35 ms·

Fusion Foolery

195 points by rohansingh 3y ago

hliyan 3y ago
This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others: "In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
- gostsamo 3y ago
  People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.
  - someplaceguy 3y ago
    Global warming is bad, but you have to see the positive aspects too. Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
    - gostsamo 3y ago
      Spiders are cool. If not for them, you will have much more guests at home and the fact that you are calling them "just insects" won't make their numbers smaller. Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.
- megaman821 3y ago
  You can't just group all those things together and say they are alike. Fusion in particular is a bit more physics experiment than the future of energy. Even in a world where we master than engineering and physics around fusion it won't be an economical source of power generation. It will only be used in areas where fusion's power generation to physical footprint ratio is highly valued.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    What if room-temperature superconductors were real and led to improved efficiency in tokamak reactors?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      The only difference between existing superconductors used for tokamaks and a RT version would be the energy cost of cooling the magnets to keep them below the critical temperature. Cooling does take a significant amount of energy, but I don't think that just getting rid of that would mean fusion produces enough energy compared to the cost of building the plant to compensate. And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
    - megaman821 3y ago
      The economic "problem" is that ultimately fusion is a heat source that turns water into steam which turns a steam turbine. Solar and wind are approaching the cost of just the steam turbine alone. There is hardly any room for fuel and operational costs. Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
  - dTal 3y ago
    This is a weird comment. There is no reason to expect that a hypothetical economically viable fusion power plant would have an unusually good "power generation to physical footprint ratio". At the same time - you really don't consider "uses water as fuel" an advantage?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power. Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper. It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges. It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%. And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually. There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    >It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
- JackFr 3y ago
  I disagree. It's a theory of others' state of mind, based solely on the author's impression, offered without evidence. It's pure projection and more a window into the author's mindset than anything else.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    It can be projection and also be true, if the author is more or less typical of people in the group they're projecting onto. It certainly resonates with me and a lot of us here on HN (which has been a hub for this kind of story).
- SanderNL 3y ago
  You know what happens if people that are not experts talk about something they are not experts in? Physicists are no exception.
- permo-w 3y ago
  come now, strip back the layer of bullshit verbosity and what does this really say?: ~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~ as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs
- ekianjo 3y ago
  There is no tangible reason for the future to be worse than the present. Until we really try hard to make it so. By all accounts levels of life have been rising worldwide for the past 50 years. Most of the stuff that remains expensive is mostly linked to over regulation which is a pure question of political will. As for energy we can still move to regular fission nuclear power and massively reduce CO2 emissions if we want to.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  It really is, and it mirrors the hype cycle around LK-99. In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  It's important to recognize that the bad news side of the ledger is overcrowded because that's what the ledger keepers want. There's a reason that the reaction counts for more engagement than thumbs in the FB algorithm.
- jujube3 3y ago
  The fusion hype should be blamed squarely on journalists, not on "the public." The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed. "fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.
  - jujube3 3y ago
    sorry, meant to write LK99 not LM99.
- carabiner 3y ago
  This was posted during the height of the LK-99 frenzy: "In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  Eh to me it reads like an old fart who doesn't find science fun any longer and is just waiting for retirement.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  That whole thing is about the NIF, which isn't the only possible path to fusion. It's also ignoring all the private fusion start-ups, which is understandable, because they havn't delivered so far. But that may change, or not. Remains to be seen, but not discarded as 'foolery' outright.
reedf1 3y ago
Every few years we get an order of magnitude or two closer to efficacy. It is not ridiculous to celebrate that.
- jahnu 3y ago
  The author does celebrate it but points out something that the media should have: "So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even at 100% efficiency, we’d get just 25 times more energy out, or 75 MJ. That’s still not enough to pay for the price of admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
  - mjamesaustin 3y ago
    The author also misses a really relevant fact, that modern lasers are an order of magnitude more efficient, so the 400MJ would be dramatically less, low enough to pass breakeven.
    - jahnu 3y ago
      In fairness I don't think it's up to the author to speculate or do original research to make their point (that the media failed to do basic reporting on the experiment). Maybe there are modern lasers that are more efficient but then shouldn't they prove they are suitable enough for the task and do that experiment and report it?
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  Might want to rephrase that, because if you go from 10% distance to the goal to 1% to 0.1% etc, but never reach the goal, it doesn't matter if that happens every few years or every second, you still never reach the goal.
Kydlaw 3y ago
