[HN Gopher] Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
___________________________________________________________________
Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
Author : zackoverflow
Score : 464 points
Date : 2022-12-11 18:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| [deleted]
| Doorstep2077 wrote:
| I keep seeing lots of talks of nuclear energy being the next
| greatest form of energy, but ever since Chernobyl, it seems like
| people are afraid even though Chernobyl was a one-off incident
| that wasn't regulated well.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The 457th "breakthrough" in fusion this year...
| lambdatronics wrote:
| I would say there have been a handful of important milestones
| this year, but this I would consider a breakthrough. Most of
| the other stuff is overhyped for sure.
| riffic wrote:
| good, keep em coming.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 10k more and we might actually make some progress. Just 20
| more years!
| motoxpro wrote:
| From the article.
|
| "Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are
| still decades away, the technology's potential is hard to
| ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-
| lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen
| fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of
| years."
|
| Not sure if you were expecting things to progress faster.
| But it it "only" takes 20 years. That would be insanely
| fast and world changing.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Sorry, I was actually making a joke: fusion power has
| been described as "a decade away for the last 50 years"
| which I think sums it up pretty well...
|
| https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is-
| alw...
|
| The potential is hard to ignore, but that doesn't mean
| the potential will ever be achieved. This (like crypto
| currency) is the realm of vapourware I am afraid. Always
| just around the corner. :(
| weberer wrote:
| >vaporware
|
| Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in
| 2025.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
| LatteLazy wrote:
| What's sort of my point: we've had big projects that
| would totally definitely work this time every few years
| since the 90s. Will ITER work? Maybe. Would it be the
| first to fail (or even the 10th) if it doesn't? No. Per
| your own link there are literally 100s of other
| "reactors".
|
| Its the same as crypto or emissions reductions.
| omniglottal wrote:
| What value are you contributing to this conversation?
| tazjin wrote:
| I remember hearing about ITER back in school, a long time
| ago, and being told that they were just about to finally
| assemble the thing now.
|
| That's pretty much the definition of vaporware, but maybe
| it will actually go the route of Duke Nukem :)
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| It is being assembled right now, it is just taking a
| bloody long time to do so.
| simiones wrote:
| > produce no long-lived radioactive waste
|
| It's important to note that while this is technically
| true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material
| that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but
| instead you get much more highly radioactive material
| that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or
| so.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's worth noting that the last 2 generations of fission
| plants were guaranteed to produce no waste, to be cheap,
| efficient, reliable etc. The unpalatable truth here is
| that we have no idea what fusion power will look like
| until we have built a few. The quoted section made me
| laugh as it's easy to be zero carbon when you don't
| actually exist... :)
| zackoverflow wrote:
| Can you elaborate more about the guarantees about no
| waste?
| fusion_for_all wrote:
| came to HN to post this!! Potentially 2.5 megajoule output from
| 2.1 input
| mirekrusin wrote:
| ...where 2.1 "input" is generated from >400 input.
| [deleted]
| hannob wrote:
| Usual caveat about all fusion "got more energy out than we put
| in" stories: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-
| is-nucle...
|
| From a quick skimming it seems only one of the experts quoted
| here even mentions that (Tony Roulstone).
|
| (Update: i wrote this comment in response to another story and
| the comment got moved here, so it lost a bit of context
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958678&ref=upstract.c... -
| the press release indeed does mention this caveat, but many news
| stories missed it)
| [deleted]
| tunesmith wrote:
| So... Q-plasma is above 1 for the first time, which is a huge
| deal.
|
| Q-total is still below 1, but some of that can be improved
| through already-known laser efficiency advancements, and also
| by pushing Q-plasma higher.
|
| I think pushing Q-plasma above 1 is the big gate though, isn't
| it? I mean, partly psychologically. Showing that it's actually
| technically possible.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > all fusion "got more energy out than we put in"
|
| I'm curious - given that this is the first time we have ever
| done this (even with the constrained definition as discussed in
| this article), how there can be a '"usual caveat" about all of
| the "got more energy out than we put in" stories'?
|
| AFAICT, this is the first such "story" to have ever happened
| artificially in history.
| guelo wrote:
| The caveat still applied when experiments reported energy
| gains below 1.0.
| idlewords wrote:
| Because all the interest of these stories is in fusion as a
| source of energy, and there's a long history of declaring
| we're near to break-even by leaving the most energy intensive
| part of the apparatus out of the equation.
|
| With no disrespect to the researchers in this experiment,
| it's not like we're surprised that fusion works or that a
| pellet can generate more power than is put in.
| kelnos wrote:
| Because people like to shit on fusion, sometimes
| understandably so, after decades of over-promising and under-
| delivering. It's annoying and tiring, but there we have it.
|
| Yes, it's true that in this case we didn't actually "get more
| energy out than we put in" when considering the full closed
| system, but the point of this research was to see if they
| could get more energy out of the reaction itself than was put
| into it by the lasers themselves. Presumably the next step is
| to see how far they can push this, still without bothering to
| think about the energy needed to power the lasers themselves,
| because, again, that is not the purpose of this research.
| There are other people working on making lasers more
| efficient, and the overall project will benefit from that
| research (and so will the NIF, if they decide it's worthwhile
| to upgrade their 90s-era lasers to something modern).
|
| I think a lot of people here are having knee-jerk reactions
| and didn't read the article where they very clearly explain
| the caveat and what the researchers actually did.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| To be fair to the original commentator, their comment was
| moved from a different article where it was not so clearly
| explained.
| operator-name wrote:
| "That's because they had to use 500 MJ of energy into the
| lasers to deliver 1.8 MJ to the target - so even though they
| got 2.5 MJ out, it's still far less than the energy they needed
| for the lasers in the first place. In other words, the energy
| output (largely heat energy) was still only 0.5% of the input."
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Converting the heat energy to electricity loses an additional
| 50-70%.
| DennisP wrote:
| Partly that's because they use laser tech from the 1990s,
| with less than 1% efficiency. Now we have NIF-class lasers
| with over 20% efficiency.
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102.
| ..
| ghostly_s wrote:
| They'd still be getting only ~1/4 of power input with a 20%
| efficiency laser.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| Yes, but the overall we get "more power out of the
| building then we put in" isn't the goal. They are trying
| to drive the Q factor of the reaction itself up. If they
| get that to > 5x what the laser strike hits (a very real
| probability) it's likely trying to make a building that
| has a net positive Q makes sense.
|
| That building would use modern lasers, modern
| supercapactiors, etc. to significantly change the "other"
| parts of the equation.
| eloff wrote:
| I don't see that scaling anytime soon, still more than two
| orders of magnitude away. But never say never.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| If they replaced the lasers in this building from the 90's
| with a modern light source it would immediately do two
| orders of magnitude. Research like this needs to focus on
| solving, and experimenting with one problem (in this case
| the physics of inertial confinement fusion). They are not
| _trying_ to build something which gets "net power out of
| the building". So don't assume you're net in, net out
| ratios are representative of what a plant targeted doing
| that would be.
|
| It's quite easy to see that replacing the lasers, the
| capacitors, etc. with more modern technology would have an
| immediate effect. But it doesn't matter until doing the
| reaction at all makes sense. That's what they are focusing
| on.
| jerf wrote:
| The exact numbers depend on the form of fusion in question,
| but fusion does have some several places where it has quite
| substantial x^n growth possibilities, where "n" is
| definitely greater than one and can be greater than two at
| times, sometimes even substantially so. This means that
| there is some real, concrete hope for improvement in a way
| that, say, solar could never improve more than 4-5x where
| it is now because the absolutely best it could ever hope
| for is 100% efficiency. At the core, this is because as you
| get the plasma hotter and more confined, the rate of fusion
| goes up very quickly, much much beyond linear increases.
| eloff wrote:
| This is laser based fusion, which is super cool, but it
| might be a stretch to expect 200x more efficient lasers.
| Still maybe there's other things you could do, like make
| a bigger fusion reaction. Hydrogen bombs do it, so maybe.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| The lasers they use today are 20x less efficient than
| state of the art. The capacitors are also massively less
| efficient. So they only "need" to drive the Q factor of
| the reaction up by ~5x to be positioned to build
| something with a net energy gain.
|
| Because of the physics of fusion (or ICF) returns on
| power are non linear. It's very much possible research
| here results in a path to a "net gain facility".
| alephnil wrote:
| And they mention this right in the press release. Quote:
|
| "The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows
| that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the
| laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is
| needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to
| account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although
| the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt
| forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore
| National Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of
| result about once a day - a fusion power plant would need to do
| it ten times per second. However, the important takeaway point
| is that the basic science is now clearly well understood, and
| this should spur further investment. It is encouraging to see
| that the private sector is starting to wake up to the
| possibilities, although still long term, of these important
| emerging technologies."
|
| While this spins it in an optimistic way, the challenges to
| make this work are significant. The laser is quite inefficient,
| so the gain must be much much larger before you have net energy
| gain. To scale it up to implode a capsule tens of times a
| second rather than a few times a day, is in the order of
| 100.000 times more frequent than today.Thus this is a long way
| from commercial production.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| The NIF uses lasers produced in the 90's because their core
| mission isn't to make lasers better. We already have lasers
| which are 20x more efficient, and hitting a pellet 10*s is a
| trivial task. Those lasers can fire a 1khz or better. The EUV
| light sources for semiconductor lithography do this tens of
| thousands of times a second.
|
| The goal of the research being done at NIF is to understand
| inertial confinement fusion. "Solving" these other problems
| isn't as important, other folks are solving these all day
| long for commercial industries already.
| steve_avery wrote:
| I have personally taken a tour of the NIF at Livermore. The guide
| was an old hand, who constantly remarked about the efforts of NIF
| towards "stockpile stewardship," ie the maintenance of the US
| arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed like NIF was all about the
| stockpile stewardship first, and fusion research was a secondary
| consideration.
|
| The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy
| that they impart on the Hohlraum itself is neat, but I constantly
| discount any milestones that Livermore/NIF report, because the
| inertial confinement approach has such higher barriers to
| commercialization than tokamak style approaches, that I just
| consign it to "boondoggle" in my head.
|
| Yeah, the lasers could be 20x more efficient, and yeah, they
| probably could figure out how to pump 10s of targets into the
| chamber per second, but the energy extraction is just completely
| missing from the considerations. The engineering challenges are a
| whole 'nother level for NIF, a big barrier to usability.
| DennisP wrote:
| Seems like energy extraction would be similar to other D-T
| designs: surround the reaction chamber with molten FLiBe or
| lead-lithium and run some coolant pipes through it.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| What is your opinion of ITER?
| https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nucle...
| petermcneeley wrote:
| What is "zero-carbon" in this context? No graphite control rods?
| elil17 wrote:
| I think it's there for people who may not be familiar with what
| fusion energy is, so they can understand that it's a potential
| climate change solution.
| [deleted]
| SuperFine wrote:
| There are no control rods in fusion reactors.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It means no fossil fuels required to sustain the reaction, and
| no carbon emissions resulting from it.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| A fusion rector does not have control rods. It has a magnetic
| containment field around a plasma which is, something like 10x
| hotter than the sun. if you put a control rod in there it would
| instantly vaporize.
| HillRat wrote:
| At the risk of being pedantic, if this is the LLNL NIF, then
| it's ICF, not MCF, though putting a graphite rod at the heart
| of a laser-driven thermonuclear event probably looks about
| the same either way.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| It's unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole. Of course there will
| still be carbon emissions from the production of the reactor
| parts and the sourcing of fuel ingredients. The potential
| benefits of working fusion are far greater than carbon worries,
| and the media sells it short with narrow-minded labeling.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Just because _you_ understand the impact of fusion on carbon
| emissions, does not mean
|
| >It's unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole
|
| OP's question provides evidence that not all people
| understand the carbon benefits of this technology.
| Ruq wrote:
| The pessimist in me says that some building(s) are going to burn
| down, one or more persons will be found with two bullet wounds as
| "obvious suicide", and that any and all supporting documents will
| be "lost".
|
| Because we simply cannot live in a world where we are independent
| from the current power structure. They won't allow it.
|
| Hopefully I'm wrong, I'd love to see progress in energy
| production that is actually sustainable.
| megaman821 wrote:
| This is like the "great-man" theory applied to scientific
| research. Even if this were to happen, I don't think it would
| matter much in the long term. The scientific community seems to
| independently come up with the same or similar solutions to the
| problems being concentrated on.
| 93po wrote:
| We'll see the same thing we see around fission. Lobbying and
| fear mongering. Politicians lining their pockets in exchange
| for delaying and blocking and refusing to fund fusion.
| NN88 wrote:
| do I just wait until this gets walked back or...?
| jcadam wrote:
| When can I pick up a Mr Fusion at Home Depot?
| flowersjeff wrote:
| I just hope it isn't another ( there's been more than one ) NASA
| level "announcement" on astrobiology that's going to rewrite the
| "book". These sorts of headline grabs do nothing to help in the
| end. This is feeling like another one of these, and I'm hoping to
| be proven wrong - as who wouldn't love a mr. fusion in their
| future.
| greybox wrote:
| I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission. Surely
| Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given
| enough fissionable material).
|
| What will Fusion give us that Fission can't already? Is it safer
| perhaps?
| 93po wrote:
| > I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission
|
| Realistically, today, it's only better because of decades of
| lobbying and propaganda for fear mongering around fission.
| There is no reason why nuclear energy couldn't be the vast
| majority producer of all electricity in the world while
| massively lowering environmental damage and loss of human life.
|
| Long term, fusion might be better because it can produce a lot
| more energy and be safer. I feel like the safety improvement is
| negligible however compared to modern fission reactors that are
| properly maintained and governed.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I think it's just like thorium molten salt reactors. It's a new
| awesomer kind of nuclear energy that doesn't have any of the
| baggage of fission!
|
| Certainly, fusion does have the big advantage that it makes far
| fewer Curies of radioactive material per kWh as it operates.
