[HN Gopher] US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving 'ign...
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US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving 'ignition' over and
over
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 157 points
Date : 2023-12-17 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| hannob wrote:
| I guess that means we will have another round of "this
| interesting result in basic research that has no relation to
| practical use of fusion energy shows that practical and
| commercially viable fusion energy is basically just around the
| corner".
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The rate of progress is astounding.
|
| If growth is high, you can look nowhere near something, and
| then without too much time, it actually is right around the
| corner.
|
| We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100% non-
| nuclear "renewable" world.
|
| That's enough time for the entire lifecycle of nuclear reactors
| and fusion reactors.
|
| Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they can
| rely on, and is definitely interested in alternatives in less
| than 50 years - even if it means - in ideal conditions - they'd
| be overpaying for nuclear (or fusion if it becomes viable
| within 15 years).
|
| It's almost as if all the people working on these projects and
| funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite so
| reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly dismiss
| EVERY time any fusion article is posted.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Much of the world doesn't have their own fossil fuels they
| can rely on
|
| For some reason this thought reminded me of the transition
| from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
|
| Iron failed to displace bronze during the Bronze Age for two
| reasons:
|
| 1. It is technologically difficult to make.
|
| 2. It is mostly an inferior material.
|
| (Steel is a lot better than bronze, but that wasn't an
| option.)
|
| But the Bronze Age ended in a near-total collapse of the
| social order across most of Eurasia. International trade
| routes dried up. And iron was readily available everywhere in
| the world, whereas bronze was not even available to regions
| that mined their own copper, because they didn't have any
| tin.
|
| Interestingly enough, having your own local supplies of food
| and energy protects you from suddenly starving and freezing
| if a war should break out, but it makes everyone else a lot
| less safe _from you_ , because now you're insulated from the
| consequences of war.
| danhor wrote:
| > We are probably AT LEAST 50 years away from a near 100%
| non-nuclear "renewable" world.
|
| For electricity (which is the only energy category where
| nuclear makes sense) I see no reason to be this pessimistic
| (of course, depending on your definition of near 100%, but
| let's say 95%). Solar and Wind have strong growth prospects
| and are very economical, with reason to believe in further
| price reductions (especially for solar). As we've seen at
| COP, a lot of countries are planning to strongly build out
| renewables (a simple tripling, disregarding a lot of factors,
| leading to 45% share of renewables by 2030) and only a few
| are planning a much slower expansion of nuclear.
|
| Storage shows a lot of promise and very successful initial
| deployments for short duration storage and I see no reason to
| be more (or even as) optimistic about future development of
| nuclear & fusion reactors than chemical energy storage.
|
| > It's almost as if all the people working on these projects
| and funding them aren't complete morons, and the world quite
| so reductive, like half of hacker news seems to smugly
| dismiss EVERY time any fusion article is posted.
|
| Or there's a reason why this is mostly funded by governments
| as a foundational work, presumably with hopes that fusion
| will be largely viable in the long term. If governments
| funding this work were hopeful that fusion would be
| economically viable within 15 years, you'd expect very large
| funding increases (especially from the private sector) and a
| reduction in investment for transforming the electricity grid
| away from big central power producers to more geographically
| diverse renewable supply.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I still don't get why thorium reactors basically don't exist
| despite on paper being superior for energy generation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
| superkuh wrote:
| Next step: achieving the actual energy break even instead of
| laser energy break even. That'll require improving it by an order
| of magnitude.
| armada651 wrote:
| It's not even laser energy break even if you count the energy
| used to actually generate the laser. It's only break even if
| you just count the energy from the laser going into the fuel
| pellet.
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| Two orders of magnitude. (Currently they input 300 MJ of
| electricity and get 4 MJ of fusion.)
|
| The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director says it
| could be done in "probably decades -- not six decades, I don't
| think, not five decades, which is what we used to say."
| [https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-
| achi...]
| armada651 wrote:
| If you count the efficiency of the steam turbines to actually
| generate electricity from the fusion thermal energy you'd
| need something like 750MJ of fusion energy to break even.
| (assuming your steam turbines are 40% efficient)
|
| Given that you'd want to actually generate electricity rather
| than just break even we're talking about three orders of
| magnitude rather than two.
| donny2018 wrote:
| First computer fit in a hangar, consumed enormous amount of
| energy and provided a tiny fraction of the computing power
| that you now have in your smartphone.
|
| Just saying.
| minitoar wrote:
| For computing devices being smaller typically means using
| less energy as well, so it's a bit different than a power
| generation facility where the whole point is power.
| gosub100 wrote:
| a computer simply automates something you can do with
| your bare hands: calculate. Manipulating the strong
| nuclear force is not even comparable.
|
| My opinion about fusion is that by the time they figure
| it out (which I think could _eventually_ be done, if we
| invest a large portion of humanity 's knowledge and
| wealth), it won't even be worth it. We could have almost-
| free energy now with fission, and renewables keep getting
| better. Fusing atoms (and getting more energy back) will
| be an astonishing feat when we accomplish it, but not
| offer much benefit over existing power generation. For
| instance, financially it would take a lifetime to ever
| recover the costs invested. Even once it's figured out,
| it will _still_ take decades to build the plants, which
| will be buggy-first-generation models (that still contain
| dangerous radiation, just more manageable). I really
| wanted it to succeed (20 years ago, say), but now I think
| it 's a lost cause.
