That fusion announcement is worth getting hyped about, but practical fusion is still a long way off:
Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, home of the world's most powerful laser, announced on Tuesday that they crossed the critical threshold in their pursuit of fusion power: getting more energy out of the reaction than they put in.
This is 1) a massive scientific advancement, and 2) still a long, long (long) way off from harnessing fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, as a viable source of abundant clean energy. On December 5, the team fired 192 laser beams at a tiny fuel pellet, producing slightly more energy than the lasers put in, "about 2 megajoules in, about 3 megajoules out," said Marvin Adams, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, at a press conference Tuesday.
To make fusion something that could actually produce electricity for the power grid, it can't just inch over the ignition finish line; it has to blow past it. This announcement is an important incremental advance, but the breakthrough doesn't go far enough to be of practical use. Because NIF itself is a research laboratory, its technology is not intended to produce power. So designing a fusion reactor to harness this new approach will be its own engineering challenge.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Barenflimski on Wednesday December 14, @05:32PM (9 children)
Fusion is Coming!
We're just about 20 - 30 years out now.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 14, @05:42PM (8 children)
Wait, I distinctly remember, it was 10 years, 20 years ago.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 14, @05:47PM (7 children)
Well, now it's 5 years away, 30 years later...
When I read "breakthrough" in the headline it instantly brought to mind the methods of at least one of the fusion research labs: they create a hollow diamond structure and fill it with fuel (don't ask me how), and then they blast it with a pulse laser - ripping a hole in one side of the diamond capsule but the diamond holds together for the femto-seconds required for the fuel to fuse before dispersing under the energy of the laser pulse...
Sounds more than 5 years away from commercial / industrial scale production - to me.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday December 14, @06:06PM (6 children)
Five years would be great, but you can't even get an Electric Vehicle out the door in under 10.
Mr. (Dr?) Ed Lymen seems to think it will be a little further out, for various reasons.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/12/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-doe-00073518 [politico.com]
What this does mean, is that if you are a little guy, wanting to get into a business to create some generational wealth, start bidding on contracts for this stuff. We'll need everything from logistics, manufacture of tools, extraction of fuel from the ocean, transfer of said fuel to the various sites. You'll need an electric infrastructure that is about 100x what we have today, so wires, transmission, meters, billing, teams of people to do these things, schools to teach them, curriculum, etc....
Specifically, you'll need pumps, barges, secure storage, tracking, meters, sensors, code, plans for de-carbonizing and recycling the current infrastructure, and a whole lot more....
Get busy youngins!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 14, @06:19PM (5 children)
>if you are a little guy, wanting to get into a business to create some generational wealth
Then you need to get into politics, because little guys got virtually no chance at anything resembling "wealth from hard work" today - "wealth from luck" sure, "wealth from inheritance" obviously, but just being smarter and harder working than the next guy has about zero value in today's society - I mean, it's enough to keep you "comfortable" - but far from wealthy.
Fusion? Fusion will be requiring Sagan levels of financing (Billllllionz and Billlllionz....) again, politics, or strong connections to the 0.01% most wealthy will be required.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, @07:27PM
We've got ourselves into a state where inherited wealth and ownership force artificial scarcity on the ability to solve our own problems. It's like a demonic clippy - Ah I see you're trying to solve your own problems, would you like me to help with that? No? Too bad, here's my template that you owe me rent on - get working.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday December 14, @07:39PM (2 children)
This is insightful. Yes, you will have to engage in politics to build real, generational wealth. That's what politics are for, really. The elites squabbling over estates and how best to rule the cattle, distribute their labor and product. how to euthanize the non-producers in the most discrete, politically correct way.
If your business is even mildly successful, politics will engage with you. Want to build a headquarters here? well, we will need 50% women on your board you see... now about those property tax deals we offered.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday December 14, @07:45PM
not to mention installing politics enforcement officers into your HR department.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 14, @07:53PM
>If your business is even mildly successful, politics will engage with you.
If you mean top 0.1% successful, sure...
If you are talking about your run of the mill $10M to $100M startup with 10 to 50 employees, I've been around enough of those to know: it's not politics that engages with those businesses and their owners, it's the employment and welfare offices offering various incentives for hiring the right colors and sexes and opening your offices in a depressed part of town.
I mean, yeah, "we" had whistle stop visits from the likes of Rick Scott and Newt Gingrich once every decade or so on average, but that was hardly engagement, that was stumping on their part. Scott wanted a photo-op and looked like he had had about 4 hours of sleep in the past 72 - arrived at 7am, gave a speech for the camera at 7:30, and was out by 8. Newt was fresh out of office after his scandal and did hook us up with a potential investor - one. A big one, but it didn't lead to anything in the end, much like the other 20 investors we dug up without him. Newt stopped in and nodded at our widget politely for about 20 minutes, we were on his way from the Miami Herald to his daughter's condo.
