14 ms·

US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving 'ignition' over and over

194 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

carabiner 3y ago
Holy shit it's happening...
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  Yes, but it's not ICF that will make it happen. It's MCF, look to SPARC and ARC being made by MIT & CFS in Massachusetts. Mark these words, by end of this decade we will have Q > 3 in an experimental MCF reactor and it will be SPARC. End of next decade we will have the first fusion power reactors (ARC). Whether they are used as on the grid solutions or instead heat sources for energy intensive processes (think chemical reactions, metal forges, etc ) in the 30's is yet to be determined.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Can someone expand these acronyms for me please?
    - ublaze 3y ago
      ICF: Inertial Confinement Fusion MCF: Magnetic Confinement Fusion CFS is Commonwealth Fusion Systems - https://cfs.energy/ https://cfs.energy/ Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor. SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process. ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC. It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX). And yes, ARC is named after the Iron Man reactor.
- KyleBerezin 3y ago
  It happened in 2013 lol. This is just about how its happening easier. This is a research milestone, it will help us model fusion plasma, but in no way is a prototype for a fusion power plant.
hannob 3y ago
I guess that means we will have another round of "this interesting result in basic research that has no relation to practical use of fusion energy shows that practical and commercially viable fusion energy is basically just around the corner".
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  The rate of progress is astounding. If growth is high, you can look nowhere near something, and then without too much time, it actually is right around the corner. We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100% non-nuclear "renewable" world. That's enough time for the entire lifecycle of nuclear reactors and fusion reactors. Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they can rely on, and is definitely interested in alternatives in less than 50 years - even if it means - in ideal conditions - they'd be overpaying for nuclear (or fusion if it becomes viable within 15 years). It's almost as if all the people working on these projects and funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite so reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly dismiss EVERY time any fusion article is posted.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they can rely on For some reason this thought reminded me of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Iron failed to displace bronze during the Bronze Age for two reasons: 1. It is technologically difficult to make. 2. It is mostly an inferior material. (Steel is a lot better than bronze, but that wasn't an option.) But the Bronze Age ended in a near-total collapse of the social order across most of Eurasia. International trade routes dried up. And iron was readily available everywhere in the world, whereas bronze was not even available to regions that mined their own copper, because they didn't have any tin. Interestingly enough, having your own local supplies of food and energy protects you from suddenly starving and freezing if a war should break out, but it makes everyone else a lot less safe from you, because now you're insulated from the consequences of war.
  - danhor 3y ago
    > We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100% non-nuclear "renewable" world. For electricity (which is the only energy category where nuclear makes sense) I see no reason to be this pessimistic (of course, depending on your definition of near 100%, but let's say 95%). Solar and Wind have strong growth prospects and are very economical, with reason to believe in further price reductions (especially for solar). As we've seen at COP, a lot of countries are planning to strongly build out renewables (a simple tripling, disregarding a lot of factors, leading to 45% share of renewables by 2030) and only a few are planning a much slower expansion of nuclear. Storage shows a lot of promise and very successful initial deployments for short duration storage and I see no reason to be more (or even as) optimistic about future development of nuclear & fusion reactors than chemical energy storage. > It's almost as if all the people working on these projects and funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite so reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly dismiss EVERY time any fusion article is posted. Or there's a reason why this is mostly funded by governments as a foundational work, presumably with hopes that fusion will be largely viable in the long term. If governments funding this work were hopeful that fusion would be economically viable within 15 years, you'd expect very large funding increases (especially from the private sector) and a reduction in investment for transforming the electricity grid away from big central power producers to more geographically diverse renewable supply.
superkuh 3y ago