It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely going to reuse in some arguments. Also, this one should be shouted louder for those in the back. > "Many in our culture truly believe in “the amazing future,” uncritically extrapolating our fossil-fueled joy ride into ever-more impressive innovations and technologies."
- b112 3y ago
  It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely going to reuse in some arguments. The computer was in the same category 50 years ago, as was the ball point pen 100. Just making aluminum cheap, was a miracle. And before you think aluminum isn't a biggie, it revolutionized so many industries. Including airflight, missles, and more at the time. Things impossible, became possible. And now these things are trivial. The only question is, when it becomes cheap and easy to use fusion power, will it be the optimal power source at that time?
  - mbb70 3y ago
    Calling out aluminum and pens is like picking lotto numbers after the drawing. You're ignoring the mountain of failures that were all incredibly promising and had incredibly smart people spending incredible amounts of time and money on them. Scientific advancement comes from exploring every path at once, quickly pruning failed paths and doubling down on successes, with enough stochastic jumps to keep us out of ruts for too long.
    - b112 3y ago
      I think you missed the point. Fusion power is 100%, hands down possible. There is no question in this. It's all about cost, and my point was, when, not if fusion power is a net positive, will other things be cheaper? I find it incredible how people on HN, a more technical site, seem to consider 10 years a long time, or even 100. Or that money is "wasted" because the research and work will "vanish", which is beyond absurd. Every penny spent on fusion, and cold fusion comes back to us in many wsys, there is no waste.
dist-epoch 3y ago
The whole purpose of this lab is to do nuclear weapons research. Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a nice side effect, but don't confuse it with the existence purpose of the lab.
cstross 3y ago
The key point about NIF is buried way down in the article: But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density. NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)
- morkalork 3y ago
  There's also the angle that it's just something for the researchers at that lab to do, gives them a purpose. And in exchange, the US has a perpetually well staffed nuclear weapons research lab.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I don't know why there is any doubt about that. Maybe it's only because I am older and was DoE-adjacent in the relevant timeframe, but I distinctly recall the pitch for funding NIF was 100% pure weapons. They even wrote it down: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733 """ The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile. """
api 3y ago
This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies. Everything he writes is going to go through that lens. Check the other posts. I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it'll never work. Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient. Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep working on it.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  The point isn't that fusion isn't worth doing but that NIF isn't actually about power generation and it's disappointing that it always gets into the news as if it was.
- boxed 3y ago
  Sure. But the NIF approach IS doomed. Even if they succeed by reducing fuel costs by 5 orders of magnitude AND manage to capture 100% of the energy AND manage to increase firing rate 6 orders of magnitude it's STILL not even close to competitive with solar power. That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.) We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.
  - api 3y ago
    NIF is pretty universally panned as an approach to commercial fusion. It's more about doing basic science on plasmas and fusion and of course researching thermonuclear weapons without actually doing real (dirty) nuclear tests. That being said, sometimes technology can do surprising things. If some other line of research somewhere yields, say, lasers that are multiple orders of magnitude more efficient then suddenly things might change and ICF would become a viable path. The massive inefficiency of lasers is the largest single problem. The main reason magnetic containment is so much better than ICF is that huge electromagnets are more efficient than lasers plus inertia at confining the plasma.
throwawaymaths 3y ago
I think there is an important missed point: research funding is rivalrous, and not infinite. NIF is such a dead end that there is a huge risk that the positive result sucks the air out of a crowded room and de facto takes away resources from "societal" fusion energy projects that have a shot at actually being useful.
- Veedrac 3y ago
  ...how? Commercial fusion does not compete with NIF. Nobody invests in NIF expecting to make a return, the government spends money on it hoping for science. NIF is not to my knowledge part of government programs that aim to accelerate commercial fusion.
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    The government could drop funding of fusion that can't be commercialized and give grants to other fusion projects? Funding between government research agendas is rivalrous too.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      This isn't a zero sum game. We have enough money that we can do both. It should only be a question of whether this NIF research is useful. Surely, they are actually producing some value. There research is beneficial to fusion in general. Is it useful enough? I don't know.
      - throwawaymaths 3y ago
        You're kidding right? Political handouts are exactly a zero sum game. To fund something new, you must pick one of either: - decrease spending elsewhere - tax people more - borrow on credit - print money
gpjanik 3y ago
Everyone mildly interested in the topic knows about what's written in the article. There are popular scientists making youtube videos about what is Q, etc. It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean it's not important.
- catapart 3y ago
  Agreed. This is a weirdly negative and short-sighted article. It's like... yeah, maybe lasers aren't the way to go, guy. But the fact that we proved it in a practical, empirical test - regardless of the method we used - means that all of our theories are strengthened. All of our research into the topic is either on the right track, or can now be measured against a practical result. It's... huge. It's a huge deal that was rightly praised. And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive - wonderful traits in students - are likely to do). In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in their own designs.