| That has been the main driver of nuclear fission safety and
| waste issues.
|
| On the other hand, there are good arguments suggesting that
| conventional fission has been reasonably good at containing and
| controlling the radiation, such that it's among the safest and
| cleanest forms of energy known already. But the PR issue is a
| hard one, and people don't think like actuaries.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Issues of potential output and safety considerations aside:
|
| > Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy
| (given enough fissionable material).
|
| The crux of the problem is, there is a limited supply of
| fissionable material. If we manage to survive as a species, our
| energy demand will continue to grow, and one day we would meet
| a hard cap, limiting what humanity as a species, is able to do.
|
| As a very very rough estimate, if we burnt through all the
| fissionable material that we have available on earth, it would
| be about enough energy to launch the mass of Mt. Everest into
| orbit. Long term (as in, many generations from now) we will
| need more energy than that.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| I think the main difference is safety. Simplifying /
| IAMAPhysicist, but you can't get a runaway chain reaction with
| Fusion, and the reaction tends to just burn itself out if you
| shut it off.
|
| That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the
| public perception of it is not good.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Very encouraging to see at least some enthusiasm for this. This
| is the real way forward.
|
| We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward
| with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just
| redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to
| eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the
| rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives
| in the first place.
| leaving wrote:
| You are correct. We need to control our own numbers at a
| sustainable level.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| The net energy gain is very slim and has to be converted to
| electricity to power the lasers - in doing so, there's so much
| loss, it is again NEGATIVE.
|
| It's always the same...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This isn't the same; this hasn't been done before.
|
| New things are hard. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Presenting the progress of fusion in such a way to give the
| impression that commercialisation is right around the corner
| has been done before.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Nothing like commercialization happens without an insane
| amount of work. It's easy to criticize, hard to actually
| help.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Yes because it's hard to make fusion viable since 50
| years my guy...
|
| Am I talking to a ChatGPT instance or what is happening
| here. Let's find out :D
|
| \\\\\vig-128 ?{/subject unlink;;;
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| I guess I don't really get it. Nobody doubts that you can get a
| tremendous output of energy from a fusion bomb with modest
| inputs. This thing they've ignited is a tiny fusion weapon
| without a fission blanket and with a huge, inconvenient optical
| primary. I mean I'm all for science but I don't see the road from
| this to civilian fusion power as people generally understand the
| term.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This is like a version 1.0 steam engine. Miniaturization and
| optimization can come next.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The analogy doesn't really work. The utility of a steam
| engine was obvious to antiquity, but they did not have the
| materials technology to build it. They did not need basic
| science to do steam power. The first practical steam engine
| predates the understanding by chemists of combustion. It was
| invented when phlogiston was still the going theory.
|
| NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials
| science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the
| list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to
| inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On
| the other side you can make that list for magnetic
| confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement
| research to commercialization, with a known set of major
| problems.
| thehappypm wrote:
| People in antiquity did build a functioning steam-powered
| engine, but dismissed it as a curiosity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
| ufmace wrote:
| This fascinating article goes into more detail on the
| reasons why: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-
| why-no-roman-indus...
|
| They correctly dismissed it as a curiosity because it was
| far too inefficient to do anything useful with the
| amounts of fuel they would have had available. They
| couldn't have made a more efficient one because they
| didn't have any idea how to construct reasonably uniform
| pressure-bearing cylinders.
|
| Real innovation didn't happen until much later on, at
| British coal mines because 1. there was lots of fuel
| because it's already at a coal mine, 2. there was a
| useful task for the work in pumping water out of the
| mine, and 3. materials technology had advanced enough to
| make it possible to construct an engine that did a useful
| amount of work from a manageable amount of fuel.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, this is like research into TNT being presented as a
| potential way of creating a power plant by capturing the
| energy of the explosion. The real purpose is producing better
| explosives.
|
| This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is
| officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and
| improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely
| imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very
| best a bonus.
|
| Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10
| million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered
| "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum).
|
| The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal
| walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it
| emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that
| those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the
| same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that
| they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a
| chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel
| before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time
| all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that
| explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion
| process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably
| destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw
| material for the next hohlraum.
|
| Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation
| as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed
| every time the fuel ignites.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I'm not following exactly--are the lasers destroyed after
| each shot? The fuel being destroyed of course makes sense..
| idlewords wrote:
| The problem is you can say that about any wildly inefficient
| new technology, but it doesn't always pan out.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There isn't any, not for ICF. These labs are part of the DOE's
| thermonuclear weapon research programs, not energy research.
|
| It is possible though that they could also use this for some
| fundamental research into how fusion works as a process.
| bnjemian wrote:
| I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of input energy
| costs. Most notable is the raw energy cost required to power the
| lasers and control machinery in the experiment. But then there
| are other costs, all of which must be amortized over time for any
| real-world use case to exist. I say this because the journalists
| in this piece imply that net gain is simply based off of the
| amount of energy pumped into the experiment while it operated,
| but the total input energy would clearly be more than that.
|
| On the extreme end, there's the energy cost of building the
| machine and engineering its components. For the vast majority of
| these, we can probably all agree that were a fusion power plant
| to be built, the net gain would fully eclipse these initial
| inputs fairly quickly. This may sound silly, but remember that
| the economic context where fusion so often sits is one that
| centers on renewable energy and sustainability. These costs do
| have to be accounted for.
|
| On the other end, there's the energy cost consumables. For
| example, the deuterium and tritium fuel input into the device,
| which need to be purified (deuterium from water, possibly tritium
| from the atmosphere) or otherwise isolated (from what I
| understand, tritium is a byproduct from fission reactors and they
| serve as its primary source in scientific applications). It may
| well be that the energy cost of acquiring these consumables is
| fractions to fractions of a fraction of the energy cost of
| running the device, effectively constituting a rounding error.
| But I think when we're talking about net gain, a clear definition
| and accounting of the input energy required to run the experiment
| would be useful to communicate to the public.
|
| I hope we see disclosure of these details with all the expected
| caveats when the peer-reviewed article goes to print and
| journalists have another feeding frenzy.
| ashurbanipal wrote:
| Is this cold fusion? The article contrasts this experiment with a
| plasma tokamak in the UK. I suppose the lasers require a lot of
| energy but it doesn't sound like there is a plasma is there?
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Definitely not cold fusion. Using powerful lasers to heat up
| and pressurize the target.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Could someone break down the costs of realistic fusion for me
| like I am 12 please?
|
| For example, for fission, my 12 year old understanding is: Stack
| uranium plates until the reaction is self-sustaining, boil water
| to spin turbine, if reaction gets too fast, cover it with lead /
| cool it with water. Circulated water is slightly radioactive.
| Main costs are keeping reaction container / need power to
| circulate water cooling, disposing of spent fuel is a problem.
| Power output is 100s or 1000s times more effective than coal /
| oil once running. In addition to meltdown risk, public opinion is
| concerned about radioactive cooling water near their community.
|
| What's the same tldr for fusion? (and feel free to correct my
| tldr)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Tiny H-bomb except pure fusion, and instead of a fission bomb
| as the trigger, you have huge lasers. You'd produce energy the
| same way, with heat being captured by some sort of spherical
| shield around the tiny bomb (which could also be breeding some
| of the fusion fuel out of lithium) and used to produce steam to
| run turbines.
|
| This is the first time that the laser's photon energy was
| exceeded by the energy produced by fusion. But this machine
| isn't optimized as a power plant, just to demonstrate fusion
| (mostly to improve modeling of H-bombs, actually). The shots
| take hours to do, the tiny bombs are currently expensive to
| make, the chamber for the tiny bombs isn't designed to capture
| heat, breed fuel, or even withstand damage from higher yield
| fusion. Another machine would be needed to demonstrate like
| 10-100 tiny bombs per second, and the efficiency (and
| repetition rate) of the lasers would need to be higher and the
| energy gain also needs to be much higher (but if they got
| "ignition" where the fusion heat helps sustain the reaction,
| this may be doable). And need to find a way to make these tiny
| bombs cheaper.
| jokteur wrote:
| Realistic fusion (with the best understood technology): build
| powerful magnets around a donut shaped chamber, which allows to
| contain a plasma comprised of Deuterium and Tritium (both
| Hydrogen isotops) which is then heated by externals sources.
| Reach very high temperatures such that fusion reactions occur
| frequently. Some of this energy stays inside the plasma, and
| some of it escapes under the form of neutrons. Capture these
| energetic neutrons in a blanket around the chamber, creating
| fuel (tritium) and heating water pipes that then drive a normal
| steam turbine. Tritium is radioactive (but has a very short
| shell life; just wait a couple of decades), and the chamber may
| be slightly radioactive after decades of neutron bombardment.
| There are no problems of long term radioactive waste, and the
| reactor can't do a chain-reaction, so no Fukushima or
| Tchernobyl.
|
| I need to explain what Q is in the context of fusion.
| Basically, you heat the plasma with some energy (Energy In),
| and the fusion reactions produces some energy (Energy out). Q
| is basically the ratio (Energy out)/(Energy In). When Q is
| bigger than 1, we call it break-even. However, (Energy In) is
| not the actual cost of energy you need to run the whole
| facility, it is only the Energy that reaches the plasma. The
| same goes for (Energy out): this energy cannot be captured 100%
| efficiently. Some of it will heat the plasma itself, some of it
| will escape but the conversion back to electricity is not 100%
| efficient.
|
| So in a sense, Q > 1, aka break-even, does not mean commercial
| fusion, it is only a kind of a psychological barrier to achieve
| (so this is what the NIF announced; still a major
| breakthrough). We need at least to achieve (Total Electrical
| Energy out)/(Total Electrical Energy In) > 1 to achieve
| commercial fusion. But physicists consider the rest as
| engineering problems, not physics problems. And great news,
| there is no theoretical limit on how big Q can be: for example,
| the sun has a Q of infinity, as there is no required energy
| input. Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve
| commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to achieve
| that, only engineering difficulties).
|
| Main costs are: difficult to define, because we haven't
| commercialized a reactor yet. I would say, for now, everything
| around it is expensive (magnets, the blanket, the fuel
| (tritium)). However, once we have sufficiently understood the
| optimal parameters on how to produce net gain energy, there is
| no reason why the design of the reactor can't then be
| simplified to be mass-produced.
|
| Note: the technology used by the NIF is very different from
| what I described for a realistic fusion device: what I
| described is called magnetic confinement, and what the NIF did
| is called inertial confinement.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Thank you, "Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve
| commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to
| achieve that, only engineering difficulties)" is exactly what
| I was looking for.
| gigel82 wrote:
| This is no different than the hundreds of "fusion breakthroughs"
| we've been reading about over the past 20+ years. Progress is
| good, sure, but we're tired of celebrating small incremental
| gains.
|
| A leap forward or two might be worth celebrating along the way,
| sure, but we're at least 3 orders of magnitude away from actually
| generating net power here.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| They'll get greater efficiencies at scale with a hydrogen-helium
| target around 1.989 x 10^30 kg. [Nice science joke for those who
| get it.]
| Trouble_007 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/fny0J
| eqmvii wrote:
| This would be incredible... very excited for the details in the
| announcement coming Tuesday.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a lot of other "firsts".
| I'm guessing the total (and I mean -total-, lasers typically
| aren't that efficient) energy put into this will be much greater
| than the output.
| chabad360 wrote:
| At least according to the TFA, it seems that the breakthrough
| is that they got 2.5 mJ out vs. the 2.1 mJ that was used to
| power the laser.
| Oxidation wrote:
| MJ, not mJ. 2.5mJ is roughly the energy of a single keyboard
| keypress. 2.5MJ is over half a kilo of TNT.
|
| Fun fact that Wolfram alpha just informed me of: a phone uses
| between 10 and 20 MJ a year: multiple kilos of TNT. 4000mAh *
| 3.7V * 365: yep, it's about right.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Oh, oops that's a mistake, thanks for catching that.
|
| Also, interesting fun fact indeed.
| ThomPete wrote:
| By now everyone knows that Fusion, if we succeed, is going to
| provide us with abundant clean energy.
|
| But Fusion is not just another way to power your lightbulbs,
| fusion is a completely new type of energy.
|
| With fusion we can in principle reach 10% of the speed of light
| which would be revolutionary for space travel.
|
| But even wilder, because it's technically a sun we would over
| time be able to create basic materials like, Gold, Neon, Sodium,
| Magnesium, Silicon, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Gallium, Germanium.
|
| It would also mean abundant energy to create synthetic materials
| that could even replace use of fossil fuels in our materials.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| It's a different environment than the sun and other isotopes
| are fused. The plasma is a lot less dense, with a lot less
| pressure but much higher temperatures. The current technology
| will not generate other elements. And Gold etc are not created
| in the sun via fusion. they are generated by a different
| process involving stellar catastrophies.
| ThomPete wrote:
| It's a different environment which is in principle possible
| to recreate. First step is to get basic fusion working.
| melling wrote:
| Any opinions on the book mentioned: Star Builders by Arthur
| Turrel
|
| https://aeturrell.com/
| dicroce wrote:
| One thing to consider: Even if you prefer solar, you still need
| to initially make those solar panels and that is an energy
| intensive process.
|
| I think we're still probably 20 years away from commercialization
| of this, but I still think this is a very big deal.
| Blue111 wrote:
| > you still need to initially make those solar panels
|
| Can't you use energy produced from existing solar panels to
| create more of them?
