustaining, I do not believe this will ever work.
hyperbovine 4y ago
Explains why the experiment took place at 1am.

Their 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.

by w0mbat 4y ago

Their 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 ago

I think the "With modern lasers" part is addressing that.

poopbutt6 4y ago

I agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue celebrations in general.

postingawayonhn 4y ago

As 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 ago
given 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 ago
  Iteration 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

300 MJ is about 83 KWh. In the UK is 1 KWh is £0.34 So, this costs £28 in electricity to run this experiment. The experiment is a momentary thing. Clearly there is now some work to, but now this is becoming an engineering problem of how to extend, sustain, and scale this process.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moloch-hai 4y ago
Plus $10M for the target bead.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  Where did you see this estimate for hohlraum cost? The NIF fired 368 shots in 2021: https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics https://lasers.llnl.gov/for-users/nif-target-shot-metrics At $10 million per target that would cost $3.7 billion. The annual LLNL budget (which includes NIF) is only $2.8 billion: https://www.llnl.gov/doing-business/economic-impact https://www.llnl.gov/doing-business/economic-impact As of 2004, the targets were reported to cost $2500 each: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Got it from a comment on here. The 2004 targets didn't work. Neither did the 368 shots in 2021. Maybe ones that work cost more? Even $2500 for 1 kWh is rather steep.
tuatoru 4y ago
To have a hope of supplying grid power, they need to scale up the energy gain by four orders of magnitude and reactor run time by 12 orders of magnitude. Those are just two of the engineering problems. It'll be a while, and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage.

naikrovek 4y ago

don't you think it's nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do. There's a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself. If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.

qwytw 4y ago
I'm sorry but you sound much more arrogant here with your strange assumptions. AFAIK all of those things he said are based on the data from the experiment. And I've read the same (i.e. that it's very far from being energy efficient). > will believe Wouldn't be better if you were able in to verify stuff to some degree yourself instead blindly trusting every expert (not at all implying that the people who did this experiment are untrustworthy but your bound to run into some bad apples with this attitude eventually)
Retric 4y ago
The paper was very clear what was involved and that information was poorly communicated. The experiment used X energy from a laser pulse to get Y thermal energy. The issue w0mbat referred to is to be self sustaining you need to use the output energy to drive the process. Aka the important number is after all relevant losses including electricity > lasers > fusion > heat > electricity, with each of those stages have losses. The reason they don’t communicate end to end efficiency is from a scientific standpoint it’s meaningless as they aren’t converting any thermal energy into electricity. For example p + p Fusion releases neutrinos which then escape any practical device without depositing their energy as heat. This isn’t a concern with DT fusion but again the point is we don’t really care about the actual mass to energy conversion but rather the amount of useful energy obtained.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction. this is about more power leaving the reaction chamber than what entered it. that's all the announcement is about. this is NOT about how much energy it takes to ready the lasers. this is NOT about the electricity consumed by lighting, computers, cooling, or measurement or anything else-- none of that counts when you are measuring the efficiency of the reaction itself. this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in. understanding that is key to understanding the significance of the announcement, and this is significant. and I maintain that the poster I originally called arrogant is arrogant, because they indicated in their comment that they knew how to calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work. I called it arrogant because it is --objectively-- an arrogant position to take. if that makes me arrogant, then so be it. my arrogance is independent of theirs and has no bearing on comments made before my own, and my comment did not influence theirs. (they were being arrogant before I pointed it out.)

floxy 4y ago

I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications. The "breakeven" thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote. The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That's the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

jboy55 4y ago
and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, Ironically, this experiment was designed primarily to simulate the fusion you have in thermonuclear weapons. That's the NIF's purpose and the purpose of this experiment. From Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7 "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.”
- dmix 4y ago
  From what I can tell this is mostly a useful cover story as a fallback for the moon-shot type energy potential. But are there serious downsides to having this be the case? Does it significantly distract away from the pursuit of energy? Or somehow fundamentally constrain the projects scope?
  - 4y ago

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.

arbitrandomuser 4y ago
pauljurczak 4y ago
> I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030 Right. The first law of fusion physics: working fusion power generation in 10 years. It has been proven true for the last 7 decades. Rock solid.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  At some point, people will still be predicting fusion in the next 10 years, and then it will happen in the next.
- bratbag 4y ago
  The joke used to be fusion was always 30 years away. Then the joke was it was always 20 years away. Now the joke is it's always 10 years away. People paying attention over this time have noticed it getting closer as we improve our capabilities. The next iteration of the joke will be 'fusion was always inevitable'

zbobet2012 4y ago

A quick peruse through this wikipedia article will tell you what still needs done, and what this means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy Give it a read. Intertial confinement fusion with a Q > 1 may very well point the way towards a realistic powerplant. Fusion is at a point it deserves investment. The NIF cost about the same as a single b-2 bomber.

njarboe 4y ago
Total annual US public research into fusion that is not ITER or this project (which does not come from the fusion pot. As others have said this project was built for weapons research) is about $300 million per year[1]. We, as a country, do not give a rats ass about having fusion as a power source. VC funding recently (for the first time) supported many fusion startup ideas at or above the $300 million level. Too bad ZIRP is over and private funding is now likely to dry up. The recent private funding in fusion was really amazing. Many new ideas and methods are being tried. This is what fusion research needed. Not spending billions on magnets and cement in France that is ITER. Hopefully some of them have a long enough runway to get promising work done and get follow-up funding. [1]http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/images/f1big.png http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/images...
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  We may be certain, anyway, that all the startups will spend all the money they get. There will be no power generated. The investors will not get any of their money back. That would be fine, except some of the investors are pension funds.

Trisell 4y ago

If it takes 300 one time in the future to start a long term reaction that’s a price I think we would all pay. The fact that we proved the idea now makes this just an engineering problem.

NovaVeles 4y ago
I'm not trying to undermine but more just act as a reminder to some folk. There is no such thing as "just an engineering problem". These things do not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of the tripod of economics and politics. If any one of these three buckles, the whole thing doesn't happen. Concord was an engineering problem we solved, but the economics and politics around it made it a white elephant. Here's hoping this doesn't happen to this.

teilo 4y ago

Now add in the 50% efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity (and that's very optimistic), and it's only 1.5 megajoules, or 0.5%, right where I calculated it based on initial information. IANAP, but I see no path forward to sufficient Q-total using plasma fusion to put this to any practical use. Unless the reaction can somehow be self-sustaining, I do not believe this will ever work.

hyperbovine 4y ago

Explains why the experiment took place at 1am.