Nuclear fusion breakthrough

[duggie]

Well, we can't let it pass without giving notice to this wonderful breakthrough. At last, more energy out than put in. Like striking a match that doesn't go out.

We'll have all had our eye upon nuclear fusion for years, knowing it can be done, but could it be done to get more energy out than is put in...........and now it is here. I feel special to have lived my life during this marvellous moment. I wonder how it will be in a hundred years time when it is 'on tap'. I really am lost for words. I hope some good informative documentaries are made which look at just what it will mean.

The US has done good again. The world has a lot to thank the US for. They have led the way to a better world, I believe (of course other nations have had input, too). I don't really know anything about it, but it seems to me that US capitalism, working with government co-ordination, moving in a creative and positive way, could really do things and lead the way, as it has; it still can and does, but it also seems that there is another type of capitalism at large which can be used in a retrograde way to breakdown and destroy as a way of making money for capitalists, and it seems like there is that going on these days a bit too much. But this fusion breakthrough, I mean, energy is so important. I really would like to know how it will change the world.

 

[Neverlost99]

Did you see the apparatus? Don’t hold your breath for this I. The next 50 years.

 

[scrambler]

While any progress on nuclear fusion is great, what they achieved is still far from where we need to be for it to be usable.

What they did achieve was proof you can get more energy out of the fusion reaction than the energy you apply to the elements. In this case about 3 MegaJoule with 2 MegaJoule applied by the lasers.

BUT and this is a big BUT, it took 300 MegaJoule of energy to create the 2 MegaJoule of laser energy applied to the elements.
So we are still a factor 100 away just on the energy level. And there are many more hurdles to overcome for sustained production.

So we are still nowhere close to a production system, most likely decadeS away ....

But the promise a so great that we have to keep going, just in case there is still a civilization to use it when we manage it

All that said we better hope humanity has figured a way to a sustainable civilization before we give it unlimited energy, or our demise will only be faster....

 

[Handlebars]

While any progress on nuclear fusion is great, what they achieved is still far from where we need to be for it to be usable.

What they did achieve was proof you can get more energy out of the fusion reaction than the energy you apply to the elements. In this case about 3 MegaJoule with 2 MegaJoule applied by the lasers.

BUT and this is a big BUT, it took 300 MegaJoule of energy to create the 2 MegaJoule of laser energy applied to the elements.
So we are still a factor 10 away just on the energy level. And there are many more hurdles to overcome for sustained production.

So we are still nowhere close to a production system, most likely decadeS away ....

But the promise a so great that we have to keep going, just in case there is still a civilization to use it when we manage it

All that said we better hope humanity has figured a way to a sustainable civilization before we give it unlimited energy, or our demise will only be faster....

Cheap energy means dig dig dig make make make use use use. It won't be cheap energy for the people.. except for powering the work camps where the usable people will be housed while stlil usable. It's what the western nations' public is begging for; to be eliminated while being dominated more and faster. Gotta save the earth..for the powerful nincompoops who are ready and willing to dispose of them right now.

 

[duggie]

scrambler......yes, I know it all has to be worked out, but that will happen as a matter of course, decades. And yes, it may not help clean up the oceans, etc. But energy is what drives everything along. It will be a different world, a real game changer.

Neverlost99....... I haven't seen the apparatus. A hundred and fifty lazers focused upon hydrogen pellets about the size of a peppercorn. Something like that, all in the lab. I think you are right, at least 50 years. It is a slow process. But then genome mapping sped up all of a sudden. And who knows, it may be a political/security issue to do it rapidly. The point is that it is on the way now it has been proven to work. Amazing, limitless 'free' clean fuel. It also suggests just how powerful lazers are becoming, and this lab is a military one.....lazers need energy, so fusion might make even more powerful. I tell you, this is gonna change a real lot. My money is that there will be a rush to it, like the rush to get the bomb, and it is the same faculty that put the bomb together, it said on the radio.

 

[duggie]

Handlebars.......I think you are right that it will not save the Earth. I think that there are just too many people living in an unsustainable way. Answer: less people. It is going to have to be a sort of one world order where there is no possibility of war. Fusion might be a key towards this. Powerful nincompoops and a picture of Charles, haha. That's a bit harsh. I reckon he is ok. There's something about the idea of a royal family that makes a lot of sense, which is how it must have started all those years ago. There is something about being top banana and it can't be changed by anyone, ever. There is a security in it, a live and let live in it, but that is a different subject. Fusion, what will it all mean.

What are we ment to be looking at with that photo, with the red circles? What is going on?

 

[rich c]

Something like 2 units of energy in and 2.3 out wasn't it?