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| If this is the laser inertial fusion for the National Ignition
| Facility, the purpose is not to generate energy. It is to study
| fusion in the laboratory in order to maintain the nuclear weapon
| stockpile.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have
| to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power
| source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it
| a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to
| make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more
| like 10 shots per second.
|
| Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it
| seems much more practical than lasers for energy production
| because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good
| (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of
| a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something
| like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise
| space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed
| luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall
| of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a
| lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed
| tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good
| enough.
|
| There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48
| billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better
| than some other things I could buy.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic
| because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and
| is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar
| component. And costs will continue to drop.
|
| Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche
| application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any
| other environment that is without sun or space.
| 543g43g43 wrote:
| We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a
| sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-
| powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment,
| productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by
| fossil fuels (mostly coal).
| lambdatronics wrote:
| Yeah, either heavy-ion beams or electrically-pumped excimer
| lasers seems like the path forward for the driver. Higher
| efficiency, higher repetition rate, possibly more robust. They
| also need to do away with holraums and switch to direct drive,
| to reduce target cost, ease alignment issues, and increase
| energy efficiency.
|
| I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor
| from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see
| them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10
| years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the
| energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition
| threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks,
| even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to
| get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie,
| tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit
| Q~1, needs Q~100).
| Oxidation wrote:
| It's not worthless research (not that you said it was), as it
| still validates various aspects of fusion energy and some of
| the engineering around it. And it's always been ahead of
| magnetic containment devices because they only have to keep the
| conditions for nanoseconds.
|
| But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating
| reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons
| physics facility that happens to do some energy generating
| research sometimes.
|
| That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again)
| in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that
| proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's
| just engineering.
| monocularvision wrote:
| It's a real bummer to me that hype around fusion has faded so
| much because of the false hopes that this sort of thing barely
| registers on HN anymore.
| boringg wrote:
| I think that people are waiting to see the real announcement
| not the scoop with limited details. Let's see what the Granthom
| announces tomorrow. Tough to be excited about scoops with
| limited information and without the level of robustness of the
| accomplishment.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| This is very promising. Hopefully this can be one of the primary
| tools used to remove our dependency on dirty fuel sources
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is great! Why is this great? It is great because between
| magnetic confinement and inertial confinement approaches to
| fusion generation it is the FIRST one to demonstrate energy gain.
|
| If you are programmer, think of it like your program compiled
| successfully for the first time. It means that all of the bits
| between you designing the program, the program being compiled,
| and the operating system recognizing it as a program, all did
| what they were supposed to. Of course your program probably
| doesn't do what you want it to yet, but you have validated a huge
| chunk of the "pipeline" between what you are trying to do, and
| doing it with the equipment you have. That is what this is,
| "hello world" for Fusion Physicists.
|
| And the reason they are so pumped is that they have literally
| been told for DECADES that why they proposed to do "wasn't
| possible" (and by that I mean creating actual fusion through
| inertial confinement.)
|
| Steps 2 - n look a LOT more like engineering steps than "can this
| even work" steps, okay?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| When your program compiles for the first time is usually when
| the real trouble starts.
| zaking17 wrote:
| Would anyone knowledgeable about the field update their priors
| about whether we'll see commercial fusion in the next 30 years,
| after seeing these results? If not, is there a big milestone
| we're waiting for? Or will fusion advancement be a slow grind
| with many small improvements over decades?
| ak217 wrote:
| I'm not an expert but I've been following the field for a
| while. It's telling that negligible venture capital is pursuing
| this route to commercial fusion, and the only cheerleading for
| it comes from DOE lab press releases. That's because the NIF is
| a thermonuclear bomb simulator developed by a lab tasked with
| both thermonuclear bomb development and also developing a
| portfolio of civilian applications for its technologies. Even
| if the NIF were to break even on the entire power plant package
| in theory, harvesting energy from fast fusion neutrons is hard
| enough in magnetic confinement designs without them pulsing
| like a bomb as they do in ignition designs.
|
| Meanwhile the VC money is quietly piling into tokamak and
| stellarator magnetic confinement designs, driven by high
| expectations from real breakthroughs in ReBCO tape
| manufacturing technology. These superconducting tapes can be
| manufactured like semiconductors and can develop magnetic
| fields that were previously impossible, which is a key
| manufacturability enabler in a design whose path to
| commercialization is far better de-risked overall. There are
| still concerns with the durability of equipment needed to
| capture the neutrons in these designs too, but ReBCO tapes were
| the real prior changer.
| zaking17 wrote:
| Thank you - exactly what I was curious to learn more about!!
| DennisP wrote:
| Funding is starting to kick in for private laser fusion
| attempts. Over the past couple decades, lasers have advanced
| even more dramatically than superconductors.
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102.
| ..
| stevespang wrote:
| foota wrote:
| How does something like this produce power? With tomamoks etc.,
| it seems like they draw out some of the heat (somehow) but how
| does this work with a pellet that has to be hit by a laser? I'm
| confused about what the working fluid is, if you will. Is there
| some kind of plasma chamber that the laser has to go through,
| that heat is then extracted from?
| DennisP wrote:
| The energy output is 80% neutron radiation. Surround the
| reaction chamber with a mix of molten lead (for neutron
| multiplication) and lithium (for tritium breeding) and run some
| cooling pipes through it.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| If this were hosted on a science website, I would be more
| inclined to believe it. But because it's on FT, it smells like
| the Stein had their "free energy breakthrough" on the Economist -
| i.e yet not another science website buy a website for investors.
| di456 wrote:
| First flight 1903 Moon landing 1969
|
| It took 63 years of progress in flight technology. Not counting
| earlier experiments and R&D time.
|
| First fusion experiment was 1933 Fusion seems a lot more complex
| to a layman (me) than spaceflight.
|
| Excited for what's to come
| mgoetzke wrote:
| While I appreciate all the effort in nuclear fusion and do think
| we should continue to invest a little of each years global R&D
| budget, it seems these reactors (e.g ITER and this one) still
| require tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently.
|
| Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and
| minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector
| for a long long time.
| echelon wrote:
| > tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently
|
| I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the
| lunar surface covered in tritium deposits?
|
| It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we
| have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v
| for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as
| substantial.
|
| Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of
| advances for the human race.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You're mixing up tritium (hydrogen-3) and helium-3.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| I believe the tritium issue is addressed through the inclusion
| of lithium in the reactor's inner blanket [1]. Something about
| the neutron interaction with the lithium results in some non-
| trivial production of tritium which is then freed into the
| reactor. tl;dr - they've thought of that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket
| deelowe wrote:
| My understanding is that this is proposed, but has not yet
| been tested. In fact, one of the goals of ITER is to test
| various breeder blanket designs.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| Isn't this the case with nearly every aspect of "proposed"
| fusion reactors. Just because it's proposed or "not yet
| tested on a commercial fusion reactor" does not necessarily
| mean that the mechanism is not well understood.
| deelowe wrote:
| I think if it were so well understood, ITER wouldn't be
| testing over 100 different breeder blanket designs. I've
| seen breeder blanket design described as one of the
| biggest challenges with fusion today.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| I would expect that it is more a matter of selecting the
| best/optimized design rather than demonstrating the
| fundamental viability of tritium breeding.
| atemerev wrote:
| Normal nuclear reactors are a good thing too, and they alone
| are enough to solve all of humanity's energy problems (though
| we should pursue fusion power too, of course). See Integral
| Fast Reactor.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Only if you use the notoriously dangerous breeder reactors -
| otherwise there isn't enough fuel.
| atemerev wrote:
| Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are
| just a little too expensive to justify their construction
| when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are
| proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering
| problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are
| production-ready and safe.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I've never really gotten the "proliferation risk" in the
| context of US power production (or China, Russia, or even
| France, for that matter). We're talking about existing
| nuclear powers, they already have the capacity to make
| nuclear weapons. If they wanted more they would make
| more, for the simple reason that having nuclear weapons
| is table stakes for being a serious player in
| geopolitics.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Suppose we have a world with working inertial confinement and
| stellarator fusion. Are there applications where one does better
| than the other?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Even if for workable viability Q (Q_? Currently 1.2?) must reach
| values on the order of 50 to 100, if considering real-world
| losses and efficiencies. It's absolutely great news!
|
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Engi...]
| cratermoon wrote:
| just like this time in 2013,
| https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-breakthrough-...,
| and this one in 2021 https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-
| time-a-fusion-rea...
|
| Which definition of breakeven are they using this time?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U&t
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Is overcoming fission's political problems harder than fusions
| technical problems?
| rcarr wrote:
| Genuine question: I seem to recall there being some very similar
| news about how 'ignition' had been achieved not too long ago. Am
| I imagining things or is this a genuine new development?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The story here isn't ignition. It's that they got out more
| energy than they put in, which is of course necessary to use
| fusion as an energy source. We'e been able to produce fusion
| for awhile, but net positive energy hasn't happened before.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| NIF is still doing fusion research? I thought they pivoted to
| materials research in support of stockpile stewardship years ago.
| zaph0d_ wrote:
| They are still doing plenty shots for the national ignition
| campaign and figuring out the target manufacturing process. The
| official purpose of NIF has just been shifted to support
| security research.
| kumarski wrote:
| Solves no problem.
|
| Fusion plants have exorbitant feedstock price volatility and are
| only marginally smaller than a fission planet, despite square
| footage not being the scope of the worlds' energy problems today.
| tempestn wrote:
| This is an interesting video covering several alternative fusion
| power initiatives being pursued currently:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNP8by6V3RA
|
| The common thread is that they tend to aim directly for an
| electrical output rather than simply generating energy, and don't
| necessarily plan to have a self-sustaining reaction.
| rvalue wrote:
| Donate the technology to the world after X number of years.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I live near Princeton NJ. Approx 4+ years ago years ago I bumped
| into a friend one evening at a local restaurant / bar. As it
| turned out, her date was a top guy at the Princeton Plasma Labs.
|
| Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close.
| It's doable. All we need is more funding."
|
| I hope he's right.
|
| p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this
| announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.
|
| https://www.pppl.gov/
| giarc wrote:
| I'd take all of that with a grain of salt. First he was
| probably trying to impress the girl, and second, every
| scientist says their work is possible, they just "need more
| funding". If they didn't think it was possible, they wouldn't
| be working on it.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| First, she couldn't hear the ccoconversation I had with him.
| Second, that sounds sexist in that I'm sure she could figure
| that out if he was.
|
| Third, the next day it was announced a reactor in China had
| the longest sustained "burst" to date (at that time).
|
| And finally, if he was wrong, why is the US making an
| announcement?
|
| You're correct. He might have been BSing. The point here
| is...he was not.
| e1g wrote:
| Good write-up to temper expectations at
| https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721
|
| My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater
| than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the
| energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break
| even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity
| would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement
| here, so it's ~200x to break even end-to-end. * The
| scientific equipment requires immense & expensive maintenance.
| * Plus the $3B facility around the equipment, that theoretically
| could deliver just 2.5 MW.
|
| So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
| bombcar wrote:
| The thing that would be surprising is if they discovered
| something _new_ to do; but this seems like more refinement of
| what they already know how to do.
|
| Continual refinement may finally get us where we need to be,
| but it's going to take a long time.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| To be honest, looking at those numbers, that doesn't look 10-20
| years away. We'd need Moore's law style improvement in
| efficiency _and_ to productionize it. So we 're really saying
| 20 years at best for the technology, and then let's look at
| quickly we can build Nuclear power plants today... uh oh. In
| the UK for example it has taken 12 years to even _agree_ to
| build a new Nuclear plant on a site that _already has Nuclear
| plants!_.
| carabiner wrote:
| Probably 5-10 years if this turns out to be the key unlocking
| it. If it is, the floodgates will open for funding, public and
| private, and we'll see a race to build the first reactor.
| Similar to how the first COVID vaccine was predicted to take
| 2-3 years and it took 8 months instead because it was a
| priority.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| It took only 8 months because covid has been in existence for
| decades. Covid 19 strain was new and the vaccines had to be
| adjusted to new strains not created from ground up
| pianoben wrote:
| Not so; the mRNA technology used to develop and deliver the
| vaccine has been in progress for decades. The hardest parts
| were done before SARS-CoV-2 ever existed, but it's wrong to
| claim that "the vaccines" needed to be tweaked - _they
| never existed_.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| For people confused about this, there were prior
| commercial attempts at coronavirus vaccines, with mixed
| success. They were not RNA vaccines. The COVID-19
| vaccines built on that research (regarding what proteins
| to target, in particular), but the COVID vaccines that
| were rolled out were completely novel technology.
| yuuu wrote:
| temper
| e1g wrote:
| What if my expectations are tamper-proof, can you still
| temper them? Thanks, edited ;)
| billiam wrote:
| No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it
| has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient
| as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement
| needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really
| means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion,
| that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a
| lot of the research money will move to lasers now.
| naasking wrote:
| > so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it,"
| whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In
| the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress.
|
| Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not
| nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out
| of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so
| to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing
| returns applies.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's still probably about 100x, given efficiency losses all
| around, even on the highest-efficiency lasers.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| ICF works for its purpose - research into thermo-nuclear
| weapons (fusion bombs).
|
| It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never
| has.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#A
| s...
|
| That's utterly incorrect:
|
| "Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the
| situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in
| the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about
| 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces
| about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy
| was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to
| produce electricity after considering losses). It also
| appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser
| efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs
| that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned
| to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that
| is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer
| efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is
| possible."