| ipdashc wrote:
| While you are right, sometimes I can't help but feel like
| Moore's Law (etc) has done us a disservice by making it
| so we compare every kind of technological progress to the
| progress in computer hardware (or I guess electronics
| more broadly) and expect that kind of progress in other
| domains. Are there any other fields that have experienced
| the same sort of staggering, exponential improvement? Off
| the top of my head, think of say, food/agriculture,
| biology, aerospace engineering, construction engineering,
| etc. All have seen steady, impressive improvements, but
| nothing comparable to the steady (over many decades), yet
| exponential improvement of Moore's Law - nothing
| comparable to going from room-sized computers to having
| 1000x the compute power in a smartphone chip.
|
| (EDIT: This isn't to say that those fields are worse, or
| the scientists there less skilled, or something. They're
| just different domains. "Increase transistor density" may
| simply just be an easier problem to solve - despite being
| an incredibly difficult problem - than the issues in
| those fields.)
|
| I'm going off on a tangent a bit, but all I'm trying to
| say is, I feel like "if electronics manufacturing can
| improve at _X_ rate, then surely _Y_ field can also
| improve at that rate " is a bit of a fallacy.
| DennisP wrote:
| Of course you're right in general but the fusion triple
| product actually did increase exponentially, at a faster
| pace than Moore's Law, from 1970 to 2000. Then for a
| while everybody decided to put most of the money in a
| giant construction project in France that still isn't
| finished. Now we're partway back to the system of
| competing smaller projects that we had during the
| exponential period.
|
| Lasers have also been improving dramatically. In
| particular the power of fast lasers has been going up
| exponentially.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| There's also the construction of the pellets[1], which uses
| deuterium and tritium as fuel, and capturing the released
| energy.
|
| [1]: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-
| presentations/2016/decem...
| fallingknife wrote:
| The article linked says the laser energy is 2 MJ. So even a
| 100% efficient laser would only have a 2x gain. And some
| quick googling gets me 80-90% as max feasible laser
| efficiency.
|
| And you would probably need more like a 10x gain to make it
| feasible so would need another order of magnitude from
| something beyond laser efficiency. Can you trigger more
| fusion with the same laser energy by scaling the system up?
| itishappy wrote:
| > The article linked says the laser energy is 2 MJ. So even
| a 100% efficient laser would only have a 2x gain. And some
| quick googling gets me 80-90% as max feasible laser
| efficiency.
|
| This doesn't sound right to me. The NIF's laser efficiency
| is less than 1%, so an 80% efficiency laser would be ~100x
| gain.
|
| Edit: Actually, I'm not positive I'm reading this right. It
| says the laser was less than 1% efficient in 1996, there
| may have been upgrades since then...
|
| Edit 2: There has not been.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#:~
| :....
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The point is that the fusion reaction has produced 2x the
| power that the laser fed into it. So a 100% efficient
| laser (which is not physically possible) that injected
| 2MJ of power into the pellet would mean a net 4MJ of
| generated fusion energy. Then, you need some way to turn
| that energy into electricity, for which no realistic
| design exists in the case of ICF, so you'll lose more
| power.
| hiddencost wrote:
| For what it's worth, the claim that improving laser efficiency
| should be straightforward sounds right to me. That they ignored
| laser efficiency to focus on ignition sounds like a principled
| approach to research: pick a specific target and focus
| exclusively on that target.
| itishappy wrote:
| We've already produced lasers with about a 100x efficiency
| improvement over what the NIF currently uses (65% vs 0.5%).
| Same wavelength, but obviously very different power levels.
|
| https://www.laserfocusworld.com/lasers-
| sources/article/16556...
| K0balt wrote:
| Nice.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're right, but it's also important to remind everyone that
| this type of fusion research is only relevant for fundamental
| physics and for nuclear weapons research. This is not remotely
| a plausible path to fusion power generation. And, the NIF is
| part of the branch of the US government that handles nuclear
| weapons.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Is there a physical law that indicates it's not feasible?
| Because if not, this is just like saying multiplying a bunch
| of matrices is not a feasible way to build a machine that
| speaks English. These things are unpredictable.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think it'd simply be the fact that the facility isn't
| aimed at achieving break even, they're mainly interested in
| performing tests which validate the viability of the
| nuclear stockpile without having to test the bombs
| directly.
|
| For example, there isn't really a means to extract the
| energy released to generate electricity from it in the
| facility (as the pellet has to be equally compressed from
| all sides by lasers).
|
| Similarly, the lasers they're using are pretty old and
| inefficient by modern standards, they're sticking to them
| because improving electricity-to-laser efficiency is not
| the bottleneck to their system, it's laser-to-pellet
| efficiency (along with the stability and accuracy of their
| optics etc). But if they were concerned about power
| generation, electricity-to-laser efficiency is obviously
| important.
|
| Basically, while the general concept of this kind of fusion
| reactor might be potentially viable, this specific facility
| likely is not (with its current mandate).
| anovikov wrote:
| Which isn't a problem anymore because nuclear test ban is
| over. They are more than welcome to test the bombs
| directly again.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't think it'll be as politically acceptable nowadays
| to do that.
| DennisP wrote:
| Laser efficiency is important if you're actually building
| a power plant, but for an experimental facility, it's
| easy enough to correct for the inefficiency of your old
| lasers. That doesn't make your research inapplicable to
| power plants.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, somewhat. The amount of precision that the physical
| worlds demand in the construction of the fuel pellets, and
| the amount of energy involved in using them, guarantee that
| you need an extremely expensive mechanical process for the
| fuel. So, while physically you probably can extract energy
| from the pellets, it'd be like a steam train powered by
| gold bars instead of coal.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I think someone would've said the same thing about
| megaflop computers before the IC was invented.
