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Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
- davidklemke 13y agoWasn't this milestone reached sometime late last year? I remember writing about it: http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2013/10/08/fusion-milestone-reached-many-more-to-go/ http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2013/10/08/fusion...
- dredmorbius 13y agoYes, though NPR's reporting is less than clear on this. The Nature article referenced was submitted in early November.
- diydsp 13y agolessee: refinedgeek, 10/8/2013: "However NIF has announced today that, for the first time ever for any fusion experiment, their reaction released more energy than what was pumped into it;" where there's a link to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621 which says (10/7/2013) "The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel - the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world." meanwhile NPR on 2/12/2014 says: "Omar Hurricane, a researcher at, says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says." We've always been at war with Eastasia.
- diydsp 13y agop.s. Here's an article from October 5, 2012 which in a very biased way dismissed the possibility of this happening.... then it happened, TWO DAYS LATER [1] > The lab's leaders predict that "ignition"-—the point where the 192 lasers actually deliver more energy than they consume—could occur as early as next year. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/national-ignition-facility-mother-of-all-boondoggles http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/national-...
- ck2 13y agoOh please. That whole "fusion" thing from that facility is a trick to get taxpayers to fund more nuclear weapon research. We should have finished this instead, what a waste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider Take a guess why congress only funded the one useful for weapons.
- EthanHeilman 13y agoGiven that hydrogen bombs are fusion bombs such a claim can be leveled at all fusion research. Maybe nuclear weapons research is the way they get the US government to shell out for fusion research, like the optics researchers did with SDI.
- arethuza 13y agoActually, most of the energy in most H-bomb designs actually comes from fission - but the neutrons that cause this fission come from the fusion of the secondary - so fusion is the key component of the whole thing working. A notable exception to this was the Soviet Tsar Bomba which used non-fissioning tampers in its multiple tertiary (and probably its single secondary) stages - resulting in an explosion of over 50Mt where 97% came from fusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- bad_alloc 13y agoAll research into nuclear energy can be used for nuclear weapons. A nuclear reactor is just a well-cooled bomb that isn't supposed to explode violently (so to speak).
- fennecfoxen 13y agoCool! If we ever have WWIII, I'm going to drop a well-cooled H-bomb that uses laser-based confinement mechanism to not explode violently on my enemies. In fact, I await their preemptive surrender even now.
- mikehotel 13y agoHurricane says no one knows for sure whether NIF can really reach the point of ignition. "It's not up to me; it's up to Mother Nature," he says. "But we're certainly going to try."
- dj-wonk 13y agoThis sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change. Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to? Instead, we should be asking what we've learned and how the project has advanced science.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoThat's not enough. Learning what doesn't work is sort of useful, but only if it ever leads to something that DOES work. There's an infinite supply of dead ends out there. You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
- vivin 13y agoI would assume that they are only working with a narrow subset of dead ends. They probably have promising leads and work on those. I think it's a constant process of refinement.
- dj-wonk 13y agoIt depends what question you are asking. If the question is "should we fund projects even if we don't know if or when they will have demonstrable results?" then I would argue that, yes, some portion of research should go towards that. How long is "long enough" to deem that a line of experimentation "didn't work out?" There is no period long enough. Sometimes a negative result is quite useful down the road. Some research just comes together when the right things are learned and tried. So any notion of a "dead end" is really just a tentative assessment, frozen in time.
- JackFr 13y agoWithout harsh assessments, a massive project will eventually dedicate some of its resources into self-perpetuation, that is justifying its existence rather than producing results.
- acidburnNSA 13y ago"Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off." The rest was lost to energy conversion losses. Yeah, not the best breakthrough I've heard today. Their best breakthrough was this CAD-flythrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sp1sDpn_M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sp1sDpn_M0
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Kroem3r 13y agoThis is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"? After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question. I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling nuclear weapons is an even greater waste of time. It's all kind of a sad epigraph about national science and technology initiatives. Assuming the modest proposition that fusion energy is possible, why not make fusion energy a 'man on the moon' kind of national goal? It's hardly in doubt that we need a large source of clean energy. Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a failure of the political system - Can't get Bubba to vote for no fusion thing. Is the status quo energy system resistant to change? Whatever, the NIF thing just makes me depressed.
- lisper 13y ago> This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"? It's not newsworthy, but most reporters are not educated enough to tell the difference between a real breakthrough and a bogus press release.
- hotpockets 13y agoIt is newsworthy. We generated fusion be shining light at molecules, which never has been done before. Aside from that, if you read the article you became slightly more science literate.