Next step: achieving the actual energy break even instead of laser energy break even. That'll require improving it by an order of magnitude.
- KyleBerezin 3y ago
  Thats more like 10 steps away, not really the next step.
- armada651 3y ago
  It's not even laser energy break even if you count the energy used to actually generate the laser. It's only break even if you just count the energy from the laser going into the fuel pellet.
- vilhelm_s 3y ago
  Two orders of magnitude. (Currently they input 300 MJ of electricity and get 4 MJ of fusion.) The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director says it could be done in "probably decades — not six decades, I don’t think, not five decades, which is what we used to say." [https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-achieves-long-sought-fusion-goal https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-achi...]
  - armada651 3y ago
    If you count the efficiency of the steam turbines to actually generate electricity from the fusion thermal energy you'd need something like 750MJ of fusion energy to break even. (assuming your steam turbines are 40% efficient) Given that you'd want to actually generate electricity rather than just break even we're talking about three orders of magnitude rather than two.
    - donny2018 3y ago
      First computer fit in a hangar, consumed enormous amount of energy and provided a tiny fraction of the computing power that you now have in your smartphone. Just saying.
jl2718 3y ago
It’s a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things that have nothing at all to do with power generation, but, possibly great improvements over spallation sources for certain applications. Or, from the more bureaucratic viewpoint, it’s a successful sale of ‘science’ to the congress for your money. You paid about 0.1% of your gross income for it (ROM).
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things that have nothing at all to do with power generation We're still characterising how non-stellar fusion plasmas behave. It's valuable to be able to create that on demand. Also, this research is critical to modelling nuclear weapons without live tests.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- noobermin 3y ago
  Far ahead of you, a lot of the non-stewardship and non-ignition work of NIF is for creating neutrons, although you don't even need ignition levels of energy to make neutrons with lasers. Although the research is premature and the beams aren't as good as spallation sources, tabletop (as in a laser table a few metres across) ultra-intense laser systems have been generating neutron beams in a single room for almost a decade+ now, we just need to improve the beams and get the word out there.
- deepnotderp 3y ago
  Much in the same way that the “Wright brothers flight has nothing to do with transportation”
kaycebasques 3y ago
The article is hinting that there are weapons applications for this. What types of weapons would those be? Bombs? Are there any other countries with research programs similarly far along?
- webdoodle 3y ago
  Directed high energy weapons, as well as existing nuclear weapons.
- jpm_sd 3y ago
  Yes, nuclear bombs/warheads https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/nif-and-stockpile-stewardship https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/nif-and-stockpile-stewardshi...
- evo 3y ago
  It’s less that this allows new unprecedented weapons, and more that this allows one to validate material properties in similar conditions to a nuclear bomb detonation without actually testing a full scale device. This lets one verify and refine the otherwise “magic number” constants in computer simulation code that were empirically derived 50-80 years ago. Of course, if you’re a nascent nuclear power along the lines of NK, you just do full scale tests, treaties be damned.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    North Korea hasn't signed any treaties abolishing nuclear weapons tests. In point of fact, the USA itself hasn't ratified[0] any treaties prohibiting the type of underground tests the DPRK has conducted. The US chooses not to do those (and has maintained a voluntary moratorium since 1992), but is under no obligations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      Notwithstanding the US's deeply hypocritical stance on treaties it hasn't ratified but others must follow, North Korea did in 1985 sign the NPT which forbids them even building nuclear weapons, as well as the 1992 "South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" where they explicitly pledge not to test nuclear weapons (which they indeed didn't do until 2006). https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Helion's design seems way more promising than the NIF one which doesn't seem to have any clear path to being a "continuous" operation production design. Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve fusion conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo Helion have a contract with Microsoft to build a production model for them (to power a datacenter) by 2028. https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world...
- Nyubis 3y ago
  By 2028, not 2008.
  - carabiner 3y ago
