On December 5th, 2022 at around 1am the Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility produced more energy from nuclear fusion than the laser energy used to drive the reaction. This is history in the making folks. If you have an hour, here’s a really interesting Q&A session with the actual scientific team that performed the experiment:
Saw this earlier. Huge news. If you don’t have an hour, here’s the few minute article.
I do wish the mass media reporting on this would frame the “net gain” figure for what it is - more heat energy produced than the net heat energy fed into the reactor. Emphasis added because lasers are abysmally inefficient and delivery of that 2.05MJ of backend laser energy likely required a good 100x as much frontend energy. And that doesn’t get into the engineering and economic challenges that ICF reactors (the type used for this experiment) face that make them poor candidates for the dirt cheap nuclear fusion reactors of so much sci-fi.
What was gained was proof that is indeed possible to profitably fuse hydrogen and surely additional information about how hydrogen fuses / behaves under the intense temperatures and pressures that fusion reactors will require.
At least the TV news show I saw said that there is alot of work left to commericalize nuclear fusion and produce efficent power in megawatt quantities. It is still a momentous event. The fact that this amount of success has been made is remarkable and provides a great deal of promise.
They achieved 3.15 mega joules of output from 2.05 MJ of laser power, and the lasers took about 300 MJ of electricity to run them.
To put things in perspective, it took the equivalent of the entire US power grid for one billionth of a second all in order to release enough fusion energy to boil 2.5 gallons of water.
My pet peve here is that the news media knows that attention spans are ever-shortening, making the equivalents of the headline, sub/drophead, and lead the most critical parts of the story that have a chance of being retained by the audience.
Thus, what’s your takeaway from the following headlines?
The former suggests that Nuclear Fusion is just around the corner; the latter indicates progress while tempering expectations.
Absolutely. It was worthwhile research and should continue. But it’s one of many steps of slow unpredictable basic research towards the end goal of economical nuclear fusion power.
This kind of information is key to framing the context of the discovery in terms of general audience expectation - i.e. when can I expect to see this and what are its broad implications?
Some further context could also communicate the state of fusion reactor design as research instruments focused on instrumentation and scientific/engineering development that have yet to attempt to harness the energies they release. A rough analogy that comes to mind would be the comparison between automobile engines in the early 90s vs modern engines: 90s engines were poor performers at about peak instrumentation with sensors everywhere while modern engines have relatively few sensors and have excellent performance by compare because the state of design has advanced and many sensors have been replaced by simulation in the ECU.
You make the mistake of assuming they care to educate the public. They have long ago fallen to the sole interest of driving advertising revenue, and that biases towards clickbait titles.
Well aware of the fact that news is a business engaged in crass commercialism and if it’s not anxiety it’s hype keeping you tuned in (and those ad rates pumped) ergo I try to keep it on criticism rather than any hope they’ll do better.
Oh for the days of honest journalism. My favorite is when one talking-head reporter interviews another talking-head reporter as if we care what they think.
Sadly most of the TV news is the latest crime, tornado or some other worthless story. I usually record and then fast-forward any news show these days. I try to avoid the commercials and repeat news headlines.
I read this yesterday (most even-handed write-up I’ve seen on the accomplishment): Scientists have made a breakthrough in fusion — but don't get carried away
Notably:
While the “net energy” achievement is big for scientists, it’s not a “massive step” for power engineers. Why? We need to account for the grid energy required for powering those lasers. Doing so more than wipes out the net gain of 20%. Each unit of laser energy put into the fuel pellet gobbled 200 units of grid energy. A lot of work needs to be done.
Not least, materials scientists and manufacturing engineers will have to come up with breakthroughs for fabricating the fusion fuel pellets, millions of which will be needed per year per reactor. Right now, each single jewel-like fuel pellet is hand-crafted and costs about $1 million. Odds are we solve that challenge, eventually. And far better lasers are already feasible and will be built, eventually.
Well a tornado taking out a car wash 2 blocks from my house yesterday is newsworthy in my eyes lol
Some of you may be familiar with German Theoretical Physicist Sabina Hossenfeld. She did a piece on Fusion Developments and How close are we really? And the misleading reports/articles.
She does a lot YouTube videos …also has a bit of Ham Side to her, videos songs on Physics. Two favorites:
0:00 / 5:52
Schrödinger’s Cat
Galaxy Song
Thanks, I was not familiar with Sabine Hossenfelder but enjoyed the video and will check out others. Here are a couple of links:
Don’t forget that our government is effectively against any nuclear energy production. We haven’t built a new nuclear power facility since 2016, yet we continue to take them offline. We’ve made the process for building a new facility impossible. I’ve heard from my local State Rep Jarrod Patterson that the process is unfeasible. He explained that building new facilities just won’t happen. He did know of one possible expansion of an existing facility in another state, but that was the best he could point out. Mr. Patterson also explained that our federal government has poisoned the energy market. There are so many Large Scale Solar Production Incentives that we are directly paying companies above the cost of facilities to bring solar online. The problem with this is Solar Energy Production is not constant and worse, often offline or not at full production during peak production periods, further stressing our power grid. This also keeps raising our energy prices, as we have to rely on on-demand coal and gas power plants which charge outrageous prices for power when supply is low in peak periods bringing instability to the price of power. Thus, increasing our power costs due to the insurance margins needed for that instability in price.
This isn’t particularly relevant given that:
Yes, but at least it doesn’t require any trigonometry. So that’s a plus…
To put this in perspective, the National Ignition Facility or NIF is primarily a nuclear weapons experimentation and stockpile testing facility. It’s mainly about preserving the nuclear stockpile and simulating nuclear explosions. The fusion work is an add on for basic science as well as public relations in my view. Now the NIF can claim they achieved ‘ignition’ and justify more funding but high powered laser fusion is not in anyone’s mind a serious contender for practical fusion and it is pure hype to use this milestone as an argument they are contributing to the cause of practical fusion energy.
Yes, but at least it doesn’t require any trigonometry. So that’s a plus…
In my view, that’s a Sin.
While cautious optimism is necessary, I will add that predicting scientific advancement in either direction is somewhat of a fool’s errand. It’s pretty much a semi-educated gut instinct at best even from an acclaimed expert. If you had asked an expert in machine learning like 20 years ago where we would be today, they probably would’ve been optimistic but that optimism wouldn’t have been even close to the lightning speed of how much things really advance. We are now at the point where most decent machine learning research paper that are at least a year old are considered outdated. Trying to keep up is madness.
Now Machine Learning is indeed a different problem with different difficulties from Nuclear Fusion, but I would simply say that there is always a wildcard factor at play in these things. A sudden discovery could be made as a product of this research and other experiments that suddenly changes the timetable drastically.
While the unforeseen is always possible and I’m in favor of this sort of research, there are many many things I would gamble on happening in the next 20-40 years than science solving the numerous very hard problems associated with nuclear fusion then engineering bringing the costs down to the point that fusion reactors are affordable even for cost-is-no-object .gov/.mil applications.