| DennisP wrote:
| Worth pointing out that "the part of the branch of the US
| government that handles nuclear weapons" is the Department of
| Energy, which of course also handles fusion energy research.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > achieving the actual energy break even instead of laser
| energy break even.
|
| Can someone elaborate on why laser energy break even was even a
| big deal? Why does that matter? Doesn't only total net energy
| matter?
| throwup238 wrote:
| The former is a milestone for the latter. In order to
| demonstrate that net energy for the process is even possible,
| they have to show that the ignition can be breakeven. By
| analogy they have to show that combustion is possible before
| spending even more money on building a giant gas fired power
| plant.
|
| It's a small milestone, but it's a very important stepping
| stone if there's going to be any future for it. Getting it to
| the commercial power plant stage is a much more holistic
| problem that will probably take 10x more investment which no
| one wants to spend sight unseen.
| cstoner wrote:
| While it's true that total net energy is what ultimately
| matters, the article points out that 99% of the energy that
| goes towards the lasers is wasted. So it seems like a logical
| next milestone.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Prior to this, ignition had only been achieved in hydrogen
| bombs.
|
| Basically, they confirmed that it is possible to have a
| controlled fusion reaction where the reaction puts out more
| energy than was put into the reaction, a prerequisite step to
| being able to put out more energy than was put into the
| entire machine.
|
| Everyone assumed that controlled ignition was possible, but
| it's still meaningful to be able to prove it experimentally,
| particularly since now they can probe the limits and
| understand how different factors affect the result.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Is a big loss here laser efficiency and cooling issues?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I attended a presentation by the NIF guys earlier this
| year at a conference, where IIRC one of the bigger
| challenges was the optics.
|
| Due to the amount of energy being put through them
| (particularly since it was pulsed), any imperfections
| would be amplified, quickly rendering the component
| unusable. They ended up developing an entire automated
| system for fixing these using an approach I can't recall.
|
| So I guess the losses in terms of reaching break even
| (which this facility is not specifically aiming for, its
| main purpose is to ensure our hydrogen bombs still work)
| are the electricity-to-laser efficiency (IIRC these
| lasers are pretty old now and less efficient than modern
| lasers), making optics which can better tolerate the
| energy, getting the timing right so that the pellet is
| compressed equally (any imbalances manifest as reduced
| efficiency) and making better pellets (since of course,
| this is also an energy intensive process at the moment).
| itishappy wrote:
| Yup. Also energy recapture. (I suppose you could argue
| that's included in "cooling issues.")
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| Thats more like 10 steps away, not really the next step.
| noobermin wrote:
| I'm generally on team NIF as a laser guy, but my biggest gripe
| is the calculation for ignition they employ uses the UV light
| into the hohlraum which ignores the 3-omega frequency tripling
| as the light (originally IR at 1053nm) enters the main target
| chamber. That frequency tripling will always rob a lot of
| energy from the lasers as it does generally for normal laser
| setups. I feel like loss from other parts of the laser like the
| amplification and other general losses are understandable
| because it's a laser and that's unavoidable, but they
| absolutely should include the loss from the frequency tripling
| because that seems like an added on thing (this improves
| penetration into the walls of the hohlraum), even though that
| will push them below the ignition threshold again.
|
| The loss there is about a factor of 1/2 or so, so they'd have
| to improve things by that much.
| carabiner wrote:
| Holy shit it's happening...
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Yes, but it's not ICF that will make it happen. It's MCF, look
| to SPARC and ARC being made by MIT & CFS in Massachusetts. Mark
| these words, by end of this decade we will have Q > 3 in an
| experimental MCF reactor and it will be SPARC. End of next
| decade we will have the first fusion power reactors (ARC).
| Whether they are used as on the grid solutions or instead heat
| sources for energy intensive processes (think chemical
| reactions, metal forges, etc ) in the 30's is yet to be
| determined.
| callalex wrote:
| Can someone expand these acronyms for me please?
| ublaze wrote:
| ICF: Inertial Confinement Fusion
|
| MCF: Magnetic Confinement Fusion
|
| CFS is Commonwealth Fusion Systems - https://cfs.energy/
|
| Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion
| system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more
| energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for
| Q 11 in its prototype reactor.
|
| SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their
| prototype reactor that they're working on that uses
| magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen
| as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion
| process.
|
| ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for
| within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out
| version of SPARC.
|
| It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-
| SpaceX).
|
| And yes, ARC is named after the Iron Man reactor.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| It happened in 2013 lol. This is just about how its happening
| easier. This is a research milestone, it will help us model
| fusion plasma, but in no way is a prototype for a fusion power
| plant.
| jl2718 wrote:
| It's a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things
| that have nothing at all to do with power generation, but,
| possibly great improvements over spallation sources for certain
| applications.
|
| Or, from the more bureaucratic viewpoint, it's a successful sale
| of 'science' to the congress for your money. You paid about 0.1%
| of your gross income for it (ROM).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things
| that have nothing at all to do with power generation_
|
| We're still characterising how non-stellar fusion plasmas
| behave. It's valuable to be able to create that on demand.
| Also, this research is critical to modelling nuclear weapons
| without live tests.
| noobermin wrote:
| Far ahead of you, a lot of the non-stewardship and non-ignition
| work of NIF is for creating neutrons, although you don't even
| need ignition levels of energy to make neutrons with lasers.
| Although the research is premature and the beams aren't as good
| as spallation sources, tabletop (as in a laser table a few
| metres across) ultra-intense laser systems have been generating
| neutron beams in a single room for almost a decade+ now, we
| just need to improve the beams and get the word out there.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The article is hinting that there are weapons applications for
| this. What types of weapons would those be? Bombs? Are there any
| other countries with research programs similarly far along?
