US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition

by novateg • 4 years ago

2786 976 4 years ago

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how far we've come.

Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.

whycome3• 4 years ago

I guess December 5th was Ignition Day and we didn't know it?

mixmastamyk• 4 years ago

Also Repeal Day for those who want to get lit.

Buttons840• 4 years ago

What about this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333346-ignition-confir...

Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?

ceejayoz5• 4 years ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7

In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition, but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the following months fell short.

Fluke or measurement error, it seems.

dogma11385• 4 years ago

Because now it’s reproducible, controllable and consistently net positive in terms of energy output.

It’s not a fluke anymore and I assume the engineering behind this is now understood well enough to develop it further and scale it up.

Fusion for the most part isn’t a physics problem it’s an engineering problem the difficulty was always in how to implement it in the real world rather than in math at ideal white paper conditions.

ericmay• 4 years ago

A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it?

If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?

anon2915• 4 years ago

Yeah... this is a great breakthrough and an historic day for physics and engineering and humanity. Every American should swell with pride.

petilon5• 4 years ago

When you consider that they laser they used consumed 300 megajoules from the wall plug, in order to send 1.8 megajoules to the target, the fact that they got 2.5 megajoules out looks puny in comparison. Even newer lasers only have 20% wall plug efficiency according to the press conference.

So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain. They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only talk about the 1.8 megajoules of laser energy sent to the target, not about the 300 megajoules of electricity needed to send 1.8 megajoules to the target.

whimsicalism3• 4 years ago

Energy is conserved in the universe so there is never any net energy gain.

See how pedantic and not helpful that is?

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

The NIF is not intended to be a power plant, and inertial containment in general is probably not a great design for producing power.

This is scientific breakthrough. The best point of comparison is probably a fusion bomb, which requires an initial fission detonation to create enough pressure and free neutrons to force a net-positive fusion reaction. But at the NIF they do it using only lasers… incredible.

TeeMassive5• 4 years ago

As was pointed out in other comments, their lasers and electrical equipment were not efficient as it was not necessary to get the scientific knowledge.

poopbutt72• 4 years ago

You are correct: this is the important point. Until this is actually powering homes at scale and competitive price- which, clearly from these numbers is a fantasy- developments in this field should be dismissed. It's embarrassing to see HN so excited about what's really quite the failure.

(Sent from my ENIAC)

jononomo• 4 years ago

Also, they’re not counting all the meals the scientists ate —- this is total BS.

willis9364• 4 years ago

I listened to the two hour press conference. NIF leadership made it clear that energy research is not what Ignition Day is about, why the NIF was made, or why the NIF is operated.

Balgair2• 4 years ago

I agree. This is a Big deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or polio-vaccine big.

My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star Trek.

Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as their future are just sooooo tiny compared to their reality. I'm thinking of faster horses and they're going to live in a world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small thinking of mine.

I'm so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are going to live such better lives.

opportune6• 4 years ago

I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into my old age. Even if we don’t get commercial fusion until the 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still need to pay for likely massive capex, R&D, and transmission) and its repercussions!

At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no need for fission plants, radically reduced costs for industrial manufacturing. Cheap energy could make raw resource extraction much cheaper and more easily automated. Fast transportation, vertical farming. With the concurrent innovations in battery tech, robotics/automation, and electric vehicles and ships, the future is looking incredibly bright

BoGoToTo• 4 years ago

My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.

Unless you're in your early teens and don't plan on having kids until you're in your 30's this proba

palata• 4 years ago

Let's be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2/3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.

The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that's the climate change problem. And it is big.

Now let's pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won't change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.

We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that's the only way.

Mistletoe5• 4 years ago

This is such a profound and deep misunderstanding of this news story.

smolder• 4 years ago

Not that I enjoy being a downer, but I think we're still quite a ways off from a trajectory towards Star Trek society. Clean energy production is absolutely key, with pollution and climate change being big obstacles to a prosperous future, but clean energy doesn't solve all air and water pollution. It won't necessarily scale economically. It also doesn't temper any megalomaniac's pride, to stop them from creating conflict as they try to subjugate everyone else. We live in a very divided, hierarchical world with a fragile order, subject to the whims of people with godlike power over the masses.

One of the most fantastical aspects of Star Trek was the societal evolution into one without interpersonal conflict, the idea being that without scarcity there's no good reason for conflict... I'm just not sure how well that would hold up, knowing people. I don't think all desire for status and power stems from scarcity of resources, and people will continue to lie and do harm to each other as long as they desire power over others.

My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.

Being available to everyone does depend on who "everyone" is. If people use the energy to grow food (and more people) until we run into some other population-limiter, we'll always have too many people. Part of achieving sustainability is ending runaway growth. Maybe you can ask people nicely enough to stop reproducing, maybe education will do it, maybe nothing short of force will. Yet our economics were built around continual growth. So, that's all a big problem to solve, still.

already• 4 years ago

It's a big deal, it will change the way people live. Hopefully it also help to eliminate wars, the war for the natural resources and land.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

Maybe. Fusion energy might be more expensive than current forms or has undesirable yet to be known side effects.