- tootie 3y ago
  I was aware of this but reading this article makes it seem like we're just completely barking up the wrong tree and this entire approach is never going to be practical.
  - gpjanik 3y ago
    On what premise? It just says we can't make it economical anytime soon, but you have to start somewhere - or should we all agree that unlimited clean energy is not worth trying because it's a long shot?
i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago
If you have to explain that you aren’t being sarcastic when you congratulate an effort, you know you’ve pushed too hard in the other direction.
hutzlibu 3y ago
I agree, there is lots of wishful thinking involved with Fusion and I was always a sceptic, but lately there were news about the Wendelstein 7-X https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212 And someone linked a podcast of a interview with the director (in german, http://alternativlos.org/36 http://alternativlos.org/36). And after listening, I do became convinced that with the Stellerator design, a working Fusion plant is possible. Maybe still not in 20 years, because it is hellish complicated, but some day. (till then I would bet on harvesting more our existing very big fusionreactor called the sun) In either case, controlling fusion is awesome technology and research, with lots of potential applications and deserves further funding. But yeah, please more of civil projects like Wendelstein and less disguised weapon research.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Why do you think the news about W-7X makes any difference? Stellarators, like tokamaks, will have terrible volumetric power density, and are very unlikely to lead to something that could compete economically, even if they "worked".
Veedrac 3y ago
This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific. For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  The criticism for commercial fusion is very similar. Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
  - Veedrac 3y ago
    > Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you. Most news about commercial fusion is ‘X had a big investment round’ or ‘Y made a really hot plasma’, and if we were in the world where a startup's tokamak hit ignition (we're not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even end to end.
progrus 3y ago
[flagged]
- myrmidon 3y ago
  Could you explain what this "infowar" is about, who "they" are and who is supposedly crazy and dumb? Your post makes zero sense without context.
  - progrus 3y ago
    You’re not the target audience, but OK: “They” are a bunch of corrupted intelligence officials and powerful/influential people who got corrupted somewhere along the way, but started morphing into a totalitarian cabal around when the Soviet Union collapsed. The unipolar “team America” world was always an illusion, the Cold War just shifted underground and distributed. This has intensified recently, as you can tell with Argentinians picking an ancap maniac, and the deep state in the US throwing the whole freakin library at Trump. Add to that all sorts of other schemes and plots that you can probably guess at, if you’re honest with yourself. The conflict is almost over, they have lost. The Chinese economy is teetering over the abyss. Trump starts his counterattack on the US establishment 8/21. Enjoy the show.
    - quenix 3y ago
      Just out of interest, why do you say 8/21? Sounds like a pretty random date, and you seem quite sure of yourself. What makes you think he'll "begin his counterattack" then?
      - progrus 3y ago
        https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/110893712805150244 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/110893712805150244
marginalia_nu 3y ago
It's been actualized recently, but there's a sort of vaporware bermuda triangle within physics of revolutionary holy grail advancements that repeatedly garner an enormous amount of hype and press, but almost always fails to materialize into anything useful. It consists of * Room temperature semiconductors * Useful fusion power * Quantum computers something anything useful outside of a simulation It's a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty years away for forty years. I wouldn't go as far as saying any of these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Is this more a property of these breakthroughs being very hard or very desirable? What would be achievements of similar impact that might be more achievable? I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally amazing, possible, future technologies.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Probably mostly a consequence of how desirable these things would be. Both room temperature semiconductors and fusion would completely reshape society and re-draw the geopolitical map to a degree we haven't seen since the industrial revolution. We'd find ourselves in an age where oil was nearly worthless. So there's a lot of money and glory at stake if you can demonstrate you're making headway toward any of these goals. There's a parallel to alchemy in all this. Before we knew it wasn't impossible to create gold through chemical processes, it seemed like a very appealing quest indeed. You have figures like Newton spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to figure it out.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    > What would be achievements of similar impact that might be more achievable? Artificial intelligence. By a gigantic margin. Fusion would be very expensive and likely not competitive with fission, due to vastly more complex and expensive reactors. So effectively useless. Quantum computers: Nobody knows what they would be practically useful for, not even experts like Scott Aaronson. (No, cracking RSA is not useful.) Room temperature superconductors: The most realistic example I have heard about them is ... smaller MRI machines. Great.
dale_glass 3y ago
Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and the energy being produced as a result. Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.
- willis936 3y ago
  >Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets. The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).
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alexwebb2 3y ago