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Yes, nuclear bombs/warheads
|
| https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/nif-and-stockpile-stewardshi...
| evo wrote:
| It's less that this allows new unprecedented weapons, and more
| that this allows one to validate material properties in similar
| conditions to a nuclear bomb detonation without actually
| testing a full scale device. This lets one verify and refine
| the otherwise "magic number" constants in computer simulation
| code that were empirically derived 50-80 years ago.
|
| Of course, if you're a nascent nuclear power along the lines of
| NK, you just do full scale tests, treaties be damned.
| perihelions wrote:
| North Korea hasn't signed any treaties abolishing nuclear
| weapons tests. In point of fact, the USA _itself_ hasn 't
| ratified[0] any treaties prohibiting the type of underground
| tests the DPRK has conducted. The US chooses not to do those
| (and has maintained a voluntary moratorium since 1992), but
| is under no obligations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-
| Ban...
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Notwithstanding the US's deeply hypocritical stance on
| treaties it hasn't ratified but others must follow, North
| Korea did in 1985 sign the NPT which forbids them even
| building nuclear weapons, as well as the 1992 "South-North
| Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean
| Peninsula" where they explicitly pledge not to test nuclear
| weapons (which they indeed didn't do until 2006).
|
| https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron
| perihelions wrote:
| Sure; though to be fair, North Korea withdrew from the
| NNPT a full three years before its first nuclear test
| (2003, 2006).
| b3orn wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken it's used instead of actual nuclear weapons
| tests. Wikipedia says the following about the NIF
|
| > It supports nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying
| the behavior of matter under the conditions found within
| nuclear explosions.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The mission of NIF is and has always been to subvert the test
| ban treaties. It is written down in the original proposal,
| which are available on the web from the agency. NIF has no
| civilian energy applications, and will never have any.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > to subvert the test ban treaties
|
| How is this subverting the treaties? The test ban is about
| not detonating nuclear weapons, and the NIF complies with
| that.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how you interpret the intent of
| the test ban. If the intent was to stop detonations
| because they are bad in themselves, then it's not
| subversive. If the intent was to stop detonations in
| order to curtail further weapons development, then it is.
| meepmorp wrote:
| It's a test ban treaty, not an agreement to stop
| development of nuclear weapons.
| webdoodle wrote:
| Directed high energy weapons, as well as existing nuclear
| weapons.
| yk wrote:
| H-bombs, the entire thing they do is look at the expansion of
| plasma that is heated by a thermonuclear reaction. The most
| prominent application of expansion of a plasma heated by a
| thermonuclear reaction is the explosion of thermonuclear
| weapons.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Fission bombs can be tested with subcritical explosions. You
| have a plutonium core (a sphere the size of a grapefruit) and
| surround it with high explosives. Not as many as for an actual
| detonation. You blow them up, create the implosion, and trigger
| a subcritical fission reaction, or one that is very slightly
| supercritical. You then take lots of measurements (temperature
| increase, X and gamma rays, neutrons, etc) and see if they
| align with your theoretical models. If they do, you have
| extremely high confidence that the bomb will work as designed.
|
| Now, virtually all nukes in the US arsenal have a fusion bomb
| stage too. The way that works in practice is this: you first
| detonate the fission component of the bomb, and that produces a
| huge amount of X-rays. It's so huge that the wavefront of the
| X-rays behaves like a solid hammer. That's what produces the
| compression for the secondary. This design is called the
| Teller-Ulam design, and it is extremely likely that it was
| discovered only once (by Ulam and Teller), all other
| thermonuclear bombs are just the result of successful spying
| and secret sharing.
|
| This X-ray hammer can't be very easily tested. That's what
| these guys are doing.
|
| Now, you may wonder if Putin's guys are doing an equally good
| job at testing their thermonuclear bombs. We don't know, but it
| doesn't make a difference: the fission part of the bombs is
| powerful enough to create utter devastation. The fusion part
| adds some extra punch, but it doesn't change the scale of
| devastation. And the CIA is highly confident that Russia is
| properly testing the fission bombs, even undergoing what is
| called "hydronuclear" tests, which, although not formally
| banned, other countries don't do.
| zirgs wrote:
| We already have fusion bombs. Making a fusion bomb is a lot
| easier than creating a fusion reactor that can emit energy in a
| more controlled manner.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Helion's design seems way more promising than the NIF one which
| doesn't seem to have any clear path to being a "continuous"
| operation production design.
|
| Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial
| confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous
| confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than
| having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each
| shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is
| heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at
| each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve
| fusion conditions.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo
|
| Helion have a contract with Microsoft to build a production model
| for them (to power a datacenter) by 2028.
|
| https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world...
| Nyubis wrote:
| By 2028, not 2008.
| carabiner wrote:
| Enormous amounts of energy needed for the closed timelike
| curves to generate Kerr singularities with flux stored in a
| capacitor.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| My money is on the technology behind a flux capacitor
| maturing before Helion's fusion tech.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Thanks - corrected.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| Like all fusion reactors in the world currently, NIF was made
| for research, not as a prototype for a power plant. As it
| stands, NIF is the only non-bomb fusion device to reach the
| fusion breakeven point. If we are ignoring the research angle
| though, and are appraising the potential for commercial power
| production, Helion's design has a similar issue to NIF. Where a
| tokamak and similar designs create constant power, NIF and
| Helion's design have to generate power from sequential nuclear
| explosions. However for the purpose of research, NIF is
| indispensable; We can finally see and measure the behavior of
| true power positive fusion (without setting off a bomb).