    Enormous amounts of energy needed for the closed timelike curves to generate Kerr singularities with flux stored in a capacitor.
    - anonuser123456 3y ago
      My money is on the technology behind a flux capacitor maturing before Helion’s fusion tech.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    Thanks - corrected.
- KyleBerezin 3y ago
  Like all fusion reactors in the world currently, NIF was made for research, not as a prototype for a power plant. As it stands, NIF is the only non-bomb fusion device to reach the fusion breakeven point. If we are ignoring the research angle though, and are appraising the potential for commercial power production, Helion's design has a similar issue to NIF. Where a tokamak and similar designs create constant power, NIF and Helion's design have to generate power from sequential nuclear explosions. However for the purpose of research, NIF is indispensable; We can finally see and measure the behavior of true power positive fusion (without setting off a bomb). edit: breakeven means the reaction put out more power than the fuel took in. It does not mean the plant as a whole puts out more power than it takes, we aren't even close to that.
kmeisthax 3y ago
To be clear, NIF's ignition is getting more energy out of the fuel than the laser they hit it with put in, but there are other energy drains and inefficiencies in the system that make it nowhere close to break-even fusion energy. That requires building a new machine designed for continuous fusion detonations. So it's a scientific accomplishment, but not that scientific accomplishment.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  And they don't have any mechanism to capture the generated energy and convert it to electricity.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    What are the chances that will be anything other than the tried and true "boil some water to make steam to turn a turbine"
    - rzzzt 3y ago
      Fusion produces helium, you fill party balloons with it, they lift an anvil which falls on a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of string in half...
      - tmccrary55 3y ago
        The Incredible Fusion Machine
        rzzzt 3y ago
        Phew!
      - noobermin 3y ago
        This is like saying "burning gasoline produces CO2, how do you make energy with that?" Literally the quoted energy they use to calculate the ignition criterion for NIF is the neutron yield.
Projectiboga 3y ago
I'm looking forward to the Boron-11 based ones. Or any of the Aneutronic ones, as they used charged particles directly rather than by heat transfer and electric generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
macilacilove 3y ago
Can somebody explain, what exactly is "ignition"? If even a single helium atom is fused you have "more energy than you have put into it". That does not seem impressive.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  No, you have more energy than two separate helium atoms. You haven't counted the energy required to make them fuse in the first place.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    There is a nice Sankey diagram at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Sys... showing where the energy losses go.
- ynlefevre 3y ago
  this may help: https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/ignition https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/ignition
choeger 3y ago
Certainly a cool achievement and something to be proud of. Maybe even a very important step towards real usable fusion power plants. But: > The facility’s laser system is enormously inefficient, and more than 99% of the energy that goes into a single ignition attempt is lost before it can reach the target. So it's still two orders of magnitude off hitting break even. And that's without a suitable device to actually capture the released energy and it does not account for pellet production. For all we know, it might very well be three orders of magnitude away from a real powerplant. That being said, making more efficient lasers and working on capturing energy might be more fruitful than trying to improve a Tokamak design. So it's good to have options.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Far more efficient lasers already exist. Their lasers are old.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Two orders of magnitude more efficient?
    - DennisP 3y ago
      From 0.5% to over 20%, for equivalent lasers. So they still have work to do, but not as much you'd think without accounting for the old lasers.
      - deepnotderp 3y ago
        Are modern petawatt class lasers really 20% efficient?
Nifty3929 3y ago
I find it frustrating the the US Govt spends > $800B/yr on our "defense" while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart. Meanwhile, that same Govt spends < $1B on fusion, which could change the course of humanity. I'm usually the last person to suggest that the govt should spend money on things, but for goodness sake I wish we could at least get our priorities straight as far as what to spend the money on. If I didn't know better I'd think that the whole point of the defense department was to funnel money to well-connected corporations and execs.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  Source on running out of ammunition? I've never heard that about the US military before