The conclusion here veers quite rapidly into scientific endism (we've more or less reached the pinnacle of human science, and no further significant advances are likely to be made) and malthusianism (we lack the resources to do so anyway and are headed for decline as a species). For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".
- ooterness 3y ago
  It is the 21st century. For more than a hundred years, fusion has been twenty years away. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war.
TomMasz 3y ago
I live near the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (aka The Laser Lab) and took a tour one day. They have an enormous bank of huge capacitors (think refrigerator-sized) that they charge off the power grid since there's no way in hell they can get sufficient energy directly. Laser fusion is one of those things that's possible but seems unlikely to ever be practical, though something may useful still come from it.
- Bajeezus 3y ago
  I used to work at the Rochester LLE! I never worked on capacitor logistics, but I heard that it was a PITA to work with local utilities to get those on the grid (but nowhere near as much as the PITA to get that building zoned for Brighton in the first place)
deleted 3y ago
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gene-h 3y ago
NIF was never made to generate power. NIF uses lasers which are less efficient, but were cheaper to build. We have better lasers. What is important about NIF's result is that they demonstrated 'burning' plasma. The yield might be increased by adding more fuel. The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short. Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary. [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.0053 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...
bell-cot 3y ago
To judge by how many Hollywood blockbusters have featured ever-larger-and-flashier Sci-Fi ray guns and robots and space ships and such...I'm thinking that most humans are quite naturally drawn to "Big! New!! Shiny!!!" things. And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology / mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.
ironborn123 3y ago
I get the feeling the article preaches to the choir. The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types. Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details. This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.
alkonaut 3y ago
I thought the laser "ignition" was just a demonstrator for being able to create circumstances where fusion occurs, not something that could ever be scaled up to a power plant? But this article talks about repetition rates? Would we theoretically have fusion powerplants where we ignite a plasma over and over again from scratch, using lasers? I thought that's what tokamaks and stellerators were for: keeping the fusion reaction going once ignited?
jkelleyrtp 3y ago
The article mentions that the reaction had a 4% yield with lasers that are 0.5% efficient. The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy. Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction. In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array. I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.
- mjamesaustin 3y ago
  This is what the article misses. NIF is doing theoretical testing using extremely inefficient lasers. Nowhere in this article does it mention the gains from using more efficient lasers, instead treating the 400MJ input as a constant. Bad reporting.
jmyeet 3y ago
I'm skeptical if commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic. We get tricked by existence of stars but stars actually produce a really low amount of energy per unit mass: 0.2mW/kg [1]. It just so happens that stars are really massive (~333,000 times the mass of Earth). Stars can thus solve the neutron problem with gravity. Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons. I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That's all. Solar, in particular, is our future. And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have. This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2]. [1]: https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/HTML/AT31605.HTM https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/... [2]: https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refinery-to-have-multibillion-dollar-impact/ https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refiner...
dekhn 3y ago
I lived with somebody who worked on NIF --- back in the early days, before anything was built (they did theory modelling on the laser/holraum interaction). They said the entire project was really just busywork to keep american scientists from working on other country's defense projects. And also predicted that while NIF might eventually break even, it was never a design that would be useful for power generation, and was only slightly useful for stockpile stewardship.
- iaw 3y ago
  I always saw NIF as bomb research by another name, frequency of ignition required is absurd. TOKAMAKs have much more promise but still face massive challenges.
dave333 3y ago
Anyone interested in clean energy should know about this device that produces 100s of kW in a novel chemical process. https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/ Note that the wikipedia article about this company is policed by skeptics and has been in dispute for more than a decade.
KorematsuFredt 3y ago
You can write a same gloomy article about invention of an electric bulb or even a wheel. Imagine cutting down an entire tree that also kills Fred when the tree fell, herculean efforts to then slice it off to create a wheel in which Cole the lost his fingers, and what do you do with that wheel ? Create a claypot ? You could have just used a wooden pot instead. Not to mention the clay pot broke. Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.
DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
The problem is that such imaginings are not tethered to physical reality. They are driven by ideology, or I would say mythology. The physical reality is that we are living in an ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid ecological degradation and global disruption to the biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-termination of this whacky mode called modernity. It simply does not add up, once the mythology is stripped away. The venture capitalist of nature is about to slam the door on our faces.
credit_guy 3y ago
Fusion will not come up of this NIF thing. But maybe mini-hydrogen bombs could. And why would that be a good thing? Because project Orion [1] could use them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