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I mean, you nail it on the head. It's not "congrats on
| limitless free energy" but more "looks we might still get
| value in the future if we keep pouring money into this."
| Positive indicators at milestones are good. Onward.
| kelnos wrote:
| The NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get
| above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement
| is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of
| magnitude.
|
| > _So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!_
|
| I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a _huge_
| milestone that 's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually
| _will_ be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it 's more like 30-40, who
| knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy _is_
| actually possible to do with our current understanding and
| technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was
| based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get
| more energy out than put in, at least not without technology
| that 's significantly out of reach.
| floxy wrote:
| Anyone have insight into how this new development differs
| from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled:
| "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal"
|
| https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-
| mile...
| Animats wrote:
| Right. Livermore has been working on this since the 1970s,
| with increasingly powerful lasers. Now, they claim
| "theoretical breakeven" - slightly more energy came out of
| the reaction than went into the reaction. But 100x less
| than went into the lasers, let alone the whole facility.
| Nor is energy being recovered.
|
| This was never expected to be a power plant technology.
| It's a research tool, for studying fusion.
|
| "Technical breakeven" is when the plant generates enough
| energy to run itself. This is at least 100x below that.
|
| "Commercial breakeven" is when it makes money.
|
| How's that Lockheed-Martin fusion thing coming along?[1]
|
| [1] https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-
| fusion.htm...
| DennisP wrote:
| Back then they were comparing to the energy actually
| absorbed by the fusion fuel. This is indirect drive, the
| laser hits a metal container first and only some of the
| energy gets to the fuel pellet.
|
| This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the
| laser beams.
|
| They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but
| that kinda makes sense because they're using really old,
| inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.
| dools wrote:
| Helion tech seems to be interesting in that they use the
| electricity directly so avoids the costly conversion via
| steam/turbines etc.
| DennisP wrote:
| And right now they're building their seventh reactor, for a
| net electricity attempt in 2024.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| When you consider the power that big oil and gas have worldwide,
| and all they've already done to sabotage adoption of clean
| energy, it just seems improbable to me that one day tech will
| arrive that provides unlimited clean energy without some kind of
| big ugly fight. Big. Like I can see these guys doing everything
| from run of the mill regulatory capture to kill it all the way up
| to supporting right wing (or communist) conspiracy theories or
| movements to destabilize democracies (all things that have been
| done in the past). I seriously wouldn't put anything past them.
| Maybe I'm being too paranoid but I have a hard time believing in
| any future that involves yanking away trillions of $$ in power
| from a small group of unscrupulous people.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| this is the reason I've been saying that we will have fusion
| within a decade of when markets start to price in the decline
| of fossil fuels because of renewable & other factors. its not
| an impossible problem, it just needs more research
| funding/focus.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was
| in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain
| reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity
| producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care
| about small amounts of tritium radiation.
|
| At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs
| for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will
| not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.
|
| We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less
| radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes
| some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put
| special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out
| their star energy.
|
| Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to
| think this will have major implications for energy systems
| anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.
|
| Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced
| fission 16 years ago.
| SuperFine wrote:
| >After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing
| plant looks like
|
| I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water,
| right?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Right. But slapping boiling water around the burning plasma
| is kind of a rube goldberg usually. See LLNL's LIFE design
| for example [1]. Things like molten salt walls circulating
| through a steam turbine and all that.
|
| There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine
| cycle.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
| eternalban wrote:
| HILIFE-II Inertial Confinement Fusion Power Plant Design:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150404075829/https://hifweb.l
| b...
| svantana wrote:
| Well, there is hydro, wind and photovoltaic. And in the
| fusion field there are startups working on aneutronic fusion,
| which can generate power directly from charged particles.
| LPPFusion is one that seemed promising a few years ago, but
| unfortunately less so now.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I'm surprised too. I've looked into this before, and it's
| absolutely right - just not intuitive to me.
|
| We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so
| inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which
| are only practical in limited situations, and again have a
| very low efficiency.
|
| So hot water it is!!
| eganist wrote:
| It's still decades off but as I understand it, this was the
| hardest nut to crack. They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1
| in?
|
| I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a
| "where were you when--" moment for me. I'm sure someone will
| pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer
| a hypothetical exercise.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Not an engineer in this field, so I may have
| misread/misunderstood, but I read that 2.5MJ out for 2.1MJ of
| laser energy in, NOT the total energy needed to make the
| whole thing work.. So, in a layman's world, it is not a net
| gain of power, only a small subset of the system yielding
| more power than it took in.
|
| Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a
| breakthrough than I think it is..
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| No, you are correct.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the
| thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a
| tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar
| ratio?
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Jup. Fusion research is necessary and funding should be
| provided. But it is not close to commercial or generative
| viability.
|
| So there is at the moment no working design for a
| generator as a plant that produces more electricity than
| it takes in.
| Someone wrote:
| Electricity in, heat out, I think. Getting that heat back to
| electricity will cost some, I expect more than that 0.4
| fanf2 wrote:
| The efficiency of a thermal power plant is around 40%,
| depending on the temperature of the steam it can produce. h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_
| ...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| > They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1 in?
|
| Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't
| consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you
| draw the control volume around the building and see that the
| lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think
| you'll be less excited, right?
|
| We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the
| early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get
| energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy
| source is still the question imho.
| sharikous wrote:
| Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean that the
| lasers could require more energy?
|
| Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming
| in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X
| BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X?
|
| If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of
| claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.
| derefr wrote:
| Presumably they mean that there are efficiency losses in
| charging the supercapacitor banks used to fire the
| lasers; so that if you consider the system over multiple
| _duty cycles_ rather than over a single cycle, it 's no
| longer energy-positive. (I.e. if the system were
| capturing its emitted energy -- and that emitted energy
| needed to be enough to act as a grid power source
| _feeding input power to the supercapacitors_ , rather
| than merely being the equivalent of the direct output
| power of the lasers per shot -- then it wouldn't be
| enough to sustain the reaction.)
|
| But personally, I don't know whether that's actually
| important. Power plants _usually_ consume a nontrivial
| fraction of their own produced power to power themselves,
| and in fact consume _more than 100% of produced power_
| when starting from a full stop -- meaning that in initial
| few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own
| produced power into themselves, they still need (huge
| amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car
| engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few
| kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a
| power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome
| initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby
| back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy
| turbines spinning from a stop.
|
| It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power
| plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot
| run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became
| energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever
| its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming
| net-positive would be a good point to start to consider
| those more practical calculations, since they'd have been
| useless to consider until then--a power plant can't
| possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty
| cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive
| when considered in isolation.
|
| Which is, to me, why it probably _does_ make sense for
| ITER to be excited. They 've reached the point where they
| can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and
| start trying to come up with another, more full-scale
| model of power efficiency to replace it with.
| danbruc wrote:
| Exactly. Looking at the Wikipedia article [1] suggest
| that they start out with 422 MJ stored in capacitors,
| turn this into 4 MJ IR laser light, convert it into 1.8
| MJ UV laser light, this into x-rays of which 0.15 MJ heat
| the target of which finally 0.015 MJ heat the fuel.
| Depending on what in this chain you consider the input
| energy, you can get orders of magnitude different numbers
| - 15 kJ of energy produced could either be a gain of 1 or
| a gain of 0.0000036 or anything in between. And this is
| before trying to capture the released energy and
| converting it into electricity, this will come with
| another sizable loss.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
| est31 wrote:
| From https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-
| cfc345589...
|
| > The fusion reaction at the US government facility
| produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about
| 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the
| lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said,
| adding that the data was still being analysed.
|
| They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia
| article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to
| the UV light numbers.
| danbruc wrote:
| If this is assumption is true, they only produced 0.6 %
| of the energy they spent. Another question would then be,
| how relevant this is, i.e. could the UV light be produced
| _much_ more efficiently than the experiment does? Maybe
| some constraints forces them to use a very inefficient
| process? In that case it might be reasonable to use the
| UV laser power as the reference for the gain.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, and if they upgrade the lasers themselves to
| current laser tech (as I understand it, the NIF's
| hardware is around 25 years out of date on that front),
| then that 0.6% number probably jumps to 20% or so. Which
| still isn't enough, but is _way_ closer than 0.6%.
|
| Add to that the fact that improvements in laser
| efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used
| commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is
| always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little
| more attainable.
| foxyv wrote:
| So the laser energy that went into the reaction in the
| form of light is less than what came out of the reaction.
| However, the energy needed to produce that laser energy
| may be orders of magnitude more depending on the laser.
| AKA: the Wall Plug Efficiency.
|
| Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high
| power such as we see here tends to come with drastically
| reduced efficiency.
| ansible wrote:
| Not /u/acidburnNSA, but what was meant is that no laser
| is 100% efficient. Not only do they not convert 100% of
| their electrical input into laser energy, but they also
| require other support systems, notably cooling. So we
| need to consider the total energy costs of the building
| the fusion experiment is conducted in, not just the
| physically small area where the fusion reaction is
| happening inside the reactor.
|
| Still, this is an important step in the development of
| fusion energy reactors.
| PietdeVries wrote:
| I think fusion-plants have always been "15 years away", and
| most likely will be so for quite a few years...
|
| Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away:
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-
| fusi...
| soperj wrote:
| I don't know what people get out of repeating this on
| every single fusion article. It's not inventive or
| insightful, and it doesn't further the discussion in the
| slightest.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| some people are new to the Fusion discussion. They've
| missed the last 50 yrs of "fusion is 10 yrs away" claims.
| Over the years, I've learned to temper all discovery
| excitement. Its the other side of the coin equivalent of
| the the XKCD 10000 comic[1].
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Because it is context that is rarely included in the
| article.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because it's A) true, B) relevant to keep all of the hype
| in check. The year of Linux on the desktop is always
| right around the corner too. Yes, they are tropes, but
| they were not born out of nothing.
|
| Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked
| with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually
| start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of
| their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism,
| then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else.
| Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and
| come at it honestly.
| signatoremo wrote:
| If you want to keep the hype in check, do it with facts
| like /acidburnNSA did above. Let people debate. You don't
| even know what will be announced. Repeating the same joke
| in every single fusion article is tiresome and has long
| past its funny expiration date.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why does it have to be funny? It's just a sad statement
| about the situation. Maybe you're tired of people not
| being as excited as you, or even willing to for a second
| hold their breath any longer on this topic. But here we
| are at another announcement essentially saying "this shit
| is hard. with more funding, we could possibly maybe do
| something in the nearish future". Anything announced in
| the PRs is just mumbojumbo hand waving to explain why
| what they are saying isn't really saying anything
| substantive other than to keep fusion in the news so it
| is easier to raise money. This is the main perception of
| fussion by the masses.
|
| Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable
| solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will
| gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I
| just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and
| don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding
| fusion.
|
| What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But
| to each their own
| kelnos wrote:
| I think one can be simultaneously excited about a big
| breakthrough like this, but also understand that there's
| still a ton more to do before we have viable fusion
| power.
|
| And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to
| say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is
| amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we
| have no idea when (or if) it will be.
|
| I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching
| from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort
| of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular
| breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome --
| yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of
| naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single
| time.
| Veen wrote:
| It's not a trope; it's a cliche. There's nothing wrong
| with poking holes in overinflated hype, but do they have
| to be so boring and repetitive about it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you keep telling me the same thing with the same lack
| of results, I could say the same to you as being boring
| and repetitive. Just because you say 2+2=5 and someone
| tells you you're wrong every time doesn't mean they are
| boring and repetitive.
| kelnos wrote:
| How is this "lack of results"? This particular
| announcement is a huge result!
|
| Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with
| all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power
| by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this
| particular announcement is indeed impressive.
| soperj wrote:
| It's not true. The original quote was 30 years given
| current funding. They reduced the funding and surprise
| surprise it didn't get done. It's like when you estimate
| how long a project will take given a thousand people, and
| they reduce the number of people on the project to one
| person and then hold you to the original estimate.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Okay, but then if the funding has decreased, what hasn't
| the "years away" increased? No, that wouldn't sound good
| in a press release now would it. So they keep saying it
| is just around the corner. It's like the religious people
| saying that the second coming is right around the corner
| for over a thousand years now. I know, I know, religious
| zealots and science (zealots?) are different. Or are
| they?
| soperj wrote:
| Show me a fusion scientist saying fusion is 30 years
| away. No one in the article is even saying that. It's
| people in the comments repeating the same thing from the
| 80s.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What article? It's people speculating on the announcement
| that another announcement is coming. It just feeds into
| the hype machine. With this level of hype, watch them
| come out and show off the Segway!
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| The net energy gain is very slim and has to be converted to
| electricity to power the lasers - in doing so, there's so
| much loss, it is again NEGATIVE.
|
| It's always the same...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| As it always is with new, unproven things.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| or fusion.
|
| There are always these articles: net energy gain finally!
| and then: no not really.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Reminds me of solar. That took a century to get to where
| we are today where the net energy output is much greater
| than the energy needed to manufacture them.
|
| It being hard and it requiring continual progress does
| not mean that progress does not occur.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| How long has humanity been working on fusion? Wasn't Ivy
| Mike in the early 50's? Glaciers continually progress
| too, but it's not obvious on human timescales.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Correct. Nuclear fusion research should be funded and
| realistic goals be set.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| ...which is exactly what this is?
| [deleted]
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Since you seem to be an expert in that field, what is your
| perspective on fission for the short term? Are smrs really
| viable ?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either,
| sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away
| from are very real. The economies of mass production that
| they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are
| willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy
| after the first few boondoggle a bit?
|
| I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at
| the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400
| designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than
| SMRs and advanced reactors.
|
| My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is
| to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors.
| This gives you economies of scale _and_ economies of mass
| production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the
| 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where
| Offshore Power Systems installed the world 's largest gantry
| crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license
| from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these.
| [1]
|
| Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they
| couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| I'm curious, when you're talking about the SMR projects,
| does that include the Natrium reactors from TerraPower? I
| think they're backed by the Gates Foundation? Those seemed
| pretty interesting to me as a nuclear layman. Also, I don't
| know a lot about Bill Gates, but he does seem like the kind
| of guy that if they showed some real success, boondoggle or
| not, he'd be willing to brute force his way past those
| issues by throwing money at the problem.
| peteradio wrote:
| Wouldn't the possible location for floating reactors be
| much more limited than SMR projects? I would think special
| financing might get the ball rolling for SMRs, strong
| decades spanning incentives for first movers.
| Retric wrote:
| Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission
| is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup
| after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of
| redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is
| still by far the most expensive power source even with massive
| subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base
| load power backed up with peaking power plants.
|
| In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history
| of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US
| talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident
| ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that
| killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from
| trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| this is simply not true. according to IEA
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-
| el...