 

[harryS]

It's a start. 75 years ago in December, 1947, Bell Labs Scientists developed the first transistor. Popular legend said they did it on Xmas eve, but that is when they showed it to the big bosses. They actually got it working 75 years ago this week.
.
AT&T designed the water tower at the Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, NJ to represent a transistor. Bell Labs is gone now, with the name owned by Nokia, but the big transistor still stands.
.
So give it some time. Vehicles in 2047 may run on water and fusion converters,

 

[duggie]

Rich c.....yes, about 20% for free. It's like putting a pound into your pocket and it turns into £1.20, so you take that all out, keep the 20p, put the same pound in again and it turns into £1.20 again, and you can just keep on like that forever.

 

[indianajo]

The world has been 30 years from nuclear fusion power since I was 12. That was 60 years ago.
We're still 30 years from affordable nuclear fusion. The investment required to achieve the 150% gain Lawrence Livermore achieved is incredible.
I think the utilities should commit to pumping water uphill to resevoirs & dams with solar & wind power, to solve the base load problem. Would be a big help in sunny California. The east coast metroplex is also close to a number of mountains with plenty of water. The idea of using LiIon battery facilities to run inverters for dark & calm mains AC power just runs up the cost of all the electric cars we will need.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Yeah, this is a huge accomplishment that was a long time coming.

One should keep in mind that this was a successful physics experiment. That still leaves us a long way from designing and building a practical fusion power plant, and there is no guarantee that such a plant will be economically feasible or competitive.

Keep in mind too that solar panels have dropped 99% in cost in the past 40 years, and battery costs per watt-hour are cut in half roughly every five years. So a fusion plant doesn't have to compete with the electricity prices we have today, but the foreseeable electricity prices of some decades in the future. Which I suspect will be tiny.

 

[duggie]

Yes, there is still a lot to do and unknown, BUT just the proven fact that it is possible I find comforting. One thing is for sure is that it could be massive amounts of cheap power, and that is something to play with in re-jigging the world, hopefully making things better. This is what is so monumental about the success of this experiment. Maybe historians in a thousand years will attribute so much to this moment which we living at this time cannot know it will make possible.

 

[procreator]

I'm waiting for Mr. Fusion.

 

[procreator]

Some have likened last week's event to the Wright Brothers first flight. I think of it more in terms lab experiments demonstrating that moving air over a wing creates lift (borrowing from a piece in the Atlantic). That is a long was from a flying machine.

It is quite unfortunate that development and building of fission reactors was halted in the late '70s and early '80s primarily due to environmental concerns. This was in spite of the fact the fission reactors had (and continue to have) an excellent track record. Yes, there was Three Mile Island, but that only proved how reliable the safety measures were. The China Syndrome was a Hollywood creation.

Think of how much further we'd be along in our quest to reduce CO2 emissions if we built nuclear power plants in the years following rather than fossil-fueled ones. It is almost as if we let our quest for perfection prevent us from using something good.

I can't help but feel that this is also going on with EVs. We have states banning the sale of ICE cars and manufacturers saying they are going to stop producing them. Our country is not ready for the large scale deployment of EVs...but there is a perfectly functional albeit imperfect solution in hybrids. Are we shunning the good in our quest for perfection?

 

[teskow]

As the current power plants get older and older slowly new cleaner energy sources will be developed and with a little luck it will be cheaper and clean like fusion. What and how fast things happen no man knows. Necessity speeds development up quickly. By the latest info the world is using as much coal as ever. When I was a child the snow was black from coal soot. Wouldn't want to go there again.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Some have likened last week's event to the Wright Brothers first flight. I think of it more in terms lab experiments demonstrating that moving air over a wing creates lift (borrowing from a piece in the Atlantic). That is a long was from a flying machine.

Actually Bernoulli's Principle was published in Hydrodynamica in 1738. The Wright Brother's first flight was in 1903.

So we may be in for a bit of a wait.

There are a long list of ugly engineering problems that have to be solved to build a practical fusion reactor and electricity generation system. There is no rational way to put a timeline on how long it will take to solve them. There is no guarantee that there are solutions to those problems. There is no guarantee that any good solution will be economically feasible. And I'm talking about known problems here. There will be surprises.

Just to give a short list:

• Neutron flux. The intensity of neutron emissions from a fusion reaction is thousands of times higher than with any other nuclear reaction we have experience with. No known material can withstand such intense neutron emissions. So it begs the question what in blazes do you build this thing out of.
• Tritium (and neutrons). You need tritium (hydrogen with two neutrons) and deuterium (hydrogen with one neutron) to make this kind of fusion reaction go. For a self-sustaining system of power plants, you need to capture the one extra neutron and "breed" one new tritium (probably with Lithium-6, which you'll need a lot of). The problem is that for a self-sustaining system you'll need to capture 100 percent of the neutrons and make tritium out of all of them. One hundred percent efficiency doesn't happen very often, and this whole system kind of assumes that you can do that.
• Helium. The deuterium-tritium reaction produces helium. Having helium in the reaction chamber will slow down and eventually completely stop the fusion process. So you need a very efficient system for getting rid of the helium.