195 points by rohansingh 3y ago

This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others: "In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."

gostsamo 3y ago
People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  Global warming is bad, but you have to see the positive aspects too. Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
  - gostsamo 3y ago
    Spiders are cool. If not for them, you will have much more guests at home and the fact that you are calling them "just insects" won't make their numbers smaller. Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.
megaman821 3y ago
You can't just group all those things together and say they are alike. Fusion in particular is a bit more physics experiment than the future of energy. Even in a world where we master than engineering and physics around fusion it won't be an economical source of power generation. It will only be used in areas where fusion's power generation to physical footprint ratio is highly valued.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  What if room-temperature superconductors were real and led to improved efficiency in tokamak reactors?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The only difference between existing superconductors used for tokamaks and a RT version would be the energy cost of cooling the magnets to keep them below the critical temperature. Cooling does take a significant amount of energy, but I don't think that just getting rid of that would mean fusion produces enough energy compared to the cost of building the plant to compensate. And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
  - megaman821 3y ago
    The economic "problem" is that ultimately fusion is a heat source that turns water into steam which turns a steam turbine. Solar and wind are approaching the cost of just the steam turbine alone. There is hardly any room for fuel and operational costs. Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
- dTal 3y ago
  This is a weird comment. There is no reason to expect that a hypothetical economically viable fusion power plant would have an unusually good "power generation to physical footprint ratio". At the same time - you really don't consider "uses water as fuel" an advantage?
bryanlarsen 3y ago
The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power. Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper. It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges. It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%. And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually. There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  >It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
JackFr 3y ago
I disagree. It's a theory of others' state of mind, based solely on the author's impression, offered without evidence. It's pure projection and more a window into the author's mindset than anything else.
- lolinder 3y ago
  It can be projection and also be true, if the author is more or less typical of people in the group they're projecting onto. It certainly resonates with me and a lot of us here on HN (which has been a hub for this kind of story).
SanderNL 3y ago
You know what happens if people that are not experts talk about something they are not experts in? Physicists are no exception.
permo-w 3y ago
come now, strip back the layer of bullshit verbosity and what does this really say?: ~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~ as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs
ekianjo 3y ago
There is no tangible reason for the future to be worse than the present. Until we really try hard to make it so. By all accounts levels of life have been rising worldwide for the past 50 years. Most of the stuff that remains expensive is mostly linked to over regulation which is a pure question of political will. As for energy we can still move to regular fission nuclear power and massively reduce CO2 emissions if we want to.
JeremyNT 3y ago
It really is, and it mirrors the hype cycle around LK-99. In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.
fallingknife 3y ago
It's important to recognize that the bad news side of the ledger is overcrowded because that's what the ledger keepers want. There's a reason that the reaction counts for more engagement than thumbs in the FB algorithm.
jujube3 3y ago
The fusion hype should be blamed squarely on journalists, not on "the public." The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed. "fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.
- jujube3 3y ago
  sorry, meant to write LK99 not LM99.
carabiner 3y ago
This was posted during the height of the LK-99 frenzy: "In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
Eh to me it reads like an old fart who doesn't find science fun any longer and is just waiting for retirement.
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
That whole thing is about the NIF, which isn't the only possible path to fusion. It's also ignoring all the private fusion start-ups, which is understandable, because they havn't delivered so far. But that may change, or not. Remains to be seen, but not discarded as 'foolery' outright.

reedf1 3y ago

Every few years we get an order of magnitude or two closer to efficacy. It is not ridiculous to celebrate that.

jahnu 3y ago
The author does celebrate it but points out something that the media should have: "So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even at 100% efficiency, we’d get just 25 times more energy out, or 75 MJ. That’s still not enough to pay for the price of admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
- mjamesaustin 3y ago
  The author also misses a really relevant fact, that modern lasers are an order of magnitude more efficient, so the 400MJ would be dramatically less, low enough to pass breakeven.
  - jahnu 3y ago
    In fairness I don't think it's up to the author to speculate or do original research to make their point (that the media failed to do basic reporting on the experiment). Maybe there are modern lasers that are more efficient but then shouldn't they prove they are suitable enough for the task and do that experiment and report it?
johnnyworker 3y ago
Might want to rephrase that, because if you go from 10% distance to the goal to 1% to 0.1% etc, but never reach the goal, it doesn't matter if that happens every few years or every second, you still never reach the goal.