|
| edit: breakeven means the reaction put out more power than the
| fuel took in. It does not mean the plant as a whole puts out
| more power than it takes, we aren't even close to that.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Helion's design doesn't require constant power, it's not
| based on heating water into steam to turn a turbine. Rather,
| their reactor _is_ the turbine, the sequential plasma ring
| collision fusion reactions generate a magnetic field that
| drives a current in wires coiled around the reactor.
|
| It's rather ingenious and is the first reactor-based power
| source that generates electricity directly from the reaction
| itself, rather than from heating water into steam. I hope
| they're able to achieve breakeven in their next prototype or
| two.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| I'm excited to see what they can do, but its important to
| remember they are the only fusion device with a marketing
| department. Pulsed power generation would be a problem for
| any power plant, and its viability is predicated on its
| ability to reset rapidly. Helion needs to demonstrate their
| 12T compression ignition works, then need to demonstrate
| the reactor can reset quickly, and they need to demonstrate
| they can generate enough power from the expanding magnetic
| field.
|
| Its an awesome design, its just their marketing material
| has led people into believing we are on the verge of fusion
| power, which we are not. Also note, I am not against
| private companies competing, or marketing their product,
| just remember that it's not quite as great as they claim.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| I wish people would stop parroting Helion's obvious lie
| that they invented direct energy capture. These ideas are
| more than half a century old and have been tried before.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
|
| I would have a lot more faith in Helion if they were more
| upfront instead of playing stupid games. If they're willing
| to bend the truth on this, I can believe they're lying
| about all sorts of other things. I suspect Helion will
| eventually have it's own Theranos moment.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| They have to convince senators to invest into their
| company lol. There is no way they are going to do that
| with a plasma physics textbook and a white paper on
| plasma compression ignition. I don't blame them for
| building hype, and glossing over the technical risks.
| It's just if you want an informed opinion you have to
| look past the marketing material.
|
| As devils advocate I will make the counterpoint, the idea
| of generating steam using heat through the walls of a
| tokamak is perhaps equally unproven. You need to have
| intense temperatures right next to supercooled magnets.
| That seems like a potential dealbreaker too, and everyone
| glosses over it in the same way.
| DennisP wrote:
| I've been following them for years and I've never seen
| them claim they invented DAC in general, just their
| particular device.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Eh not really. SNAP10A didn't have a steam turbine. It used
| thermoelectrics to directly convert heat to electricity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
|
| There's a whole world of direct energy concepts out there:
| https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1130979
| sgift wrote:
| NIF is thinly veiled fusion weapons test research, nothing
| more. There's no real intention for advances in energy
| generation research. If it happens it's more an accident or
| part of the 'cover'.
| eesmith wrote:
| It isn't even that veiled. The article points out: 'The NIF
| was designed not as a power plant, but as a facility to
| recreate and study the reactions that occur during
| thermonuclear detonations after the United States halted
| underground weapons testing in 1992. The higher fusion yields
| are already being used to advance nuclear-weapons research,
| and have also fuelled enthusiasm about fusion as a limitless
| source of clean energy.'
| DennisP wrote:
| However, whatever the situation was before, the DOE
| recently made fusion power research officially part of
| their mission.
|
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-5611/three-new-inertial-
| fus...
| eesmith wrote:
| Sure, but how does that veil the weapons component, even
| lightly?
|
| I mean, an early Python conference was held at LLNL
| (1996?), but surely that didn't veil that LLNL is a
| nuclear weapons lab.
| DennisP wrote:
| We openly spend a hundred times as much money on nuclear
| weapons as we do on fusion research. There's no need for a
| "cover."
| credit_guy wrote:
| > to build a production model for them (to power a datacenter)
| by 2028.
|
| Helion is known to promise the pie in the sky, and soon. In [1]
| they tell you (in 2014) that they will have a "pilot plant
| operation in 2019". One year later, in 2015, they let you know
| in [2] that they will "start building commercial systems by
| 2022".
|
| [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/07/helion-energy-plans-
| to...
|
| [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/helion-energy-
| raised-1...
| wand3r wrote:
| Honest question: How much of this is engineering and how much
| is regulation? Everyone overestimated development cycles but
| if there was 0 regulation and we lived in Ayn Rands' wet
| dream, do you think they could be close to delivering, or no?
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| There's no regulation holding them back. They can do
| whatever they want.
|
| What regulation can possibly be in the way?
| wand3r wrote:
| Wow, is this really the case? They could go build a novel
| reactor without any regulatory oversight? I guess I'll
| look into this but honestly doesn't seem like it would be
| true for the US
| DennisP wrote:
| The situation was unclear for a while, but a few months
| ago the NRC decided to regulate fusion reactors like
| particle accelerators and hospital devices, rather than
| like fission reactors. It was a unanimous decision by the
| five commissioners.[1]
|
| According to the CEO of Helion, this essentially means
| they get regulated at the state level, in their case by
| the WA Department of Health.[2]
|
| A poorly-designed fission reactor can turn into
| Chernobyl. A poorly-designed fusion reactor just doesn't
| work. It's not the same level of risk at all.
|
| [1] https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/nrc-
| decision-separ...