Now, the $1B market value outfit I worked with for a couple of years, yeah, they hired an attorney who was fresh out of the campaign for Tom DeLay when Tom was a big deal. They used the hell out of that connection to put pressure on the FDA, but ultimately did a rather poor job of it. CEO took his $5M golden parachute in exchange for that final costly blunder and never looked back. I actually saw the writing all over the glass sides of the building and made my exit about 6 weeks before the CEO.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday December 15, @02:55AM
Amen bro. Fuck the world.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday December 14, @06:00PM (9 children)
300 megajoules in, 3 megajoules out.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 14, @06:13PM (7 children)
> 3 megajoules out
Not including the (in)efficiency of turning all that heat into electricity...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, @06:49PM (6 children)
> turning all that heat into electricity
Are there any new developments in this area, or will they go with traditional: make steam, run turbines, spin generators?
Does fusion produce enough charged particles that maybe there is some direct way to make electricity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, @07:29PM (1 child)
It's almost like you expect someone to answer your bullshit questions....?! Incredible. First you need to appoint yourself Director of something then someone might take you seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, @11:56PM
Guess I won't be inviting you to my next brainstorming session.
Thanks to the others who took a stab at my naive questions!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 14, @08:01PM
>Does fusion produce enough charged particles that maybe there is some direct way to make electricity?
Doubtful in any meaningful way. You're looking for a "Beta Battery" - which is super long lasting, safe as long as you keep the decaying isotope covered by any kind of shielding, but not very powerful for its size and weight.
I mean, if they do create a "mini sun" you could catch the rays with (highly modified) solar cells, but again, I suspect you'll get better ROI just pointing conventional solar cells at the sun.
>will they go with traditional: make steam, run turbines, spin generators?
You looking for innovation on two fronts at one time?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, @08:39PM (1 child)
My gut feeling is that the answer to this is "no". It seems plausible that one can use electromagnetic effects with a plasma to harness some of the potential energy inherent to the plasma's charge separation, but I think this potential energy doesn't really come from the fusion itself so that's probably not going to help in a fusion-based electricity generator.
Picking one specific instance of fusion: deuterium and tritium smash together and produce helium-5, which almost instantly decays by neutron emission to form helium-4 (which is a stable isotope).
The reason you can get energy out of this reaction in the first place is because the total mass of one helium-4 nucleus plus one neutron is actually slightly less than the total mass of one deuterium plus one tritium nucleus (if you divide the atomic masses of each component by the number of nucleons, you will find that the neutron actually gained mass per nucleon, but the reduction in the helium-4 more than makes up for it. Sometimes this is expressed a different way by saying that helium-4 has a relatively high binding energy per nucleon).
Where did the extra mass go? It was essentially all turned into kinetic energy: the helium-4 has a lot (E=mc²) more of it than the deterium and tritium had to begin with. Or put another way: the helium is just a lot hotter, and you're probably stuck with the usual methods of producing electrical power from hot things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15, @02:59AM
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 15, @04:21PM
>Does fusion produce enough charged particles that maybe there is some direct way to make electricity?
Depends on the fusion. But no, none of the easy reaction do so.
However, one of the reasons proton-boron fusion is considered a holy grail of fusion is that the resulting highly energized C12 nucleus is unstable, and instead of shedding the fusion energy as either gamma or fast neutron radiation like most fusion reactions do, it immediately fragments into three He4 nuclei with an extremely narrow range of extremely high speeds. Which can then be converted directly to electricity with the appropriate equipment.
Of course, the appropriate equipment isn't necessarily compatible with a viable fusion reaction chamber - but it is extremely compatible with electrostatic confinement reactors such as those inspired by the old Farnsworth Fusors. According to the NAVY progress reports the Bussard Polywell team looked to be aiming in that direction, with successful demonstration of p-B fusion being one of the last milestones reported before their funding ran out and they went private. Their next prototype reactor was supposed to be a full-scale pre-commercial model that would be decidedly energy-positive, lacking only the supporting hardware to convert that energy into a useful form. Sadly I've heard not a peep since then, and don't know if the team simply dissolved without NAVY support, or found private investors and are quietly working to surprise us all.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday December 15, @06:48AM
Here are more detailed explanations to your point https://bigthink.com/the-future/fusion-power-nif-hype-lose-energy/ [bigthink.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.