Kydlaw 3y ago

It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely going to reuse in some arguments. Also, this one should be shouted louder for those in the back. > "Many in our culture truly believe in “the amazing future,” uncritically extrapolating our fossil-fueled joy ride into ever-more impressive innovations and technologies."

b112 3y ago
It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely going to reuse in some arguments. The computer was in the same category 50 years ago, as was the ball point pen 100. Just making aluminum cheap, was a miracle. And before you think aluminum isn't a biggie, it revolutionized so many industries. Including airflight, missles, and more at the time. Things impossible, became possible. And now these things are trivial. The only question is, when it becomes cheap and easy to use fusion power, will it be the optimal power source at that time?
- mbb70 3y ago
  Calling out aluminum and pens is like picking lotto numbers after the drawing. You're ignoring the mountain of failures that were all incredibly promising and had incredibly smart people spending incredible amounts of time and money on them. Scientific advancement comes from exploring every path at once, quickly pruning failed paths and doubling down on successes, with enough stochastic jumps to keep us out of ruts for too long.
  - b112 3y ago
    I think you missed the point. Fusion power is 100%, hands down possible. There is no question in this. It's all about cost, and my point was, when, not if fusion power is a net positive, will other things be cheaper? I find it incredible how people on HN, a more technical site, seem to consider 10 years a long time, or even 100. Or that money is "wasted" because the research and work will "vanish", which is beyond absurd. Every penny spent on fusion, and cold fusion comes back to us in many wsys, there is no waste.

dist-epoch 3y ago

The whole purpose of this lab is to do nuclear weapons research. Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a nice side effect, but don't confuse it with the existence purpose of the lab.

cstross 3y ago

The key point about NIF is buried way down in the article: But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density. NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)

morkalork 3y ago
There's also the angle that it's just something for the researchers at that lab to do, gives them a purpose. And in exchange, the US has a perpetually well staffed nuclear weapons research lab.
jeffbee 3y ago
I don't know why there is any doubt about that. Maybe it's only because I am older and was DoE-adjacent in the relevant timeframe, but I distinctly recall the pitch for funding NIF was 100% pure weapons. They even wrote it down: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733 """ The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile. """

api 3y ago

This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies. Everything he writes is going to go through that lens. Check the other posts. I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it'll never work. Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient. Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep working on it.

chpatrick 3y ago
The point isn't that fusion isn't worth doing but that NIF isn't actually about power generation and it's disappointing that it always gets into the news as if it was.
boxed 3y ago
Sure. But the NIF approach IS doomed. Even if they succeed by reducing fuel costs by 5 orders of magnitude AND manage to capture 100% of the energy AND manage to increase firing rate 6 orders of magnitude it's STILL not even close to competitive with solar power. That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.) We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.
- api 3y ago
  NIF is pretty universally panned as an approach to commercial fusion. It's more about doing basic science on plasmas and fusion and of course researching thermonuclear weapons without actually doing real (dirty) nuclear tests. That being said, sometimes technology can do surprising things. If some other line of research somewhere yields, say, lasers that are multiple orders of magnitude more efficient then suddenly things might change and ICF would become a viable path. The massive inefficiency of lasers is the largest single problem. The main reason magnetic containment is so much better than ICF is that huge electromagnets are more efficient than lasers plus inertia at confining the plasma.

throwawaymaths 3y ago

I think there is an important missed point: research funding is rivalrous, and not infinite. NIF is such a dead end that there is a huge risk that the positive result sucks the air out of a crowded room and de facto takes away resources from "societal" fusion energy projects that have a shot at actually being useful.

Veedrac 3y ago
...how? Commercial fusion does not compete with NIF. Nobody invests in NIF expecting to make a return, the government spends money on it hoping for science. NIF is not to my knowledge part of government programs that aim to accelerate commercial fusion.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  The government could drop funding of fusion that can't be commercialized and give grants to other fusion projects? Funding between government research agendas is rivalrous too.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    This isn't a zero sum game. We have enough money that we can do both. It should only be a question of whether this NIF research is useful. Surely, they are actually producing some value. There research is beneficial to fusion in general. Is it useful enough? I don't know.
    - throwawaymaths 3y ago
      You're kidding right? Political handouts are exactly a zero sum game. To fund something new, you must pick one of either: - decrease spending elsewhere - tax people more - borrow on credit - print money

gpjanik 3y ago

Everyone mildly interested in the topic knows about what's written in the article. There are popular scientists making youtube videos about what is Q, etc. It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean it's not important.