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/18k8roi/age_
| of_mira...
| wand3r wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed info!
| K0balt wrote:
| No. Experimental fusion reactors are not subject to the
| kind of scrutiny that even a coal plant would be subjected
| to. (Essentially very little oversight unless you start
| emitting a lot of ionizing radiation outside of your
| containment structure) When they outgrow the lab, that will
| start to change a bit, but we are far from net positive
| even in a lab environment.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| OK, good to know, and I suppose not surprising since this is
| after all never-been-done-before research as well as
| engineering.
|
| I guess the big question is how have they been progressing
| since, say, 2014? Are they making obvious progress and
| overcoming potential problems, or are new issues being
| identified as fast as others are being resolved ?
|
| The design itself does seem promising, certainly more so than
| Tomahawk designs. I remember excitedly following the UK's JET
| (Joint European Torus) project when in high school in the
| late 1970's and here we are with ITER still sucking money and
| not appearing much closer than we were back then!
| DennisP wrote:
| Those older predictions were based on getting the necessary
| funding, which they didn't get until years later.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| To be clear, NIF's ignition is getting more energy out of the
| fuel than the laser they hit it with put in, but there are other
| energy drains and inefficiencies in the system that make it
| nowhere close to break-even fusion energy. That requires building
| a new machine designed for continuous fusion detonations.
|
| So it's a scientific accomplishment, but not _that_ scientific
| accomplishment.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| And they don't have any mechanism to capture the generated
| energy and convert it to electricity.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| What are the chances that will be anything other than the
| tried and true "boil some water to make steam to turn a
| turbine"
| rzzzt wrote:
| Fusion produces helium, you fill party balloons with it,
| they lift an anvil which falls on a pair of scissors that
| cuts a piece of string in half...
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| The Incredible Fusion Machine
| rzzzt wrote:
| _Phew!_
| noobermin wrote:
| This is like saying "burning gasoline produces CO2, how
| do you make energy with that?" Literally the quoted
| energy they use to calculate the ignition criterion for
| NIF is the neutron yield.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| It's also like saying, "This is kind of an amusing joke
| for those that enjoy amusing jokes".
| DennisP wrote:
| That's exactly what it would be, for any fusion that's not
| using aneutronic fuel.
| noobermin wrote:
| That literally is it, just like fission you capture
| neutrons and heat water. The engineering issue of getting a
| stream of pellets to shoot is the issue, the "how do you
| convert neutrons from DT into electricity" just betrays
| severe ignorance. The engineering issue is a bigger jump.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The issue of capturing power out of the exploding pellet
| is not at all the same as the issue of capturing neutrons
| out of a MCF reactor, and neither is the same as the
| problem of capturing the neutrons from a fission power
| plant.
|
| The neutrons from fusion reactos are far more powerful,
| so they punch much more easily through materials you put
| in the way. Also, the ICF reactor has many moving parts
| (the pellet needs to be put in a very precise position
| for the lasers to shoot), so transferring heat from it is
| not nearly as easy as a much simpler fission reactor
| (which is mostly just a hunk of uranium which stays hot,
| and all the complexity comes out of being able to prevent
| the uranium from getting too hot).
| zirgs wrote:
| When I first learned how nuclear reactors actually generate
| power it was a big WTF moment for me. Wait - do they really
| just heat water? For some reason I thought that there was a
| more advanced process to extract electricity from the
| reactor.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Yup. It does seem inefficient.
|
| I assume the cost is "good enough".
| sillywalk wrote:
| In Back to The Future, Doc Brown not only invented a time
| machine, but a device that fits into a Delorean that can
| directly convert plutonium into electricity.
| justinclift wrote:
| This was announced back in 2008, but it sounds like it
| didn't go anywhere:
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13545-nanomaterial-
| tu...
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| "Energy drains and inefficiencies" underplays it. The laser
| they're using is, what, 10% efficient? So they're at least an
| order of magnitude away from net power. Probably two orders.
| DennisP wrote:
| 0.5% efficient, but they're old lasers. Equivalent modern
| ones are over 20% efficient.
|
| Also, with their first Q>1 shot they increased the laser
| power 8% and got 230% more output. They think the nonlinear
| scaling will continue for a while. If they're right, then
| they're not actually that far from overall net power, if you
| correct for the obsolete laser tech.
| noobermin wrote:
| Whenever anyone brings this up, it's important to remind
| everyone this is the best in the world to this day, so every
| time people (namely, people invested in MCF or various private
| companies) shit talk NIF understand they are saying their
| schemes per the data are _even worse_ than what is apparently a
| bad result.
| SamBam wrote:
| I question your assumption that most people who bring this up
| are people invested in MCF or various private companies.
|
| I think for most people, the question isn't between this
| fusion and that fusion, it's about fusion and anything else.
|
| We haven't yet been able to get useable energy out of fusion.
| It may be wonderful if we could, but at the moment, every
| dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on building more
| solar panels and wind turbines.
|
| If it really is the case that it will not be possible to
| power the world without fusion, then that might be money well
| invested, but it's quite possible that we should just be
| putting everything into existing renewable technologies.
| noobermin wrote:
| >It may be wonderful if we could, but at the moment, every
| dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on building
| more solar panels and wind turbines.
|
| You care to back your armchairing with data? I'll bet you
| 100usd that it's a pittance compared to what goes into
| solar and wind turbines world wide. This point is not
| salient.
|
| >I think for most people, the question isn't between this
| fusion and that fusion, it's about fusion and anything
| else.