|
| LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other
| possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up
| front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while
| wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
|
| your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive
| accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd
| build today causing any accidents like that in a western
| country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth
| discussing.
| Retric wrote:
| You see a lot of handwaving such as that very close to 0
| statement with nuclear but someone's got to be on the hook.
|
| The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance
| costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500
| billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year
| insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the
| risk premium associated with insurance. And that's on top
| of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to
| do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc.
| Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh
| which is quite significant for these projects.
|
| In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around
| nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there
| hasn't been a power plant built and operated in the last 20
| years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when
| you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs
| with actual decommissioning costs.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > but there hasn't been a power plant built and operated
| in the last 20 years that come even close to these
| numbers
|
| If we are being honest, that also has a lot to do with
| _why_ nuclear is so expensive.
| Retric wrote:
| Sure, I have no issue saying nuclear could in theory cost
| 40% less with reasonable regulation and a large scale
| deployment across decades. I just have problems with
| people saying well it could in theory cost X, therefore
| it does cost X.
| fundatus wrote:
| > sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear
| powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had
| to be completely replaced every 25 years.
|
| Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31
| billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW.
|
| For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind
| turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW
| capacity. So even under the assumptions that
|
| - you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100
| years life span and
|
| - you always have to build more renewables since they don't
| run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan
|
| wind make more sense economically nowadays.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Much of fissions complexity comes from safety/damage
| management. Even after years of advancements we hear about some
| incidents and radioactive leaks every other decade.
|
| Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and
| fallout
| kelnos wrote:
| Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and
| marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or
| the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them.
| (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues
| that exist are not significantly worse than those present
| burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions.
| They're just different, and in some ways very emotionally so.)
|
| I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more
| expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation
| is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power
| as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it,
| and it'll be fine.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Nuclear plants are also very expensive, no?
| fundatus wrote:
| Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more
| expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the
| current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for
| fusion reactors at all to be honest.
|
| After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12
| light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that
| energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-
| driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable
| sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance
| everything out.
| amai wrote:
| Mandatory video by Sabine Hossenfelder:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
|
| So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Asking as a layman, are there any hybrid solutions between
| inertial and magnetic, or are they mutually exclusive? I'm
| imagining using magnetic field for macro-control and laser for
| micro-adjustment. Kind of like SOC designs that have separate
| cores optimized for different workloads.
| DennisP wrote:
| NIF recently started experimenting with adding a magnetic
| field: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost-
| nif-im...
|
| I don't think they used that for this recent event, so if it
| works out that's potentially a significant improvement.
| chaps wrote:
| "The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that
| scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser
| itself. This is great progress indeed, _but still more is needed:
| first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account
| for losses in generating the laser light etc_ (although the
| technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward
| in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore National
| Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of result about
| once a day - a fusion power plant would need to do it ten times
| per second. However, the important takeaway point is that the
| basic science is now clearly well understood, and this should
| spur further investment. It is encouraging to see that the
| private sector is starting to wake up to the possibilities,
| although still long term, of these important emerging
| technologies."
|
| emphasis, etc
| raylad wrote:
| Not only that, but the capsules that are used for the
| experiment are expensive and difficult to produce. And you'd
| have to be continuously blasting new ones for each burst of
| energy you want to generate.
|
| Taking those costs into account, being able to use this method
| to generate power seems really non-optimal.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| Yes, _but_ the problem of generating laser light efficiently
| has and is being solved for elsewhere. Which is why the NIF
| didn't focus on, or update their lasers. This is a major
| problem for semiconductor lithography for example, and receives
| literally tens of billions in investment every year and one
| which has lasers that are already 20x more efficient than the
| ones used by the NIF.
|
| The real question in the experiments here at NIF was about
| whether inertial confinement fusion would work. This is very
| promising progress.
|
| Also NIF spends a good portion of its time on weapons research,
| not fusion power so it's only been a recent focus.
| JStanton617 wrote:
| The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1%
| of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of
| only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have
| commercially relevant "net gain"
| DennisP wrote:
| Yes but NIF's lasers date back to the 1990s, and laser
| technology has improved a lot since then. NIF-class lasers
| with over 20% efficiency are available now.
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102.
| ..
|
| Same article mentions that some petawatt lasers can fire more
| than once per second now.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%
|
| Some reactor designs let you harvest electricity directly
| from charged ions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
| boc wrote:
| It's insane how much cynicism I'm seeing here. I know people who
| are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they're excited about this
| then it's a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy
| than expected and damaged the sensors.
|
| This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and
| it's a not healthy.
| jsight wrote:
| I'm not sure when it happened, but this place has become a lot
| less inquisitive and a lot more dark in recent times. Possibly
| its correlated with growth, but it feels like something else.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Think it's correlated with growth. I've seen significant
| post-pandemic degradation on all major social media platforms
| I use (mostly here & Twitter), along with large increases in
| volume.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It isn't cynicism. It's a reality check:
|
| 1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every
| fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate
| electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't
| there yet;
|
| 2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush
| over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that
| tells a much better story.
|
| 3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss;
|
| 4. We still have container damage to content with due to
| neutron embrittlement.
|
| Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that
| commercial fusion power generation is "decades away".
|
| Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism
| because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel
| abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive
| trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what
| contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity.
|
| I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out
| these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a
| realist.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| senko wrote:
| > It's insane how much cynicism I'm seeing here. [..] This
| website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and
| it's a not healthy.
|
| The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by
| the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets
| people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn
| to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing
| blown out of proportion.
|
| I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not
| about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal,
| great!
| cpleppert wrote:
| It isn't just hyped; popular reporting on fusion power hasn't
| been very accurate. It doesn't help fusion power that things
| like this are trumpeted as a breakthrough when the reality is
| that the INF was never was a viable way to generate power in
| first place.
| chemmail wrote:
| It doesn't matter if we find an infinite energy source. It will
| just shuffle the powers around. Nothing will really change.
| Humans will shift their fight to something else and inequality
| will still be the source of most of our problems.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's been clear like that for a while. Crypto threads are
| infested with nonsense, ignoring anything that's even distantly
| related and ignoring any breakthroughs. Any new tech is poo
| pooed immediately.
| jxramos wrote:
| that's a brilliant phrase, a reflexive contrarian. They just go
| the opposite of, I've been thinking about this behavior of
| late, great way to characterize it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I'm a physicist and it's absurd how much career concerns push
| us to overhype even the most incremental research effort. I'm
| not surprised the public are sceptical
| kolbe wrote:
| Maybe we paid attention when our parents told us the tale of
| the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Look if a scientist at LLNL is excited about it, then there's a
| conflict of interest here. The fact of the matter is that there
| is such a high likelihood that inertial confinement is a dead
| end, because as far as I can tell there is not a realistic plan
| to harvest the produced energy, which at least, some of the
| other designs do. The bar is literally higher in other branches
| of fusion research (and they too are getting called to task for
| reporting plasma q values instead of estimated plausible total
| yields). Until someone starts at least building a model of how
| to collect this energy high levels of skepticism are warranted.
| hardtke wrote:
| Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of
| national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab
| open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long
| history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success,
| but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified.
| The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile
| stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for
| nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building
| any."
| cpleppert wrote:
| I don't believe its contrarianism. Sure, its an interesting
| science experiment but it has no viable way to generate power
| in any way. The lasers needs to be more efficient by a factor
| of 100x in the best case scenario(it depends on the specifics
| of how they calculate net gain). Then you probably need to
| increase that by another factor of 2-5x even assuming you have
| a way to convert that thermal energy to electricity.
|
| No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion
| alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer
| from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to
| build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the
| lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea
| how that would work either.
|
| There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in
| fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this
| before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable
| power source.
|
| Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the
| viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent
| were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power
| plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here
| is just not accurate.
| politician wrote:
| > "Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful
| experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the
| exact yield is still being determined and we can't confirm that
| it is over the threshold at this time," it said. "That analysis
| is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that
| process is complete would be inaccurate."
|
| From the article!!!
| rafaelero wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
| and it's a not healthy.
|
| I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for
| things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if
| they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being
| cautious, but never, ever, negative.
| talkingtab wrote:
| HN comments are not thinking, doing anything, or building
| something. It is a place where you gain attention and karma not
| from some constructive act. People post constructive things,
| then commenters vie for attention. If you look at threads, the
| top "comment" on them is something about a completely different
| topic. And then they mostly go downhill.
|
| Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea.
| The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social
| machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are
| contrarians, it a function of the machine.
|
| Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the
| Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything
| constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas,
| available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you
| see here.
| raydiatian wrote:
| You're just a reflexive (reflexive contrarian) contrarian
| dundarious wrote:
| "Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not
| translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite
| reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the
| beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion
| revolution.
|
| It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in
| particle physics are interesting.
| [deleted]
| dundarious wrote:
| An example of the context in which I want to tamper
| excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the
| FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite
| matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16
| 020118886526320...
|
| > SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy
| grail in science for decades. Now I'm told US scientists have
| done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential
| for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press
| conference Tuesday:
| https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-
| cfc345589...
|
| Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison
| would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out
| from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are
| breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful
| in the way it is described in these articles, solving
| currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are _so
| far away_ from something useful that these inches are
| ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people
| like me).
|
| By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great
| science reporting on these topics, but I have been
| conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of
| such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not
| mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
| happytiger wrote:
| Engineers tend to have a problem solving demeanor towards
| novelty, which is excellent for finding the problem with
| things.
|
| Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem
| that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a
| general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range.
|
| I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal
| response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on
| HN.
|
| This is a "show me the evidence don't tell me about the
| possibilities" crowd.
|
| I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my
| bias is "wait and see." This could be a massive leap towards
| proof it will work.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| This could pass as satire of a Hacker News comment.
| pavon wrote:
| I agree that the discussion generated from this article is not
| what we want on HN, but I don't think it is fair to criticize
| the comments as being reflexive contrarians when they are
| simply and correctly pointing out that the claims being made in
| the article are misleading at best. And these aren't nit-picky
| details about side-issues in the article - the are the core
| headline claims that aren't further clarified or nuanced in the
| article text, so guidelines to not "pick the most provocative
| thing ... to complain about" aren't applicable IMO - without
| posts correcting the article many reader would have a wildly
| false understanding of what actually occurred which isn't what
| we want either.
|
| I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for
| research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven
| coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual
| research results and their implications, rather than on the
| poor coverage.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| People have just become unsensitized to clickbait, it's mostly
| the media's fault, they always use titles like "cancer cure
| discovered" to get more views and thus more money, the viewers
| see a thousand articles like this and keep getting disappointed
| to the point a real cancer cure could be discovered and no one
| would believe it. tldr:crywolf
| squokko wrote:
| I think it's just the difference in expectations between
| scientists and laypeople. "Major fusion breakthrough" to a
| scientist could mean one step out of 200, over 3 decades,
| towards functional fusion power. Scientists understand the long
| arc of progress. But these labs need to market to the public as
| well who invariably end up expecting a SimCity Fusion Power
| Plant within 18 months.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Many on HN have the same response to many things in every
| domain, not just research.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai
| and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing
| I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have
| formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware
| or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured
| since.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| That's not completely true, but has a lot of truth in it.
|
| Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long
| time ago.
|
| But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but
| has it's own flaws.
| Moissanite wrote:
| On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of
| cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated
| "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in
| leaning towards pessimism.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic
| projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy
| countries at least are now _full_ of little gadgets that
| couldn 't have existed even a few years ago due to the
| battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see
| probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems
| that are pretty close to sci-fi.
| paxys wrote:
| For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are
| strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted
| responses to every new product announcement are essentially
| "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".
| dsr_ wrote:
| That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff
| performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been
| debugged in ways the new stuff has not.
|
| All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks
| shiny.
| xeromal wrote:
| The problem is this might be true, but it will not always
| be true. The horse was probably better than the first
| cars for a while, but progress changed that.
| paxys wrote:
| If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the
| time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for
| it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from
| people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the
| small chance that they are in the 10%.
| nine_k wrote:
| Rather, very anti science and technology _hype_. Many
| visitors of this website measure experience by decades,
| and have seen many waves of hype resiting in not much
| progress in unyielding areas, from self-driving car and
| silver-bullet methodologies to, well, commercial fusion.
|
| When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors
| of this site get very excited and positive, from things
| like the Rust language all the way to solar power and
| reusable rockets.
|
| A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely)
| quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a
| nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a
| qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus,
| actual generation.
|
| We are still far away from the latter, alas.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This is the very opposite to silver bullet approaches to
| fusion, though. This is a methodical, military-
| industrial-complex style development that was decades in
| the making.
|
| I think it's just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained
| us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick
| takes that don't dig into the first principles and
| instead serve as shibboleths that you're not one of THOSE
| types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs
| or whatever.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Not really convincing since Rust is 99% hype from people
| who misunderstand C++ and are just happy to join an
| "inclusive" cult
| rocqua wrote:
| Products better have sn answer to that question, and that
| answer tends to be very informative.
| aksss wrote:
| Most people in tech are cynical about tech because they
| intimately know the vision is waaay further out than
| reality, they know the breed and sometimes the names of
| the squirrels running in the wheels making it work, and
| have gone through more figurative duct tape and baling
| wire than most developing nations.
| ForgotIdAgain wrote:
| In my experience, the more someone has deep understanding
| in tech, the more they are critical of it. Especially
| true in my field of infosec.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, it's called counter-signaling.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think as people gain experience, they can start
| substituting experience and cynicism for actual first
| principles thinking and curiosity.
| qayxc wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
| and it's a not healthy.
|
| I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the
| researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which
| are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is
| closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about
| 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with
| the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we
| can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this.
| So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even.