catapart 3y ago
Agreed. This is a weirdly negative and short-sighted article. It's like... yeah, maybe lasers aren't the way to go, guy. But the fact that we proved it in a practical, empirical test - regardless of the method we used - means that all of our theories are strengthened. All of our research into the topic is either on the right track, or can now be measured against a practical result. It's... huge. It's a huge deal that was rightly praised. And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive - wonderful traits in students - are likely to do). In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in their own designs.
tootie 3y ago
I was aware of this but reading this article makes it seem like we're just completely barking up the wrong tree and this entire approach is never going to be practical.
- gpjanik 3y ago
  On what premise? It just says we can't make it economical anytime soon, but you have to start somewhere - or should we all agree that unlimited clean energy is not worth trying because it's a long shot?

i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago

If you have to explain that you aren’t being sarcastic when you congratulate an effort, you know you’ve pushed too hard in the other direction.

hutzlibu 3y ago

I agree, there is lots of wishful thinking involved with Fusion and I was always a sceptic, but lately there were news about the Wendelstein 7-X https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212 And someone linked a podcast of a interview with the director (in german, http://alternativlos.org/36 http://alternativlos.org/36). And after listening, I do became convinced that with the Stellerator design, a working Fusion plant is possible. Maybe still not in 20 years, because it is hellish complicated, but some day. (till then I would bet on harvesting more our existing very big fusionreactor called the sun) In either case, controlling fusion is awesome technology and research, with lots of potential applications and deserves further funding. But yeah, please more of civil projects like Wendelstein and less disguised weapon research.

pfdietz 3y ago
Why do you think the news about W-7X makes any difference? Stellarators, like tokamaks, will have terrible volumetric power density, and are very unlikely to lead to something that could compete economically, even if they "worked".

Veedrac 3y ago

This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific. For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.

dale_glass 3y ago
The criticism for commercial fusion is very similar. Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
- Veedrac 3y ago
  > Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you. Most news about commercial fusion is ‘X had a big investment round’ or ‘Y made a really hot plasma’, and if we were in the world where a startup's tokamak hit ignition (we're not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even end to end.

progrus 3y ago

[flagged]

myrmidon 3y ago
Could you explain what this "infowar" is about, who "they" are and who is supposedly crazy and dumb? Your post makes zero sense without context.
- progrus 3y ago
  You’re not the target audience, but OK: “They” are a bunch of corrupted intelligence officials and powerful/influential people who got corrupted somewhere along the way, but started morphing into a totalitarian cabal around when the Soviet Union collapsed. The unipolar “team America” world was always an illusion, the Cold War just shifted underground and distributed. This has intensified recently, as you can tell with Argentinians picking an ancap maniac, and the deep state in the US throwing the whole freakin library at Trump. Add to that all sorts of other schemes and plots that you can probably guess at, if you’re honest with yourself. The conflict is almost over, they have lost. The Chinese economy is teetering over the abyss. Trump starts his counterattack on the US establishment 8/21. Enjoy the show.
  - quenix 3y ago
    Just out of interest, why do you say 8/21? Sounds like a pretty random date, and you seem quite sure of yourself. What makes you think he'll "begin his counterattack" then?
    - progrus 3y ago
      https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/110893712805150244 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/110893712805150244

marginalia_nu 3y ago

It's been actualized recently, but there's a sort of vaporware bermuda triangle within physics of revolutionary holy grail advancements that repeatedly garner an enormous amount of hype and press, but almost always fails to materialize into anything useful. It consists of * Room temperature semiconductors * Useful fusion power * Quantum computers something anything useful outside of a simulation It's a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty years away for forty years. I wouldn't go as far as saying any of these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.

ajmurmann 3y ago
Is this more a property of these breakthroughs being very hard or very desirable? What would be achievements of similar impact that might be more achievable? I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally amazing, possible, future technologies.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Probably mostly a consequence of how desirable these things would be. Both room temperature semiconductors and fusion would completely reshape society and re-draw the geopolitical map to a degree we haven't seen since the industrial revolution. We'd find ourselves in an age where oil was nearly worthless. So there's a lot of money and glory at stake if you can demonstrate you're making headway toward any of these goals. There's a parallel to alchemy in all this. Before we knew it wasn't impossible to create gold through chemical processes, it seemed like a very appealing quest indeed. You have figures like Newton spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to figure it out.
- cubefox 3y ago
  > What would be achievements of similar impact that might be more achievable? Artificial intelligence. By a gigantic margin. Fusion would be very expensive and likely not competitive with fission, due to vastly more complex and expensive reactors. So effectively useless. Quantum computers: Nobody knows what they would be practically useful for, not even experts like Scott Aaronson. (No, cracking RSA is not useful.) Room temperature superconductors: The most realistic example I have heard about them is ... smaller MRI machines. Great.

dale_glass 3y ago

Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and the energy being produced as a result. Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.

willis936 3y ago
>Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets. The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).