- mushbino 3y ago
  I imagine it has a lot to do with oil company lobbying.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition Because they're actively being used in a war in Ukraine at a prodigious rate? And we're spending money ramping up production. And we're not "running out" -- we're keeping plenty to defend ourselves, we just want to be able to send Ukraine even more. > and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart. Source? This is the first I'm hearing of this. The US has the most powerful and capable military in the world. You're acting like we're spending money on it but are getting something cut-rate in return. But we're not.
  - throwaway1492 3y ago
    Too much fox/maga media/kremlin propaganda. All the ammo given to Ukraine has been expired and due to be disposed of.
  - photonbeam 3y ago
    otoh, Its the natural state of ships to be falling apart, they’re very maintenance heavy
Animats 3y ago
But not over and over and over again. "Scientists at the laboratory achieved ignition during two further attempts in October. And the laboratory’s calculations suggest that two others in June and September generated slightly more energy than the lasers provided, but not enough to confirm ignition." It's not like they're running an engine. Nobody has claimed that this approach is a useful power source since the 1970s. There was, at one time, talk of systems where pellets are injected, zapped with lasers, some fusion and heat results, and this is cycled at some high rate, maybe a few times per second. But that was really political cover for the National Ignition Facility, which is really for studying what happens in an H-bomb without setting one off. There's an pulsed fusion startup.[1] This is not laser-triggered fusion with inertial containment; it's a combo of magnetic containment and inertial containment, triggered by a huge electrical pulse applied to a plasma. Like the Z-machine at Sandia. They were supposed to have a demo by the end of 2023. Press releases stopped in July. Uh oh. [1] https://www.f.energy/ https://www.f.energy/
- Animats 3y ago
  Ah. Here's why the PR. They previously failed to replicate their earlier success.[1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02022-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02022-1
- DennisP 3y ago
  The startup you link is one of dozens, many of which are pulsed, with several being laser fusion specifically, including Longview, LaserFusionX, Xcimer Energy, Focused Energy, HB11 Energy, and Marvel Fusion.[1] NIF doesn't need political cover for weapons work. We openly spend a hundred times more on nuclear weapons than on fusion power. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-energy-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-ener...
  - DennisP 3y ago
    Here's the archive: https://archive.is/BCsf5 https://archive.is/BCsf5 The article also says "A decade ago, a report by the National Academy of Sciences found much to like in the energy potential of laser fusion but recommended that the United States hold off major investments until ignition was achieved. That time is now." Here is the NAS report: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv
hiddencost 3y ago
Does anyone know the triple product of their experiments? I've seen values ranging from 10^22 to 10^25. I was hoping to find an updated chart of the triple product over time but can't find anything more recent than 2019. See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion And this chart: https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-in-fusion-energy-the-triple-products https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-...
finnjohnsen2 3y ago
the end game here is so exciting, getting these news of the steps in the right direction is welcome in my book
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
“Ignition” in this sense is interesting physics. But it has absolutely nothing to do with power generation.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Half a dozen commercial laser fusion projects disagree with you. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-energy-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-ener...
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    Those companies are good at one thing: extracting money from VCs who are bad at math.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      The article mentions that the National Academy of Sciences also disagrees with you. Here is their report. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv
      - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
        I’d love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
        DennisP 3y ago
        Well there's something to be said for confidence I guess.
justin66 3y ago
> Developing more efficient laser systems is one goal of the DOE’s new inertial-fusion-energy research programme. This month, the agency announced US$42 million over four years to establish three new research centres — each involving a mix of national laboratories, university researchers and industry partners — that will work towards this and other advances. In other words, the government is spending enough to keep the lights on.