- gus_massa 13y agoFusion with laser has been done before, by the same team. The difference is that they improve the experiment and this time they get ~50% more energy. Or if you evaluate it in other words, the efficiency improve from ~0.6% to 1%, or less depending on what do you define by input energy. More details in other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227620
- 13y ago
- ginko 13y agoIt was always my understanding that achieving nuclear fusion wasn't the problem. You can do that with a tabletop device like a Farnsworth Fusor. The hard part is getting more energy out of it than you put in.
- Oculus 13y ago> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the world's military spending on these big, as Google likes to put it, moonshot projects we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future vs. waiting many, many decades (if not centuries).
- pfraze 13y agoJust want to toss in, I think military applications are much easier for the layman to conceptualize. You hear science research and your gut doesn't send any strong signals.
- valarauca1 13y agoThe cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2] [1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
- Oculus 13y agoThe B-2 Bomber is child's play compared to the F-35's 1 Trillion USD program [1], but the comparison to the LHC's pricetag really puts things in prespective. 1: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighter-idUSBRE82S03L20120329 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighte...
- dmix 13y agoOr even better failed military projects, such as the $25+ billion spent on a spy satellite project before it was killed in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office#Future_Imagery_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
- acomjean 13y agoAfter the Fleischmann–Pons Cold fusion debacle of the late 1980's at least journalists are asking the right questions. did you get more energy out than you put in? Fusion is hard.
- ddorian43 13y agoExplained on reddit very well: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1xq78u/scientists_have_created_nuclear_fusion/cfdmt5k http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1xq78u/scientists_h...
- sTevo-In-VA 13y agoSounds like a 'needs more funding' article to me.
- edgarvm 13y agoI think they deserve it
- stcredzero 13y agoOne of the proposed drives for the Daedalus starship design involved laser fusion. The pellet would detonate and would push against a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust, like the Orion nuclear craft, but more efficient. Also, the expanding magnetic fields could cause induced currents in networks of wires designed to capture energy, powering the ship and the next detonation.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoHere's the paper. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature-ally. The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289 [WaPo] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion-energy-milestone-reported-by-california-scientists/2014/02/12/f511ed18-936b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion... The "1%" energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_and_ICF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF... [a] I'm referring to this: "while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel." (update: from yosyp's link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoAs I understand, they are hoping to achieve fusion ignition, where no additional external energy will be required to generate power. So current efficiency calculations are irrelevant in that case.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoYes, but in the article they also say this isn't possible with their current techniques. Anyone have a figure that represents how far off they are?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
- jackmaney 13y agoIt all fits into my evil plan! You see, I plan to use this "laser" to turn the moon into a weapon. With this "death star", all the governments of the world will be powerless against me! If they try to stop me, I'll use the "death star" to create "nuclear fusion"! [holds right pinky to the corner of his mouth]
- microtherion 13y agoYeah, I was visualizing the scientists making air quotes around “Laser” at the press conference.
- smartistone 13y agojust have a fat person sit on it
- rglover 13y agoAnybody else excited that one of the guys working on fusion power is named "Mr. Hurricane?"
- Ogre 13y agoI thought it was kind of hard to take the article seriously after that. I know it's the guy's real name, so I feel bad about this (as bad as I can feel for someone with an awesome name!), but it doesn't change that it sounds like something from a comic book. A fusion scientist named Omar Hurricane? Come on! Next thing we hear is there's been a horrible lab accident involving high powered lasers and lead scientist Omar Hurricane has died. Only he hasn't really, he escaped death and and went into hiding, avoiding public shame while also training to use his new found weather controlling laser eyes. But for good or for evil? Is Mr. Hurricane a villain or a hero? Buy the next issue to find out!
- tosseraccount 13y agoGovernment funded science is winding up behind a private paywall?
- wildster 13y agoLike Thorium this does not prove that it will ever be commercially viable source of energy.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sytelus 13y agoBottom line: It's not self-sustaining fusion. Still long long away from that milestone.
- evanb 13y agoLink to LLNL release: https://www.llnl.gov/news/aroundthelab/2014/Feb/NR-14-02-06.html#.Uvwt3EJdWio https://www.llnl.gov/news/aroundthelab/2014/Feb/NR-14-02-06....
- blazespin 13y agoFor less than a billionth of a second. Please.. It could easily be measurement error they are using as a last ditch effort to continue funding.
- drjesusphd 13y agoEvery time the NIF PR folks make a new overindulgent claim, the press always falls for it, and I don't know why. Every. Fucking. Time.
- alex_doom 13y ago> Omar Hurricane, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory That is one awesome name.