|
| Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a
| breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself
| says the data is still being analysed and the actual results
| aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about
| the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result
| that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet.
|
| So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's
| contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach
| sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth
| attitude instead.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved
| a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy
| from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to
| you?
| scottLobster wrote:
| For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the
| observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe
| worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no
| immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the
| first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of
| the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that
| would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers'
| flight 40 years later?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| For the vast majority of people, the Wright Brothers'
| flight was also "just another Monday [or whatever day it
| happened to be]".
|
| It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| > But that's energy, no electricity as far as fusion
| viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is
| enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because
| there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce
| heat.
|
| Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are
| inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain
| is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get
| incrementally more efficient, at least there was not
| incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no
| known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
| qayxc wrote:
| > the whole electricity is moving the goal post because
| there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce
| heat.
|
| There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in
| the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post
| at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of
| nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've
| solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if
| not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily
| available literally at the push of a button. But for some
| odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on
| electricity instead...
| anyfoo wrote:
| The question is whether this is a breakthrough and a
| significant milestone or not. It seems to me like your
| comment suggests that we have hit the "significant
| milestone" marker only when we have an actual
| electricity-generating fusion reactor, which I think
| diminishes the actual breakthrough that a positive net
| energy gain represents (if correct). It was long sought
| after, it has now been reached.
| qayxc wrote:
| Exactly! This is a very good question that requires some
| context, preferably from within the field. What does it
| actually mean?
|
| Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in
| answering that question and providing the necessary
| context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem
| ecstatic about the possibilities.
|
| You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that
| I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in
| the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.
|
| But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the
| same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough
| and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to
| this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called
| "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right
| direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Lasers can get over 50% efficient (although these are
| specialized types).
|
| It's silly to blame a facility not designed for power
| production for using inefficient lasers.
|
| This is an important and necessary step to getting
| resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would've been
| to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x
| energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| > ...I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist
| headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude
| instead.
|
| My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking.
| If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias
| is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias
| is against.
|
| Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you
| are being critical of the idea?
|
| I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the
| deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there
| _is_ something going here other than that?
| qayxc wrote:
| > Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because
| you are being critical of the idea?
|
| Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good
| progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration,
| sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before
| substance, and raising expectations for something that's
| still essentially just basic research.
|
| This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just
| poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of
| genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a
| publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we
| get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source,
| why even bother taking any publication serious anymore?
| It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their
| work.
|
| It's a critique of the media preventing the public from
| actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be
| educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up.
| donquixote25 wrote:
| Many fusion new articles have this problem but i would
| argue that this time, how FT categorized this is
| appropriate. This is literally the first time the
| scientific break-even (not engineering break-even) has
| been achieved by any controlled experiment, including
| MCF. How is that not a breakthrough?
| stuckinhell wrote:
| People have been burned time and time again by scientists over
| hyping stuff in the last 10 years, then combine that with the
| replication failures over nearly every single scientific field.
| Then look at the extreme amount of business fraud in the last
| 10 years with places like Theranos and FTX
|
| Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians.
|
| Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt.
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
| concordDance wrote:
| Note that there's multiple bits of hype compounding on each
| other. The scientists hype it up a bit, the University PR
| guys do it a lot more and the popular press goes nuts.
|
| The scientists are like 10% to blame here.
| yummypaint wrote:
| When people use the word "reflexive," they're talking about
| things like conflating business hype designed to attract
| publicity and VC capital with a press release for a major
| scientific paper from NIF. I don't think it's unreasonable
| for HN to hold itself to an understanding of these things. If
| you actually want to critically examine evidence then you
| must necessarily read the paper before posting.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| "reflexive contrarians" in the context here was being used
| a perojative rhetorical trick to broadly dismiss valid
| doubts people have about this research.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Bodied, and deservedly so.
|
| Bringing FTX into a discussion of nuclear fusion to justify
| skepticism is parody-worthy.
| gumboza wrote:
| To an external non-technical observer, this is about as
| exciting as me hitting a clean compile in the scale of things.
| It really makes me happy but no one else cares until the
| product arrives.
|
| I'm excited for both for reference.
| intrasight wrote:
| > The experiment actually created more energy than expected and
| damaged the sensors.
|
| Who else in their minds eye see smoke and sparks in the
| experimental facility and control room, and scientists and
| engineer wooping with joy ;)
| TheCondor wrote:
| I think the cynicism is linked to the cycles of bubbles.
|
| When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was
| a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People
| were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute
| and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid
| an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the
| effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an
| industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to
| lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything,
| there were companies just pouring money in to anything related
| to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a
| conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail
| to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see
| but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do
| that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success?
| Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got
| involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and
| Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our
| ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized"
| but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or
| other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is
| going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things
| righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-
| economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to
| learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon
| used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be
| a big deal...
|
| It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and
| nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe
| we'll do it next time.
|
| In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is
| awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we
| crack the fusion nut, we _will_ change the world.
| alexndrTheGreat wrote:
| twblalock wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
| and it's a not healthy.
|
| The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they
| are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story
| could probably be auto-flagged.
|
| The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Hacker News is absolutely totally broken with cynicism. It has
| been getting worse for years now.
| underscore_ku wrote:
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What I encourage people to do, and what I was encouraged to do
| by a professor, is to find the value in things. Yes the thing,
| any thing, has great flaws, risks, is an imperfect match, etc.
| That goes without saying, and is is in some respects pointless
| to say - we can stay in place without going through the effort
| of researching something. It's the value in things, and finding
| that value, that moves us forward.
| butterfi wrote:
| I try to live my life this way. People think I'm an optimist,
| but really I think the world is mostly BS and I try to
| acknowledge the good things. It works for me.
| mbgerring wrote:
| People are cynical because the world is already feeling the
| effects of climate change, the technology exists _today_ to
| move the grid to zero emissions, and because the work required
| to do that is a quotidian, slow-and-steady slog, it gets
| ignored in terms of both funding and mindshare in favor of
| things like nuclear fusion experiments.
| themitigating wrote:
| Are you claiming a key reason that low or zero emissions
| technology hasn't been implemented is due to scientists
| wasting time on nuclear fusion experiments? Not entire
| political spectrum who doesn't believe global warming to be
| real, overstated, or some sort of conspiracy.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It's ok to be cynical about things that are massively
| overhyped. This development is an important milestone, but it
| is _nowhere near_ what it is being reported as.
| eindiran wrote:
| It's not reflexive-contrarianism as such; it's that the science
| press has historically been _so_ , _so_ bad that cynicism is
| the only healthy response. Think of the last 5 things you 've
| seen in the science press: which ones were overemphasized?
| Which ones were exaggerated to the point that they didn't
| reflect anything meaningful about the actual result? And
| thinking back on the press releases over the years, what
| percentage of what you've read end up having an actual effect
| on the world? Add to that the fact that this is about fusion
| breakthroughs, something that has been wrought with complete
| disinformation by the science press since the late 1940s. Of
| course people here are going to be cynical about it.
| gaucheries wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
|
| hey, at least all of them are highly educated and extremely
| correct about things. read about it on their blogs. (sarcasm
| enabled for this reply)
| gaucheries wrote:
| downvoters of this comment, be sure to leave a link to your
| blog, too
| scottLobster wrote:
| My experience is that if scientists are exited about it then
| it's probably not a big deal to non-scientists. It may be a
| small piece of a big deal in a few decades.
|
| Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do
| something truly new, inventing technologies that previously
| didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and
| every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement
| going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my
| infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to
| do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| We're hackers, engineers. We poke around for problems before
| there are problems and we pry open the black box to make sure
| it's not just filled with Bullshit. If you want to
| unquestioningly lap up everything that's offered to you, then
| I've got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan I'd like to
| sell you.
| themitigating wrote:
| So the two options are to believe everything unquestionably
| or be suspicious/cynical about all new announcements.
| kace91 wrote:
| That's definitely how many people here see themselves, but
| excessive scepticism can also be a problem, something which
| is overlooked by this crowd.
|
| If you don't push and help the many small steps that come
| before the big leap, many big leaps will never become
| feasible.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Over-hyping the small steps as big leaps is the problem. If
| the scientifically literate people here are sick of it,
| imagine what the voting public thinks.
| kace91 wrote:
| "First time ind history fusion releases more energy that
| is put in" is a big leap. The fact that it's still a
| technology in its infancy and decades away from actual
| use doesn't make it any less impressive.
| root_axis wrote:
| Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity.
| Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims
| of amazing scientific breakthroughs.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree, but what I'm seeing here down in the comments isn't
| merely skepticism, but outright dismissal.
| SllX wrote:
| Neither is particularly healthy. Either staying level-headed
| and analytical or simply admitting ignorance would be
| healthier. Skeptical/Gullible are two ends of the same crutch
| for when we are unable or unwilling to do either.
| root_axis wrote:
| I think skepticism is healthy, rational, and intellectually
| economical, especially when we're talking about popular
| media stories. The skeptic isn't harmed by dismissing
| grandiose headlines about scientific breakthroughs which
| are selling a false narrative 99.9% of the time (yes, real
| science is happening, but the media's narrative about the
| impact of research is pretty much always false), and in the
| cases where someone is a little too dismissive, they might
| end up looking like an idiot one day, but layperson
| skepticism has no bearing on the validity of the claim, no
| amount of skepticism can overcome the reality on the
| ground, if it's real it doesn't matter what anyone
| believes.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| The older I get the more I think it's just counter signaling
| that one is smarter than whoever did this work, which is
| almost certainly not the case.
| spoils19 wrote:
| kelnos wrote:
| That's a pretty arrogant take based on zero actual
| evidence. When "in my experience" is "randoms on the
| internet who I've never met and occasionally argue with
| online", I don't think we can draw many conclusions.
| govg wrote:
| The average HN reader who is probably a generic software
| engineer in their 20s/30s will know more about nuclear
| fusion than scientists at LLNL?
| Moissanite wrote:
| Listen man, remembering the names of all these JavaScript
| frameworks is hard!
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| They think they do, but don't...I think that's the point
| that's trying to be made here
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Surely this is sarcasm?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| In my experience the average HN reader is slightly above
| the general population average.
| yummypaint wrote:
| I know for a fact that many people who worked on this are
| also on HN. You should know that scientists see posters
| on this site mostly as representatives of the software
| engineering world. Seeing this kind of sneering attitude
| so frequently on display here is pretty embarrassing and
| casts the whole profession in a poor light.
| teawrecks wrote:
| The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk
| big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them
| actually solve something and they crumble instantly.
|
| Maybe the average HN reader is smarter than the average
| reddit reader (very slightly if at all), but they're not
| more useful than someone who actually did work and shared
| it publicly.
| bumby wrote:
| > _The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can
| talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make
| them actually solve something and they crumble
| instantly._
|
| I'm sure many have experienced the phenomenon where they
| read some HN comments that sound authoritative and give
| them that level of credulity. And then they get into a
| discussion on a topic they may literally be an expert in
| and it's made glaring obvious the person they are in a
| discussion with only has a superficial understanding, yet
| takes the same authoritative tone.
| panzagl wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
|
| No it's not.
| chmod775 wrote:
| This made me chuckle.
| dwsjoquist wrote:
| You just made my day...
| jonathanoberg wrote:
| Yes it is.
| jonathanoberg wrote:
| No, it isn't Yes, it is. You just contradicted me No, I
| didn't Yes, you did No, no, no You did just then That's
| ludicrous Oh, this is futile No, it isn't I came in here
| for a good argument No, you didn't. You came in here for an
| argument Well, argument isn't the same as contradiction Can
| be
| doctor_eval wrote:
| "An argument is a connected series of statements intended
| to form a proposition. Contradiction is merely the
| automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says"
|
| "No it isn't!"
| wiredfool wrote:
| I've had enough of this.
| dawkins wrote:
| Argument - Monty Python
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ
| tomphoolery wrote:
| Oh I'm sorry, this is abuse! Yes, you want arguments,
| next door.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| Comment of the year.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Part of it is that we read about "breakthroughs" in diverse
| fields only to see nothing come of them. Past experience
| creates valid doubt. Also, as exciting as this might be, we are
| nowhere near a practical application.
|
| Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we
| haven't come to a halt.
| catach wrote:
| I do not think I can meaningfully increase my levels of
| credulity ( _nor_ my skepticism). I strive to communicate my
| thoughts accurately. Given those two points, how is it not
| healthy?
| atty wrote:
| I agree with the spirit of your comment, and I am extremely
| excited by these results. However, I think the history of
| fusion has showed us that the cynics have had a much better
| track record than the fusion optimists, haha.
|
| My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but
| not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that
| we're still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its
| way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or
| other things, like the relative instability of global energy
| markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so
| that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to
| efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Also this assumes we get 20 years and the science budget will
| not be eaten by emerging endless crisis and wars.
| scottLobster wrote:
| To be fair, fusion technology is a strategic imperative.
| The first nation to master it will quickly enjoy defacto
| Energy independence. Given that many of the crises will
| likely be energy-eccentric, we may see more investment in
| the space rather than less, especially if visible progress
| is being made.
| atty wrote:
| I think I'd switch that from "quickly" to "eventually",
| or "have a head start to" - we could get grid
| independence "relatively" quickly if the government
| subsidized it (I highly doubt first Gen fusion competes
| with natural gas or solar cost-wise), but a large amount
| of energy is used in transportation, home heating, etc..
| Until those become fully electrified you're still stuck
| in the fossil fuel economy.
| scottLobster wrote:
| True, I meant "quickly" on a relative scale. One
| advantage the 1st gen fusions would have is immunity to
| the supply shocks of fossil fuels and the intermittency
| of solar/wind. Plus we have workable electric vehicles
| and every home that has fossil-fuel powered heat by
| definition has a connection to the electric grid.
|
| It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few
| things that would kickstart the electrification of
| everything better than functional fusion power plants.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I think there are a couple different types of cynicism and one
| might be more justified than the other.