194 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

carabiner 3y ago

Holy shit it's happening...

doctorwho42 3y ago
Yes, but it's not ICF that will make it happen. It's MCF, look to SPARC and ARC being made by MIT & CFS in Massachusetts. Mark these words, by end of this decade we will have Q > 3 in an experimental MCF reactor and it will be SPARC. End of next decade we will have the first fusion power reactors (ARC). Whether they are used as on the grid solutions or instead heat sources for energy intensive processes (think chemical reactions, metal forges, etc ) in the 30's is yet to be determined.
- callalex 3y ago
  Can someone expand these acronyms for me please?
  - ublaze 3y ago
    ICF: Inertial Confinement Fusion MCF: Magnetic Confinement Fusion CFS is Commonwealth Fusion Systems - https://cfs.energy/ https://cfs.energy/ Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor. SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process. ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC. It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX). And yes, ARC is named after the Iron Man reactor.
KyleBerezin 3y ago
It happened in 2013 lol. This is just about how its happening easier. This is a research milestone, it will help us model fusion plasma, but in no way is a prototype for a fusion power plant.

hannob 3y ago

I guess that means we will have another round of "this interesting result in basic research that has no relation to practical use of fusion energy shows that practical and commercially viable fusion energy is basically just around the corner".

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
The rate of progress is astounding. If growth is high, you can look nowhere near something, and then without too much time, it actually is right around the corner. We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100% non-nuclear "renewable" world. That's enough time for the entire lifecycle of nuclear reactors and fusion reactors. Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they can rely on, and is definitely interested in alternatives in less than 50 years - even if it means - in ideal conditions - they'd be overpaying for nuclear (or fusion if it becomes viable within 15 years). It's almost as if all the people working on these projects and funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite so reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly dismiss EVERY time any fusion article is posted.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they can rely on For some reason this thought reminded me of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Iron failed to displace bronze during the Bronze Age for two reasons: 1. It is technologically difficult to make. 2. It is mostly an inferior material. (Steel is a lot better than bronze, but that wasn't an option.) But the Bronze Age ended in a near-total collapse of the social order across most of Eurasia. International trade routes dried up. And iron was readily available everywhere in the world, whereas bronze was not even available to regions that mined their own copper, because they didn't have any tin. Interestingly enough, having your own local supplies of food and energy protects you from suddenly starving and freezing if a war should break out, but it makes everyone else a lot less safe from you, because now you're insulated from the consequences of war.
- danhor 3y ago
  > We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100% non-nuclear "renewable" world. For electricity (which is the only energy category where nuclear makes sense) I see no reason to be this pessimistic (of course, depending on your definition of near 100%, but let's say 95%). Solar and Wind have strong growth prospects and are very economical, with reason to believe in further price reductions (especially for solar). As we've seen at COP, a lot of countries are planning to strongly build out renewables (a simple tripling, disregarding a lot of factors, leading to 45% share of renewables by 2030) and only a few are planning a much slower expansion of nuclear. Storage shows a lot of promise and very successful initial deployments for short duration storage and I see no reason to be more (or even as) optimistic about future development of nuclear & fusion reactors than chemical energy storage. > It's almost as if all the people working on these projects and funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite so reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly dismiss EVERY time any fusion article is posted. Or there's a reason why this is mostly funded by governments as a foundational work, presumably with hopes that fusion will be largely viable in the long term. If governments funding this work were hopeful that fusion would be economically viable within 15 years, you'd expect very large funding increases (especially from the private sector) and a reduction in investment for transforming the electricity grid away from big central power producers to more geographically diverse renewable supply.

superkuh 3y ago

Next step: achieving the actual energy break even instead of laser energy break even. That'll require improving it by an order of magnitude.

KyleBerezin 3y ago
Thats more like 10 steps away, not really the next step.
armada651 3y ago
It's not even laser energy break even if you count the energy used to actually generate the laser. It's only break even if you just count the energy from the laser going into the fuel pellet.
vilhelm_s 3y ago
Two orders of magnitude. (Currently they input 300 MJ of electricity and get 4 MJ of fusion.) The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director says it could be done in "probably decades — not six decades, I don’t think, not five decades, which is what we used to say." [https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-achieves-long-sought-fusion-goal https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-achi...]
- armada651 3y ago
  If you count the efficiency of the steam turbines to actually generate electricity from the fusion thermal energy you'd need something like 750MJ of fusion energy to break even. (assuming your steam turbines are 40% efficient) Given that you'd want to actually generate electricity rather than just break even we're talking about three orders of magnitude rather than two.
  - donny2018 3y ago
    First computer fit in a hangar, consumed enormous amount of energy and provided a tiny fraction of the computing power that you now have in your smartphone. Just saying.

jl2718 3y ago

It’s a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things that have nothing at all to do with power generation, but, possibly great improvements over spallation sources for certain applications. Or, from the more bureaucratic viewpoint, it’s a successful sale of ‘science’ to the congress for your money. You paid about 0.1% of your gross income for it (ROM).

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things that have nothing at all to do with power generation We're still characterising how non-stellar fusion plasmas behave. It's valuable to be able to create that on demand. Also, this research is critical to modelling nuclear weapons without live tests.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
noobermin 3y ago
Far ahead of you, a lot of the non-stewardship and non-ignition work of NIF is for creating neutrons, although you don't even need ignition levels of energy to make neutrons with lasers. Although the research is premature and the beams aren't as good as spallation sources, tabletop (as in a laser table a few metres across) ultra-intense laser systems have been generating neutron beams in a single room for almost a decade+ now, we just need to improve the beams and get the word out there.
deepnotderp 3y ago
Much in the same way that the “Wright brothers flight has nothing to do with transportation”

kaycebasques 3y ago

The article is hinting that there are weapons applications for this. What types of weapons would those be? Bombs? Are there any other countries with research programs similarly far along?