|
| That's a more valid point. The point for ICF is the
| potential, this is a sure push in the direction of "this
| actually has potential," justifying more research, not that
| we'll have a power plant in 5 years. There isn't this
| antagonism towards other aspirational research like
| superconductors or quantum computers.
| SamBam wrote:
| >> every dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on
| building more solar panels and wind turbines.
|
| > You care to back your armchairing with data?
|
| I'm confused by your confusion. I'm literally saying we
| could optionally be spending the money we currently spend
| on fusion on solar panels instead. This isn't a statement
| that needs data.
|
| The question is simply which is going to go further in
| decarbonizing our energy: $1 spent on solar or $1 spent
| on fusion research?
|
| That's an open question, of course, and people don't have
| the answer, since one is based on probabilities of future
| success.
|
| Note, though, that even if fusion is successful, it may
| still be more expensive than solar, and so then would it
| actually be successful? We would have saved more tons of
| CO2 by making more solar panels. [1] [2] [3]
|
| 1. https://www.wired.com/story/no-fusion-energy-wont-be-
| limitle...
|
| 2. https://futurism.com/elon-musk-fusion-more-expensive-
| wind-so...
|
| 3. https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2023/03/16/fusi
| ons-fu...
| peyton wrote:
| > I'm literally saying we could optionally be spending
| the money we currently spend on fusion on solar panels
| instead. This isn't a statement that needs data.
|
| We can't. Who is picking between fusion research and 7%
| IRR solar projects? Two totally different risk profiles.
|
| > We would have saved more tons of CO2 by making more
| solar panels.
|
| If that's your sole metric it's probably worth thinking a
| little broader towards a solution. I don't think Mohammed
| bin Salman is going to cap Ghawar Field because we put up
| a bunch of solar panels over here. He's going to sell to
| somebody else.
|
| I think it's better to let the market work towards
| solutions that compete across all dimensions--density
| included--and let that drive the energy transition.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| So the question is, what is a better energy
| infrastructure investment--definitely spending a dollar
| on fusion research, or not spending that dollar on fusion
| research and instead maybe, in theory, spending it on
| solar panels. I'll take the good plan now vs the maybe a
| better plan later option.
| DennisP wrote:
| Every dollar we put into fusion could also go into all
| sorts of things that have nothing to do with renewable
| energy.
|
| For government funding, the money could go to small fission
| reactors, some military project unrelated to energy, or
| just a reduction in the deficit.
|
| For private investment, the sort of investors interested in
| fusion breakthroughs would probably go for other high-risk,
| high-reward opportunities rather than switching to a mature
| industry.
| bostik wrote:
| > _at the moment, every dollar spent on fusion is a dollar
| not spent on building more solar panels and wind turbines_
|
| You are of course technically correct ("the best way to be
| correct"), but let's be honest: figuring out the optimal
| allocation of resources between solar/wind/geothermal and
| fusion research is unsolved problem. It's probably outright
| unsolvable.
|
| It's also not a problem of one or the other. We will need
| both.
|
| Remember that fusion research is not _just_ about fusion.
| The materials technology advances are almost certainly
| going to show up elsewhere in various forms. To top it off,
| the nature of the technology itself requires that a non-
| trivial fraction of the funds are directed towards
| fundamental research. We can not know, or even guesstimate
| where those results end up being used outside of fusion
| research tracks.
|
| I will not be surprised at all if/when some research done
| for advancing fusion will be used to improve solar and wind
| technologies.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > It may be wonderful if we could, but at the moment, every
| dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on building
| more solar panels and wind turbines.
|
| That's not how this works. The money that goes to research
| is very far removed from the money that goes towards
| utilities' capital investments. To say nothing of the
| politics involved.
|
| Regardless, we stand to gain more than just a possible
| energy source from this research.
| wolf550e wrote:
| People shit talk NIF because it's a very expensive machine to
| calibrate the Fortran code used to test hydrogen bombs
| without detonating them, in no way meant to advance fusion
| for power generation, that gets accolades for doing something
| that will probably not be useful for a useful advance in
| fusion.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, in the laser business, during a time period when it
| seemed like someone was coming up with a new kind of laser
| every month, the field developed a term, "wall plug
| efficiency," which meant how much laser power per unit of power
| drawn from the electrical outlet. It was meant to capture the
| true energy efficiency of the system, rather than just the
| efficiency of the lasing process.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I'm looking forward to the Boron-11 based ones. Or any of the
| Aneutronic ones, as they used charged particles directly rather
| than by heat transfer and electric generation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
| macilacilove wrote:
| Can somebody explain, what exactly is "ignition"? If even a
| single helium atom is fused you have "more energy than you have
| put into it". That does not seem impressive.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| No, you have more energy than two separate helium atoms.
|
| You haven't counted the energy required to make them fuse in
| the first place.
| eesmith wrote:
| There is a nice Sankey diagram at https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/National_Ignition_Facility#Sys... showing where the energy
| losses go.
| ynlefevre wrote:
| this may help: https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/ignition
| choeger wrote:
| Certainly a cool achievement and something to be proud of. Maybe
| even a very important step towards real usable fusion power
| plants.
|
| But:
|
| > The facility's laser system is enormously inefficient, and more
| than 99% of the energy that goes into a single ignition attempt
| is lost before it can reach the target.
|
| So it's still two orders of magnitude off hitting break even. And
| that's _without_ a suitable device to actually _capture_ the
| released energy and it _does not_ account for pellet production.
| For all we know, it might very well be three orders of magnitude
| away from a real powerplant.