|
| The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net
| energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be
| called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is
| still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough.
|
| The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial
| results and the article says the data is still under review".
| This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and
| accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF
| had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an
| ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it.
| brudgers wrote:
| I am skeptical, not cynical.
|
| When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical.
|
| The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper
| titled 'Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future' in
| 1982, and after the semester sharing my 'it's only 20 years
| away' enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for
| the DoD. Hence it's forty years since I first heard 'fusion is
| always 20 years away.'
|
| Of course I don't know any LLNL scientists but don't question
| their or your sincerity or motivation.
|
| The difference between those and the incentives of financially
| oriented news reporting, doesn't make me less skeptical. Their
| mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before
| the market can move.
|
| And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I
| have forty years of experience with reports...I mean I see
| excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Seeing headlines like this every year or so will do that to you
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| "Announcing a breakthrough" without replicated results is
| exactly what made cold fusion a taboo subject in the first
| place.
|
| We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe
| it until a lot of separate research groups show the same
| results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not
| believe somebody just because you personally know them or they
| are "respected". Their work _has to be replicated_ for Science
| to take it seriously.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
| and it's a not healthy.
|
| What could be done about that aside from expecting people to
| just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces
| those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators
| make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I
| encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I
| might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments
| would probably be a lot more constructive!
|
| Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over
| one fence who has very different political views to mine. We
| have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually
| really engaged and trying to understand each others'
| perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by
| avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the
| conversation is rewarded.
|
| I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick"
| (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more
| rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on
| forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a
| while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's
| moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to
| take place in "moderation space" (in which all community
| members could participate) and for there to be opportunities
| for people to refine their comments in response to feedback --
| and for doing so to be the norm.
|
| Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen
| different moderation strategies around the web produce very
| different results, so it seems to me that there should be
| plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from
| doing so.
| marincounty wrote:
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Your conversation with your neighbor has no meta-conversation
| going on.
|
| Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a
| conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of
| people) can learn and be swayed.
|
| Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes
| are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's
| willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important"
| topics.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| I'd say most of the problem here is that viewpoints are meted
| out as simple pithy statements. Half of the comments on this
| thread are one sentence statements saying the building has
| 200x to go before it's truly net positive.
|
| You get more content out of a discussion with your neighbor
| in 30s than that. Those comments are genuinely worthless,
| they don't talk about things like:
|
| 1) What are the parts of an inertial confinement fusion based
| system which are difficult and which are missing today and
| would need serious investment
|
| 2) What is the likelyhood that the power output observed here
| could double, or more with other scale factors?
|
| 3) What's the net system costs once a plant is made. Is the
| fuel cheap or expensive?
|
| Etc. It's fine to be contrarian, but most of the contrariness
| on this most internet forums is of the most basic, shallow
| kind that is defeated in a moment by any serious thinking.
|
| The short answer to being better? Posts with more in depth
| content. I seriously think HN should consider banning pithy
| one or two sentence posts "they still would only get 1/4 the
| power" you find all over the place.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| It's mostly British folks in those comments as well. If you are
| looking at real estate in Britain, now you know what you are
| dealing with.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Lotsa reasons.
|
| (1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and
| again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous
| breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my
| first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm
| not sure that there is any actual news.
|
| A few months back it was announced that scientists had
| discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it
| still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they
| discovered a closer one.
|
| (2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of
| very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might
| yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from
| Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build
| a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons &
| Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of
| LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power
| source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new
| blockchain" in this climate
|
| (3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a
| practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique
| you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests
| of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source"
|
| (4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy
| output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to
| build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make
| you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that
| ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to
| increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long
| ways to go.
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm just glad these scientists are working on something other
| than nuclear bombs.
| zargon wrote:
| The entire point of LLNL is to study nuclear bombs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The _original_ point of LLNL was to develop nuclear
| bombs. There is such as thing as "mission creep", also
| the challenge of maintaining the ability to develop bombs
| in the future if we need to.
| zargon wrote:
| Studying nuclear bombs is still the point. The press
| releases about fusion "energy" are just for appearances
| sake. The methods they employ are useless for energy
| applications. They're just H-bomb simulations.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
| and it's a not healthy.
|
| I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way
| of breathless PR around science topics both from university
| press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially
| around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So
| I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical.
| Exendroinient00 wrote:
| Still not nearly enough money invested to energy research.
| simiones wrote:
| This is not energy research, it's weapons research. Inertial
| containment fusion is only interesting because it replicates
| some of the conditions inside a fusion bomb - there is no
| plausible way to use it to generate electricity with anything
| approaching cost efficiency.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Once you have a viable start the money will explode into the
| sector. Manhattan project style.
| nostromo wrote:
| 2.1 megajoules of energy in lasers to make 2.5 megajoules of heat
| energy.
|
| If you turned that heat energy into electricity (our ultimate
| goal here) you'd have:
|
| (2.5 megajoules produced * 50% loss in conversion to electricity)
| - 2.1 megajoules input = negative 0.85 megajoules generated
|
| This is still cool of course, but we're still way off from making
| this anywhere near feasible.
| dahfizz wrote:
| This is science lab, not a power plant. The point is to create
| and prove new technologies.
|
| They could easily buy a newer, more efficient laser for
| example. That would increase the overall efficiency, but would
| ultimately be a waste of money. It wouldn't change the science
| at all, and the point is the science.
| mach1ne wrote:
| Didn't they claim this already in 2013?
| https://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-the-worlds-first-net-positi...
| [deleted]
| lambdatronics wrote:
| Last time, they got something like 80% return on the laser
| energy input, now it's over 100% apparently. And, they had
| trouble repeating that last record, so people were questioning
| how meaningful it was if it couldn't be repeated. Now they've
| been able to repeat it & improve on it.
| coolspot wrote:
| Anyone remembers Lockheed Martin container-sized fusion reactors
| announced couple (edit: 8) years ago?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458339
| pfdietz wrote:
| They discovered that it actually had a power density 100x lower
| than what they had said, if it could even work at all. Last I
| heard the group there was disbanded in 2019.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same
| old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship
| program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30
| years away".
|
| I think it's very clear, given the past year that NIF has had,
| that they are _very_ rapidly approaching a point where we have
| the tech to "solve" inertial fusion.
|
| https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-presentations
|
| Getting fusion right is done a magnitude at a time. Right now NIF
| is within 1 magnitude if they built it with modern laser tech.
| Many fusion designs are 10 magnitudes away or more.
|
| Their most recent article has a ton of great data and next steps:
|
| https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost-nif-im...
|
| This includes
|
| - Cryo-cooling the main target
|
| - New alloys
|
| - Magnetic compression of targets
|
| The recent advancement that helped reach ignition (in the last
| article) boosted performance 40%.
|
| The advancement between then and now: nearly 60%.
|
| Within the past 6 months, NIF has nearly doubled energy output of
| the reaction.
|
| Plus, if you know anything about fusion research, you'd know that
| energy outputs tend to scale non-linearly with energy input and
| size. This tends to be on the order of the power 3 or 4. Hence
| the existence of ITER.
|
| NIF has uncovered some new science, closed the magnitude gap, and
| made it actually realistic for inertial confinement to be a
| feasible tech for a power producing plant.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Well... if Nuclear Fusion becomes actually possible in a cost-
| effective manner, so much for the need to roll out solar and
| wind-based electricity, which looks very much like a 1st-
| generation modern green energy technology in retrospect.
|
| I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion,
| if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how
| to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically
| zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the
| most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a
| better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame
| people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar).
| sveme wrote:
| Even with such a breakthrough, cost-effective fusion would
| still probably be 50 years away. Why would you assume it to be
| super cheap right out the house?
| IMTDb wrote:
| > even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist
|
| They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real
| alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like
| we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were
| developed.
|
| The main issue is that our electricity grids and production
| facilities aren't ready yet to sustain a mass shift to
| electric, so we need to ease in the transition. But the moment
| they are, there is no reason to delay any further.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real
| alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like
| we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were
| developed.
|
| Banning gas cars outright, I think, would be a political
| miscalculation. There is broad mistrust of _anything_ the
| government does right now in the US (not wholly undeserved),
| and it is likely to continue getting stronger, so not
| tainting it with a political ban would be a better solution
| in my view. Otherwise you risk polarization and failure,
| because not everyone buys climate change, or banning
| something because X is determined to be better now. It also
| would breed widespread resentment from people who aren 't
| ready to switch (because, let me tell you, outside of cities,
| "reduces climate change" is something nobody cares about as a
| selling point). Just let electric vehicles naturally become
| better at everything and let gas cars slowly die naturally.
| The "invisible hand" will take care of the rest - just like
| it did with the horse and buggy.
| bombcar wrote:
| You don't even have to ban it outright; you just ban making
| new ones (though even the CFC ban wasn't 1000% complete;
| there's been evidence that some companies were 'faking
| finding old supplies').
|
| People who "really want to" will keep old ones working and
| most people will slowly start using the new ones.
|
| After all you can still get a horse-drawn carriage if you
| want to, and you can drive a Model T, but few people bother.
| skrowl wrote:
| Good news! FTL travel when?
| carabiner wrote:
| Right after the reusable fusion rockets.
| rapsey wrote:
| Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the
| real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too
| enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not
| actually be a cost effective source of power.
|
| Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and
| there are lots of ways of making them.
| barnabee wrote:
| Most things don't start off cost effective, they become so due
| to investment, demand, industrialisation, competition, etc.
|
| Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for
| decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be
| part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude
| more energy than we do now...
| ragebol wrote:
| Not everything is expressed in cost, externalities like the
| looks and intrusiveness of something do matter.
|
| 1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land,
| for example.
|
| But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it
| becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so
| small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
| neonsunset wrote:
| Solar and wind are _bad_ and unsustainable due to mining of
| rare earth minerals and photovoltaic cells degrading and
| becoming a landfill liability.
|
| Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of
| nuclear executed through bureaucracy.
|
| The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to
| use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with
| decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is
| _the_ zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Nonsense. Solar and wind are good and sustainable using
| minimal rare-earth minerals. Photovoltaic cells hold on
| decades and decades and can be easily recycled. Cost
| effectiveness is true even though stupid things have been
| done to get rid of the excess energy provided during the
| night by nuclear which can't switch off.
|
| The nuclear, however, is currently the most expensive and
| worst energy source, technologically too complicated to make
| safe. It is the technology with the highest risk for
| catastrophic failure as shown by Fukushima and Chornobyl.
| neonsunset wrote:
| What were the estimated damage and deaths caused by
| Fukushima incident? When was the reactor site built, when
| was the reactor designed?
|
| A few extra questions you may also be interested in:
| lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high
| efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and
| heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on
| nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that
| makes the public treat opinions like yours as even remotely
| realistic.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Why did people back then think it was save and then it
| exploded? Were they wrong in their assessment back then?
| Why were they wrong? Are you sure your assesment is
| correct today? Why is it better than their assessment
| back then? Are you sure you are not making the same
| mistakes that they made back then? Oh look, I can ask
| questions too, because I am a sealion.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| extra questions you might be interested in:
|
| where is most of the uranium mined that is used in
| european reactors? what environmental damages are done by
| reprocessing uran? costs of the buildback of reactors?
| who will pay for it when the costs for this are 10x what
| the operators put aside for it? how much subsidies go
| into nuclear? how do you prevent proliferation in rougue
| nations that use nuclear for example iran?
| coldpie wrote:
| Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem.
| Research on batteries may get us there soon, but today they
| aren't feasible. It's very much worth putting effort into both
| approaches. IMO the best outcome is a wide variety of clean
| energy sources and storage solutions, so the best solution can
| be chosen for a given geographical/political/etc situation.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in
| most markets. Nuclear isn't competing with renewables, it's
| competing against batteries and almost free renewables that
| charge them.
|
| Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where
| renewables aren't feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any
| means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your
| math.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108
| melling wrote:
| That's great! Because there are [ONLY] 8500 coal power
| plants producing 20% of the CO2 emissions globally.
|
| Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference.
|
| ETA on this should be around 2030?
|
| What I don't get is since solar is cheaper, why are we
| building so many coal power plants?