webdoodle 3y ago
Directed high energy weapons, as well as existing nuclear weapons.
jpm_sd 3y ago
Yes, nuclear bombs/warheads https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/nif-and-stockpile-stewardship https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/nif-and-stockpile-stewardshi...
evo 3y ago
It’s less that this allows new unprecedented weapons, and more that this allows one to validate material properties in similar conditions to a nuclear bomb detonation without actually testing a full scale device. This lets one verify and refine the otherwise “magic number” constants in computer simulation code that were empirically derived 50-80 years ago. Of course, if you’re a nascent nuclear power along the lines of NK, you just do full scale tests, treaties be damned.
- perihelions 3y ago
  North Korea hasn't signed any treaties abolishing nuclear weapons tests. In point of fact, the USA itself hasn't ratified[0] any treaties prohibiting the type of underground tests the DPRK has conducted. The US chooses not to do those (and has maintained a voluntary moratorium since 1992), but is under no obligations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    Notwithstanding the US's deeply hypocritical stance on treaties it hasn't ratified but others must follow, North Korea did in 1985 sign the NPT which forbids them even building nuclear weapons, as well as the 1992 "South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" where they explicitly pledge not to test nuclear weapons (which they indeed didn't do until 2006). https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Helion's design seems way more promising than the NIF one which doesn't seem to have any clear path to being a "continuous" operation production design. Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve fusion conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo Helion have a contract with Microsoft to build a production model for them (to power a datacenter) by 2028. https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world...

Nyubis 3y ago
By 2028, not 2008.
- carabiner 3y ago
  Enormous amounts of energy needed for the closed timelike curves to generate Kerr singularities with flux stored in a capacitor.
  - anonuser123456 3y ago
    My money is on the technology behind a flux capacitor maturing before Helion’s fusion tech.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Thanks - corrected.
KyleBerezin 3y ago
Like all fusion reactors in the world currently, NIF was made for research, not as a prototype for a power plant. As it stands, NIF is the only non-bomb fusion device to reach the fusion breakeven point. If we are ignoring the research angle though, and are appraising the potential for commercial power production, Helion's design has a similar issue to NIF. Where a tokamak and similar designs create constant power, NIF and Helion's design have to generate power from sequential nuclear explosions. However for the purpose of research, NIF is indispensable; We can finally see and measure the behavior of true power positive fusion (without setting off a bomb). edit: breakeven means the reaction put out more power than the fuel took in. It does not mean the plant as a whole puts out more power than it takes, we aren't even close to that.

kmeisthax 3y ago

To be clear, NIF's ignition is getting more energy out of the fuel than the laser they hit it with put in, but there are other energy drains and inefficiencies in the system that make it nowhere close to break-even fusion energy. That requires building a new machine designed for continuous fusion detonations. So it's a scientific accomplishment, but not that scientific accomplishment.

dist-epoch 3y ago
And they don't have any mechanism to capture the generated energy and convert it to electricity.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  What are the chances that will be anything other than the tried and true "boil some water to make steam to turn a turbine"
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    Fusion produces helium, you fill party balloons with it, they lift an anvil which falls on a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of string in half...
    - tmccrary55 3y ago
      The Incredible Fusion Machine
      - rzzzt 3y ago
        Phew!
    - noobermin 3y ago
      This is like saying "burning gasoline produces CO2, how do you make energy with that?" Literally the quoted energy they use to calculate the ignition criterion for NIF is the neutron yield.

Projectiboga 3y ago

I'm looking forward to the Boron-11 based ones. Or any of the Aneutronic ones, as they used charged particles directly rather than by heat transfer and electric generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

macilacilove 3y ago

Can somebody explain, what exactly is "ignition"? If even a single helium atom is fused you have "more energy than you have put into it". That does not seem impressive.

dist-epoch 3y ago
No, you have more energy than two separate helium atoms. You haven't counted the energy required to make them fuse in the first place.
- eesmith 3y ago
  There is a nice Sankey diagram at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Sys... showing where the energy losses go.
ynlefevre 3y ago
this may help: https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/ignition https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/ignition

choeger 3y ago

Certainly a cool achievement and something to be proud of. Maybe even a very important step towards real usable fusion power plants. But: > The facility’s laser system is enormously inefficient, and more than 99% of the energy that goes into a single ignition attempt is lost before it can reach the target. So it's still two orders of magnitude off hitting break even. And that's without a suitable device to actually capture the released energy and it does not account for pellet production. For all we know, it might very well be three orders of magnitude away from a real powerplant. That being said, making more efficient lasers and working on capturing energy might be more fruitful than trying to improve a Tokamak design. So it's good to have options.

DennisP 3y ago
Far more efficient lasers already exist. Their lasers are old.
- SamBam 3y ago
  Two orders of magnitude more efficient?
  - DennisP 3y ago
    From 0.5% to over 20%, for equivalent lasers. So they still have work to do, but not as much you'd think without accounting for the old lasers.
    - deepnotderp 3y ago
      Are modern petawatt class lasers really 20% efficient?