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alexwebb2 3y ago

The conclusion here veers quite rapidly into scientific endism (we've more or less reached the pinnacle of human science, and no further significant advances are likely to be made) and malthusianism (we lack the resources to do so anyway and are headed for decline as a species). For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".

ooterness 3y ago
It is the 21st century. For more than a hundred years, fusion has been twenty years away. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war.

TomMasz 3y ago

I live near the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (aka The Laser Lab) and took a tour one day. They have an enormous bank of huge capacitors (think refrigerator-sized) that they charge off the power grid since there's no way in hell they can get sufficient energy directly. Laser fusion is one of those things that's possible but seems unlikely to ever be practical, though something may useful still come from it.

Bajeezus 3y ago
I used to work at the Rochester LLE! I never worked on capacitor logistics, but I heard that it was a PITA to work with local utilities to get those on the grid (but nowhere near as much as the PITA to get that building zoned for Brighton in the first place)

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gene-h 3y ago

NIF was never made to generate power. NIF uses lasers which are less efficient, but were cheaper to build. We have better lasers. What is important about NIF's result is that they demonstrated 'burning' plasma. The yield might be increased by adding more fuel. The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short. Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary. [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.0053 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...

bell-cot 3y ago

To judge by how many Hollywood blockbusters have featured ever-larger-and-flashier Sci-Fi ray guns and robots and space ships and such...I'm thinking that most humans are quite naturally drawn to "Big! New!! Shiny!!!" things. And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology / mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.

ironborn123 3y ago

I get the feeling the article preaches to the choir. The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types. Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details. This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.

alkonaut 3y ago

I thought the laser "ignition" was just a demonstrator for being able to create circumstances where fusion occurs, not something that could ever be scaled up to a power plant? But this article talks about repetition rates? Would we theoretically have fusion powerplants where we ignite a plasma over and over again from scratch, using lasers? I thought that's what tokamaks and stellerators were for: keeping the fusion reaction going once ignited?

jkelleyrtp 3y ago

The article mentions that the reaction had a 4% yield with lasers that are 0.5% efficient. The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy. Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction. In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array. I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.

mjamesaustin 3y ago
This is what the article misses. NIF is doing theoretical testing using extremely inefficient lasers. Nowhere in this article does it mention the gains from using more efficient lasers, instead treating the 400MJ input as a constant. Bad reporting.

jmyeet 3y ago

I'm skeptical if commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic. We get tricked by existence of stars but stars actually produce a really low amount of energy per unit mass: 0.2mW/kg [1]. It just so happens that stars are really massive (~333,000 times the mass of Earth). Stars can thus solve the neutron problem with gravity. Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons. I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That's all. Solar, in particular, is our future. And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have. This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2]. [1]: https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/HTML/AT31605.HTM https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/... [2]: https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refinery-to-have-multibillion-dollar-impact/ https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refiner...

dekhn 3y ago

I lived with somebody who worked on NIF --- back in the early days, before anything was built (they did theory modelling on the laser/holraum interaction). They said the entire project was really just busywork to keep american scientists from working on other country's defense projects. And also predicted that while NIF might eventually break even, it was never a design that would be useful for power generation, and was only slightly useful for stockpile stewardship.

iaw 3y ago
I always saw NIF as bomb research by another name, frequency of ignition required is absurd. TOKAMAKs have much more promise but still face massive challenges.

dave333 3y ago

Anyone interested in clean energy should know about this device that produces 100s of kW in a novel chemical process. https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/ Note that the wikipedia article about this company is policed by skeptics and has been in dispute for more than a decade.

KorematsuFredt 3y ago

You can write a same gloomy article about invention of an electric bulb or even a wheel. Imagine cutting down an entire tree that also kills Fred when the tree fell, herculean efforts to then slice it off to create a wheel in which Cole the lost his fingers, and what do you do with that wheel ? Create a claypot ? You could have just used a wooden pot instead. Not to mention the clay pot broke. Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.

DemocracyFTW2 3y ago

The problem is that such imaginings are not tethered to physical reality. They are driven by ideology, or I would say mythology. The physical reality is that we are living in an ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid ecological degradation and global disruption to the biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-termination of this whacky mode called modernity. It simply does not add up, once the mythology is stripped away. The venture capitalist of nature is about to slam the door on our faces.

credit_guy 3y ago

Fusion will not come up of this NIF thing. But maybe mini-hydrogen bombs could. And why would that be a good thing? Because project Orion [1] could use them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...