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-
| buildi...
| throitallaway wrote:
| Solar generates electricity during the day. It would have
| to be overprovisioned and paired with storage in order to
| handle dark hours. There are some battery banks out there
| (Tesla), but I don't think they're very common.
|
| Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear
| for baseline instead.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Construction still hasn't begun on that project, 3 years
| later. When is the last time LA had a large construction
| project come in under budget?
|
| I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed
| and the bill is paid.
|
| Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In
| 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7
| GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few
| minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load
| generation.
|
| [1] https://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| See you in ten years at the earliest when any nuclear
| generator you break ground on today generates its first
| kWh of power (assuming it isn't wildly late or over
| budget, as every one built since the 70s has been).
| dahfizz wrote:
| I'm not saying fusion is necessarily the answer. I'm just
| tired of hearing "solar plus storage is the cheapest
| option" when the sources always rely on projected costs
| and a pathetically small amount of storage.
|
| We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make
| grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never
| going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage
| will come along faster than fusion.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We don't need major breakthroughs, we just need to watch
| technologies proceed down their experience curves.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| But at least we've built them and we know we can provide
| the necessary capacity.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| "Places where sun availability makes solar inefficient" is
| still a niche so massive that "niche" seems like a bad
| descriptor.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Keep in mind HVDC. 3300 KM north of the Sahara desert,
| and you are relatively close to the Arctic circle. North
| of that is still a "niche," but now we're talking about a
| million people living hugely spread out.
|
| Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden
| with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level
| that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian
| countries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
| coldpie wrote:
| Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in
| Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for
| a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, and failing
| power literally means death? I genuinely don't know. Like I
| said, having a variety of solutions is the best outcome so
| we can choose the right one & have backups.
|
| > just show your math.
|
| I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various
| science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica;
| Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
| jsight wrote:
| To keep warm, I'm estimating 2,628 kwh for a month for a
| home for a family of 3. In our magical Minnesota where
| everyone lives in houses with 3 people and only electric
| heat pumps, we'd have 1,900,000. This means, we'd need
| 4,993,200,000 kwh in the coldest month (4.993 Twh).
|
| 500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the
| worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many
| to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar.
| That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that
| we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost
| 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd
| freeze people to death.
|
| To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of
| batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At
| a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000
| in energy storage prices.
|
| Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly.
| The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the
| worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate
| with lower demand and more than double the supply.
|
| Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like
| building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way
| there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be
| truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe
| even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the
| returns diminish the deeper one goes.
| coldpie wrote:
| Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my
| ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently
| 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month).
| That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month
| (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more
| than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and
| Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the
| conservative side of things... or possibly my home is
| very inefficient :)
|
| E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat
| pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG
| boiler.
| jsight wrote:
| Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat
| pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that
| estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with
| electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing.
|
| Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I
| was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
| foota wrote:
| I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about
| future investment, but the current "value" of the whole
| energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the
| hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built
| out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year
| are much lower.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I think UMN did a study with 4 hour storage plus solar on
| the grid a few years back.
|
| https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-
| grid...
| coldpie wrote:
| Thanks, this was informative. It wasn't clear to me, but
| I think the study does not account for switching heating
| from burning NG in the dwelling to electricity. I don't
| have numbers, but I'm pretty sure that's going to
| introduce an enormous load on the system, and is my main
| source of skepticism for wind/solar/storage as a solution
| for all electricity generation in places like Minnesota.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people
| away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air
| conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at
| about the same time as maximum solar power.
| finnh wrote:
| We are doing that actually, but the other way: rather
| than moving the people, we are moving the climate.
| coldpie wrote:
| This might work with post-Surak Vulcans, but it's not
| gonna fly here on Earth with humans :)
| megaman821 wrote:
| Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with
| Minnesota's state borders.
|
| Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery
| storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the
| process of being built out now. Medium term storage is
| still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?).
| Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with
| carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable
| than fusion in the next few decades.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you limit yourself to using solar generated with
| Minnesota 's state borders_
|
| I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-
| state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero
| accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a
| tough sell.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas
| from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline
| to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar
| electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a
| long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas
| traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat
| your homes and businesses_
|
| Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil
| and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what
| it's worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The
| fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the
| Dakotas and Iowa.
|
| These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part
| of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national
| discourse.
|
| [1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electrica
| lgenera...
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN
| megaman821 wrote:
| In northern states almost all residential energy use is
| heating. The amount of electricity used is minimal,
| therefore even modest amounts of electricity generation
| can meet need. Wyoming is the only northern state that
| has natural gas in notable amounts, all other states
| import a lot of their energy (especially heating) needs.
|
| If most states stopped importing energy they would have
| to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a
| huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience
| and home air quality.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _almost all residential energy use is heating. The
| amount of electricity used is minimal_
|
| Resistive heating.
|
| > _most states stopped importing energy they would have
| to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves_
|
| Most states don't have high-baseload, low-latency life-
| or-death energy requirements. Those that do have the
| options I outlined above.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Heat pumps should be paired with rooftop solar and
| batteries whenever possible for resiliency. I admit the
| use of natural gas will decline in my lifetime, but
| probably won't be fully deprecated.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The state you live in has one of the highest potentials
| for wind power in the country, easily backed by
| transmission, batteries, and as a last resort, natural
| gas.
|
| High level, the energy transition isn't simply a
| fossil->renewables story, but also a
| centralization->highly decentralized story.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Totally agree, though I don't know how wind performs in
| extended and deep subzero / heavy snow conditions.
| Hydropower is the traditional baseload for the Midwest,
| but it's tough to square the destruction to natural
| beauty that entails in comparison with a remote nuclear
| set-up.
|
| EDIT: It seems not too badly [1].
|
| [1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-
| work-in-...
| kelnos wrote:
| What does the geothermal story look like? I expect it's
| expensive to first set up, but after that, maybe it's
| cost-effective and reliable? Asking because I genuinely
| don't know, but haven't seen it mentioned in this
| subthread.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/resource-assessment-
| mapping....
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/assets/images/resource-
| asses...
| hedora wrote:
| In central California with ideal conditions, one day's
| worth of storage roughly doubles the price of a solar
| system that is correctly sized for net zero production in
| November (assuming a wood stove is supplementing a heat
| pump).
|
| I don't think storage will be feasible in places like
| Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense:
|
| - Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels
| vs. "normal" states.
|
| - Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances
| and vehicles.
|
| - Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries.
|
| - Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during
| outages (this more than doubles the generator's end to
| end efficiency)
|
| - Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used
| for subsidized carbon capture.
|
| This should be completely resilient against storms and
| power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would
| cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
| hadlock wrote:
| I honestly wonder if large scale population of the
| northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels.
| Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes
| and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some
| extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy
| doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net
| negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be
| much higher to offset generation in more favorable
| climates.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Cold can be mitigated a lot by enhanced R-value
| insulation in a single application. Northern states have
| higher levels of insulation.
|
| https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identif
| y_p...
|
| I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this
| chart-
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-
| the-...
|
| And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small.
| Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
| tacocataco wrote:
| The birds fly south for the winter. Then again, the birds
| dont have to worry about who owns the land wherever they
| eventually land.
| [deleted]
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Minnesota can use wind, which is also cheaper.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Minnesota has anticyclones, which are periods lasting
| over a week with almost no wind.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Not are carbon fuels are carbon negative - biofuel pulls
| down carbon from the atmosphere when it's created, so is
| considered carbon neutral.
|
| I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of
| algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the
| energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We can look at how solar/wind/storage compete with
| putative fusion. Fusion is a baseload source, so let's
| see how they would do to provide "synthetic baseload".
|
| https://model.energy/
|
| Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and
| 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh.
| The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of
| hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak
| power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.
| elurg wrote:
| Why do we need to cover the worst case with 100%
| renewables?
|
| The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even
| if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Eventually we have to get to zero net carbon emissions.
| But the worst case is just to create carbon based fuels
| from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere and use it in
| places/for uses which cannot be covered by renewable
| electricity directly (the far north, airplaines, ...)
| Spivak wrote:
| I think because it's the learned defensive reaction. What
| ends up happening is that you have someone who _really_
| hates fossil fuels who is more than willing to back
| policies that require a quality of life drop or a massive
| cost shift onto individuals to achieve 100% renewables.
| So whenever it comes up anything positive you say about
| renewables has to be come with the explicit caveat that
| it 's not yet a 1-1 replacement.
|
| It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of
| people are on the same page about what we should do but
| at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on
| one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides
| of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out
| of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up
| in comment sections.
| jsight wrote:
| We don't need to do that. But the media focuses on things
| like that and turns everything into some sort of weird
| argument that renewables are literally going to freeze
| gramma to death. Its overwhelmingly about emotion.
|
| Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what
| if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the
| cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no
| chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of
| "those people".
|
| Real world performance and goals are not correlated well
| with media hyperbole.
| jsight wrote:
| This site has changed a lot in the past year. Its been
| strange to watch.
| _ph_ wrote:
| There are plenty of other renewables usable than solar.
| Wind power would be the obvious one, as wind is often a
| great complement to solar anyway. Then there are long-
| distance transmission lines, water power, energy from
| biomass. Finally, if everything else fails, create
| hydrocarbons from CO2 in sunny places, ship those
| "eFuels" to Minnesota.
| rapsey wrote:
| > Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem.
|
| Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped
| hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite
| large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly
| cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
| conradev wrote:
| CATL is working on sodium batteries as a lithium replacement
| shipping in 2023
|
| Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class
| of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test
| installation in 2023
|
| The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage
| building more pumped storage capacity
|
| Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform
|
| There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term
| HillRat wrote:
| Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders
| of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization,
| though admittedly it's not like they've industrialized the
| process yet.
|
| The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own
| definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've
| demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct
| energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they
| basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually
| running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL
| assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that
| real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric.
| (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of
| those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF
| is so far behind their promised schedule.)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and
| there are lots of ways of making them.
|
| Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from
| politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or
| potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels
| require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly
| produced with forced labor.
|
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...
|
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence...
|
| And it's not just a China problem.
|
| "On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of
| between 15% and 30% of the world's cobalt in the Democratic
| Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that
| children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal
| cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions
| were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have
| adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust
| that contributed to hard metal lung disease."
|
| The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on
| it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to
| doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is
| true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the
| Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is
| fairly distasteful considering their sources.
| rapsey wrote:
| Mechanical, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all
| types of batteries. All capable of storing MW to GW of power.
| It is not all lithium and cobalt.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the technology
| to build a battery capable of storing enough renewable
| electrical energy for the (world|nation) for even half a
| day *does not exist* at any reasonable cost.
|
| And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly
| nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure
| anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and
| you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then
| the technology doubly doesn't exist.
|
| And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah,
| but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't
| someone say something about hydrogen?" which is
| essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero
| carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known
| how to do so since the 60s.
| rapsey wrote:
| > Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the
| technology to build a battery capable of storing enough
| renewable electrical energy for the (world|nation) for
| even half a day _does not exist_ at any reasonable cost.
|
| But it is almost certainly closer to existence than
| fusion.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Almost certainly not. The US _alone_ generates 4,095
| billion kWh yearly. For a half a day, you would need to
| store 5,600,000,000 kWh. Tesla Megapack can store 3916
| kWh fully loaded. This means you would need 1,430,000
| Megapacks to power the US for half a day. With Tesla only
| being capable of producing roughly 40,000,000 kWh of
| Megapacks annually, it would take 140 years to produce
| all the batteries. If Tesla created 100 times the factory
| capacity they have now (which, could the supply of raw
| materials even withstand the smallest fraction of that?),
| it would take 14 years, for batteries that have a
| warranty of 15 years. These are lithium-ion batteries
| which are the most space-efficient, unless you don 't
| mind clearing hundreds of square miles of space for this
| project. Did I mention it costs about $1 million per
| Megapack right now, so this project would cost _$1.4
| TRILLION_ assuming all Lithium+Cobalt+Supplies+Labor cost
| the same as they do now despite demand being increased
| 100x, and ignoring all engineering costs, and factory
| scaling costs, which could multiply the cost
| exponentially. All to power the US for just half a day.
| Now consider how to add Europe, Asia, Africa, South
| America, the rest of North America...
|
| We're not close, and it's basically completely
| unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such
| a project.
| rapsey wrote:
| I have listed 5 different types of batteries than Tesla
| makes. A number more are much farther than the
| fundamental science stage of Fusion. Tesla primarily
| makes batteries for cars, grid storage is actually way
| more flexible in the type of battery that can be used.
| You are missing the forest for the trees.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Almost certainly yes.
|
| Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal
| cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a
| gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then
| reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then
| reversing that cycle to generate power.
|
| This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely
| from cheap materials available in essentially infinite
| supply. No component operates at a temperature above the
| creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency
| could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological
| breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Sure it exists, it is called compressed air. Even better
| with CO2.
|
| Close to me is the oldest one, built in 1972 and still
| operational today:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Huntorf
| megaman821 wrote:
| I agree. There is no breakthrough on the horizon that is going
| to make a fusion plant have the complexity closer to a natural
| gas plant than a nuclear fission plant. Therefore the costs
| will remain high.
|
| It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I
| could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
| DennisP wrote:
| Gas has low capital cost but relatively high fuel cost,
| especially outside the US. For most fusion designs (possibly
| excluding NIF), the fuel cost is insignificant.
|
| Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions
| of gas plants.
| megaman821 wrote:
| That is what I mean. Some people are imagining the capital
| costs of a natural gas plant with the fuel and
| environmental costs being almost nothing. There is
| absolutely nothing to suggest that a fusion plant would
| cost anything less than a fission plant at this point.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build
| because they're already taking advantage of economies of scale
| and aren't in the R&D phase still.
|
| The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time
| around getting more power out than you put in and once that
| marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way.
| There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it
| can easily / readily scale though.
|
| It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only
| ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but
| with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead.
| When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery
| production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the
| potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it
| ultimately gets there is another question.
| rapsey wrote:
| > It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically.
|
| Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere
| near a decade away.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Fair, my statement had an implied "if they cleared this
| hurdle" attached but I probably should have made it
| explicit.
|
| I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain ->
| commercial fusion reactors coming online.
| gabesullice wrote:
| Pessimists were saying solar panels and batteries were too
| expensive too, not so long ago. If we discover fusion power to
| be viable in our lifetime, it will be a breathtaking
| accomplishment to witness. It's a fork in the timeline with
| repercussions that will reverberate for millenia, across
| trillions of human lives.
| codealot wrote:
| Beautifully stated. I teared up. This and watching us settle
| on the moon and Mars would be incredible. And achieving more
| breakthroughs in AI and medicine and everything else. I am an
| optimist and really excited by everything on the horizon.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the
| Clown.
|
| Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events.
|
| DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since
| it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and
| that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view
| it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and
| stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good
| engineering.
| rgmerk wrote:
| This.
|
| If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy
| from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going
| to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world.
|
| Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can
| make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships,
| and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid
| electricity is doubtful.
| gabesullice wrote:
| My impression is that the research efforts have been
| focused on "can we do it?" Then, if the answer is yes,
| they'll focus on "how do we do it efficiently?" Where
| efficiency can mean anything from capital efficient, to
| resource efficient, to energy conversion efficiency.
| Limiting one's focus on the next blocker in the critical
| path and not increasing scope beyond it sounds like
| perfectly good engineering to me.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It seems like terrible myopic project management to me.
| You want to avoid first steps that you know are very
| likely going to lead to dead ends down the line.
|
| We're constantly being told to take the long term view.
| Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the
| technological optimist's case or budget?
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