Nifty3929 3y ago

I find it frustrating the the US Govt spends > $800B/yr on our "defense" while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart. Meanwhile, that same Govt spends < $1B on fusion, which could change the course of humanity. I'm usually the last person to suggest that the govt should spend money on things, but for goodness sake I wish we could at least get our priorities straight as far as what to spend the money on. If I didn't know better I'd think that the whole point of the defense department was to funnel money to well-connected corporations and execs.

SteveNuts 3y ago
Source on running out of ammunition? I've never heard that about the US military before
mushbino 3y ago
I imagine it has a lot to do with oil company lobbying.
crazygringo 3y ago
> while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition Because they're actively being used in a war in Ukraine at a prodigious rate? And we're spending money ramping up production. And we're not "running out" -- we're keeping plenty to defend ourselves, we just want to be able to send Ukraine even more. > and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart. Source? This is the first I'm hearing of this. The US has the most powerful and capable military in the world. You're acting like we're spending money on it but are getting something cut-rate in return. But we're not.
- throwaway1492 3y ago
  Too much fox/maga media/kremlin propaganda. All the ammo given to Ukraine has been expired and due to be disposed of.
- photonbeam 3y ago
  otoh, Its the natural state of ships to be falling apart, they’re very maintenance heavy

Animats 3y ago

But not over and over and over again. "Scientists at the laboratory achieved ignition during two further attempts in October. And the laboratory’s calculations suggest that two others in June and September generated slightly more energy than the lasers provided, but not enough to confirm ignition." It's not like they're running an engine. Nobody has claimed that this approach is a useful power source since the 1970s. There was, at one time, talk of systems where pellets are injected, zapped with lasers, some fusion and heat results, and this is cycled at some high rate, maybe a few times per second. But that was really political cover for the National Ignition Facility, which is really for studying what happens in an H-bomb without setting one off. There's an pulsed fusion startup.[1] This is not laser-triggered fusion with inertial containment; it's a combo of magnetic containment and inertial containment, triggered by a huge electrical pulse applied to a plasma. Like the Z-machine at Sandia. They were supposed to have a demo by the end of 2023. Press releases stopped in July. Uh oh. [1] https://www.f.energy/ https://www.f.energy/

Animats 3y ago
Ah. Here's why the PR. They previously failed to replicate their earlier success.[1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02022-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02022-1
DennisP 3y ago
The startup you link is one of dozens, many of which are pulsed, with several being laser fusion specifically, including Longview, LaserFusionX, Xcimer Energy, Focused Energy, HB11 Energy, and Marvel Fusion.[1] NIF doesn't need political cover for weapons work. We openly spend a hundred times more on nuclear weapons than on fusion power. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-energy-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-ener...
- DennisP 3y ago
  Here's the archive: https://archive.is/BCsf5 https://archive.is/BCsf5 The article also says "A decade ago, a report by the National Academy of Sciences found much to like in the energy potential of laser fusion but recommended that the United States hold off major investments until ignition was achieved. That time is now." Here is the NAS report: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv

hiddencost 3y ago

Does anyone know the triple product of their experiments? I've seen values ranging from 10^22 to 10^25. I was hoping to find an updated chart of the triple product over time but can't find anything more recent than 2019. See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion And this chart: https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-in-fusion-energy-the-triple-products https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-...

finnjohnsen2 3y ago

the end game here is so exciting, getting these news of the steps in the right direction is welcome in my book

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

“Ignition” in this sense is interesting physics. But it has absolutely nothing to do with power generation.

DennisP 3y ago
Half a dozen commercial laser fusion projects disagree with you. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-energy-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-ener...
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  Those companies are good at one thing: extracting money from VCs who are bad at math.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    The article mentions that the National Academy of Sciences also disagrees with you. Here is their report. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18289/chapter/1#xv
    - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
      I’d love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
      - DennisP 3y ago
        Well there's something to be said for confidence I guess.

justin66 3y ago

> Developing more efficient laser systems is one goal of the DOE’s new inertial-fusion-energy research programme. This month, the agency announced US$42 million over four years to establish three new research centres — each involving a mix of national laboratories, university researchers and industry partners — that will work towards this and other advances. In other words, the government is spending enough to keep the lights on.