|
| That being said, making more efficient lasers and working on
| capturing energy might be more fruitful than trying to improve a
| Tokamak design. So it's good to have options.
| DennisP wrote:
| Far more efficient lasers already exist. Their lasers are old.
| SamBam wrote:
| Two orders of magnitude more efficient?
| DennisP wrote:
| From 0.5% to over 20%, for equivalent lasers. So they still
| have work to do, but not as much you'd think without
| accounting for the old lasers.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I find it frustrating the the US Govt spends > $800B/yr on our
| "defense" while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition and
| all of our tanks and ships are falling apart.
|
| Meanwhile, that same Govt spends < $1B on fusion, which could
| change the course of humanity.
|
| I'm usually the last person to suggest that the govt should spend
| money on things, but for goodness sake I wish we could at least
| get our priorities straight as far as what to spend the money on.
|
| If I didn't know better I'd think that the whole point of the
| defense department was to funnel money to well-connected
| corporations and execs.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Source on running out of ammunition? I've never heard that
| about the US military before
| mushbino wrote:
| I imagine it has a lot to do with oil company lobbying.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition_
|
| Because they're actively being used in a war in Ukraine at a
| prodigious rate? And we're spending money ramping up
| production.
|
| And we're not "running out" -- we're keeping plenty to defend
| ourselves, we just want to be able to send Ukraine even more.
|
| > _and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart._
|
| Source? This is the first I'm hearing of this.
|
| The US has the most powerful and capable military in the world.
| You're acting like we're spending money on it but are getting
| something cut-rate in return. But we're not.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| Too much fox/maga media/kremlin propaganda. All the ammo
| given to Ukraine has been expired and due to be disposed of.
| photonbeam wrote:
| otoh, Its the natural state of ships to be falling apart,
| they're very maintenance heavy
| f324sdklsjfdlkj wrote:
| What in the world led you to think that? In the real world,
| solving problems is more than just a function of how far to the
| right you slide their budget allocation.
| rdedev wrote:
| In case of fusion I don't think it's a money problem. ITER has
| funding from a lot of countries and even they have a hard time
| with it. It could be that fusion is almost impossible with the
| current state of technology that we have now.
|
| As for govt spending on military vs science almost all govts
| are like this. I wish it was different. It's almost like a zero
| sum game when it need not be like that
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There's a difference between running out of ammunition and
| running out of ammunition that can be supplied.
|
| They're running out of ammunition that can be supplied, because
| the rest is being reserved for if we end up needing it for
| ourselves.
|
| As for tanks and ships falling apart, I have no idea where
| you're getting that from.
| Animats wrote:
| But not over and over and over again.
|
| _" Scientists at the laboratory achieved ignition during two
| further attempts in October. And the laboratory's calculations
| suggest that two others in June and September generated slightly
| more energy than the lasers provided, but not enough to confirm
| ignition."_
|
| It's not like they're running an engine.
|
| Nobody has claimed that this approach is a useful power source
| since the 1970s. There was, at one time, talk of systems where
| pellets are injected, zapped with lasers, some fusion and heat
| results, and this is cycled at some high rate, maybe a few times
| per second. But that was really political cover for the National
| Ignition Facility, which is really for studying what happens in
| an H-bomb without setting one off.
|
| There's an pulsed fusion startup.[1] This is not laser-triggered
| fusion with inertial containment; it's a combo of magnetic
| containment and inertial containment, triggered by a huge
| electrical pulse applied to a plasma. Like the Z-machine at
| Sandia.
|
| They were supposed to have a demo by the end of 2023. Press
| releases stopped in July. Uh oh.
|
| [1] https://www.f.energy/
| Animats wrote:
| Ah. Here's why the PR. They previously failed to replicate
| their earlier success.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02022-1
| DennisP wrote:
| The startup you link is one of dozens, many of which are
| pulsed, with several being laser fusion specifically, including
| Longview, LaserFusionX, Xcimer Energy, Focused Energy, HB11
| Energy, and Marvel Fusion.[1]
|
| NIF doesn't need political cover for weapons work. We openly
| spend a hundred times more on nuclear weapons than on fusion
| power.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/science/laser-fusion-
| ener...
| asdff wrote:
| I'm curious what is even being discovered with H bomb
| simulation work these days. I thought we figured out already
| how to glass the earth in 15 minutes by the 1960s.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Maybe they're figuring out how to NOT glass the earth with
| fusion?
| avar wrote:
| In the 1960s they were testing detonations.
|
| If you were tasked with manufacturing a 1960s car today that
| _had_ to work without ever actually starting the engine doing
| so would be a monumental undertaking, involving
| supercomputers simulating the internal combustion etc.
|
| That's what's happening with nuclear weapons development
| since the testing ban, and simulating that's a lot more
| complex.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Does anyone know the triple product of their experiments? I've
| seen values ranging from 10^22 to 10^25.
|
| I was hoping to find an updated chart of the triple product over
| time but can't find anything more recent than 2019.
|
| See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
|
| And this chart:
| https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-...
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| the end game here is so exciting, getting these news of the steps
| in the right direction is welcome in my book
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| "Ignition" in this sense is interesting physics. But it has
| absolutely nothing to do with power generation.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Developing more efficient laser systems is one goal of the
| DOE's new inertial-fusion-energy research programme. This month,
| the agency announced US$42 million over four years to establish
| three new research centres -- each involving a mix of national
| laboratories, university researchers and industry partners --
| that will work towards this and other advances.
|
| In other words, the government is spending enough to keep the
| lights on.
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