There's more where that came from. And I'm just talking about known problems.

It is quite unfortunate that development and building of fission reactors was halted in the late '70s and early '80s primarily due to environmental concerns. This was in spite of the fact the fission reactors had (and continue to have) an excellent track record. Yes, there was Three Mile Island, but that only proved how reliable the safety measures were. The China Syndrome was a Hollywood creation.

It is kind of more complicated than that.

Thermal neutron water moderated reactors (which includes nearly all nuclear power plants in use) are widely acknowledged to be a dead-end technology. Largely because they have poor economics and require a lot of complicated and redundant equipment to keep operating and keep operating safely. The design has very bad failure modes, even if those failures are fortunately rare. You only consider major failures, but my understanding is that there is a pretty continuous stream of minor failures that we aren't hearing about. Even if those failures don't endanger anyone (and nearly all of them do not) they add to the cost and complexity of the system.

Better design pathways exist. Both molten-salt reactors and lead-moderated fast neutron reactors fail in less destructive ways and would likely be less expensive to maintain and operate. In addition their failure modes are far less catastrophic. They also produce far less (on the order of 1 percent) less radioactive waste, and that waste needs to be kept safe for a far shorter time. As of this writing I am not aware of anyone who is pursuing those options at scale. While practical models of lead-moderated fast neutron reactors have been built (in 1970s-era Soviet submarines) there is still quite a few years (probably on the order of fifteen years with generous funding and a crash program) until a commercially feasible reactor based on those technologies would be available.

 

[procreator]

I appreciate your response. You're much more knowledgeable on the subject than I.

Better design pathways exist...As of this writing I am not aware of anyone who is pursuing those options at scale.

There are probably a myriad of reasons for this. But I am disappointed that this hasn't been pursued more aggressively. Fission power plants have shown practical promise whereas fusion power plants are still a pipe dream. Seems like a lost opportunity to have hundreds of years of clean energy while developing fusion technology.

 

[procreator]

---

One thing that was kind of sad in the DoE press release was the military implications. From Bloomberg,

The most immediate winner from the Department of Energy’s fusion breakthrough fusion breakthrough is likely to be the military, which will get a new way to evaluate the US nuclear-weapons stockpile.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the experiment took place, is one of the Department of Energy’s preeminent nuclear-weapons research centers. The data yielded by the fusion test will allow scientists to model what happens during a thermonuclear explosion. That helps to ensure the nation’s more-than-5,000 aging warheads can be deployed — effectively creating a new way to gauge the arms’ shelf life.

I had a chance to visit the USAF museum in Dayton, OH this past spring. They had a replica of the Wright's plane, which flew for the first time in 1903. Just a few displays away was a biplane fitted with a machine gun from 1912. That means in less than 10 years someone figured out how to use that wonderful technological advance to kill people more easily.

It's sad that many of the technology advances we benefit from today are the result of figuring out how to kill people.

 

[scrambler]

---

One thing that was kind of sad in the DoE press release was the military implications. From Bloomberg,


I had a chance to visit the USAF museum in Dayton, OH this past spring. They had a replica of the Wright's plane, which flew for the first time in 1903. Just a few displays away was a biplane fitted with a machine gun from 1912. That means in less than 10 years someone figured out how to use that wonderful technological advance to kill people more easily.

It's sad that many of the technology advances we benefit from today are the result of figuring out how to kill people.

And it is not just about killing people.
Humans have demonstrated time and time again that Any invention made for good is ultimately used for bad, being killing people or screwing them up, robbing them, abusing them etc...
The list is endless, and the latest one is the Internet....

It seems that despite all our technological evolution, our civilization is still a barbaric one albeit with much more sophisticated ways to act barbarically...
Makes you wonder about our specie and its chances of long-term survival

 

[Jason Knight]

BUT and this is a big BUT, it took 300 MegaJoule of energy to create the 2 MegaJoule of laser energy applied to the elements.

And that's where the handwaving magic comes in. Same as the whole "hydrogen economy" thing where whilst hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, getting it pure costs more energy than you get out when you burn or run it through a fuel cell.

Could be worse though, could be the stoner idiots talking about the "magic" of how hemp is a wonder-material solving everything from postcards to automobiles.

So much of this nonsense basically requires unobtainium to work.