People said the same of nuclear and here we are.

seandoe2• 4 years ago

And had we continued to develop and improve upon fission we'd probably be in a better place.

dal• 4 years ago

You mean like tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time and opening a hell portal to another dimension?

sh1mmer• 4 years ago

People also said the same thing about wind and solar, and those still have some downsides but they are also rapidly becoming the cheapest current form of peak energy, or with cheaper grid storage, energy period.

Sci-if authors have been talking about both solar and fusion for years, and now solar has been industrialized why wouldn’t we be excited to see progression in fusion?

eastbound2• 4 years ago

The negative effect of nuclear were known in 1927 (Hermann Joseph Meller). It would be surprising if we discovered another form of radiation, given calculations lead us far further without showing new forms of radiations.

amelius• 4 years ago

There will probably still be wars over other natural resources.

standardUser• 4 years ago

Currently, there are a couple dozen authoritarian regimes, most heavily armed, that are almost entirely funded by fossil fuel exports. That makes me fear things will get worse before they get better.

Arubis• 4 years ago

True; however, this was already the direction things were headed for said regimes as much of the world has begun to focus on energy security. On the upside, perhaps the lowered long-term demand for fossil fuels will reduce the risk of additional resource discoveries leading to more despotic regimes.

trilobyte3• 4 years ago

Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of energy over input?

gjsman-10003• 4 years ago

2.05 MJ in, 3.15 MJ out.

That's amazing.

eastbound2• 4 years ago

Minus the laser power supply, is it correct?

phkahler• 4 years ago

>:Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of energy over input?

Let's add some words. The output energy is electromagnetic radiation and heat. When they do make a conversion to usable energy (electricity) there will be conversion losses.

On the input side, they are measuring laser energy. The lasers are not very efficient so this overlooks a bunch of losses on the input side as well.

They are probably 100x away from real energy gain, and the facility isn't even designed to be used that way.

Never the less, it is a milestone along the way.

Kukumber3• 4 years ago

Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the need to generate selfish profit is at reach!

coliveira• 4 years ago

Well, they'll clearly give the government-backed science to some "visionary" who will promptly monopolize the tech and hail himself as super-genius who brought energy to the masses!

hardnose4• 4 years ago

Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.

Kukumber3• 4 years ago

Without the accessibility of their public library, and public workers to guide them, they would have never been able to acquire the required knowledge in aeronautics

stonogo4• 4 years ago

I don't think they do, since they started with research done by the Smithsonian Institution.

typeofhuman2• 4 years ago

How much of the funded research is actually a breakthrough?

ralusek• 4 years ago

Some breakthroughs.

teeray• 4 years ago

Can someone ELI5 why this is significant over previous fusion experiments?

gjsman-10003• 4 years ago

Previous Fusion experiments, even though we could get Fusion reactions to occur, required more energy to start and sustain the reaction than was generated from it. For the first time, more was generated from the reaction than put in.

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

Note that while this is important progress, it's a bit of specific accounting. The entire system still requires more energy input than output, but this isolated piece can now output a little more than input.

This is indeed a promising and exciting result, but we need to remember that this does not take into account the energy required to run the lasers that confine the reaction and other inefficiencies and losses.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-fusion...

It's still entirely possible that we will not see a fusion reactor in production within our lifetimes.

malfist• 4 years ago

No other fusion experiment has achieve greater outputs than inputs.

So this is the first time that a fusion reactor has been net positive for energy production

leephillips4• 4 years ago

Neither did this one. This is not a net positive. That’s what they told journalists to start the current cycle of hype, but note that announcements direct from DOE don’t use that language.

johnlk• 4 years ago

"...a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy".

That's the best outcome you can think of as a result of possible free energy?

typeofhuman2• 4 years ago

10% for the Big Guy.

seanw444• 4 years ago

Thank you, Saint Biden, for doing the bare minimum for the ability to slap your name on it.

endisneigh• 4 years ago

I’d love to hear the pros and cons of fusion vs micro molten salt fission reactors.

thehappypm3• 4 years ago

Fission requires material that can be used in nuclear weapons.

Fission can always melt down.

loeg2• 4 years ago

Both are decades away from being viable power plant technology, which is either a con or a pro depending on your point of view.

bioemerl2• 4 years ago

Here's your most exciting paragraph

LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.

It's fusion Manhattan project time.

rllearneratwork3• 4 years ago

I would love to see "fusion Manhattan project", this planet is well overdue for new gigantic R&D projects such as Manhattan and Apollo.

Victerius• 4 years ago

Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

simiones4• 4 years ago

That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs.

I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.

ceejayoz5• 4 years ago

Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

jerf• 4 years ago

Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.

Robotbeat7• 4 years ago

That isn’t what this would be used for. In fact, yields for the largest deployed H-bombs today I think are smaller than they once were (due to better targeting capabilities).

badrabbit• 4 years ago

You should be very excited because we live on a planet with independent competing countries and well... you don't want to live in the US or Europe with China or other not so friendly countries building a bigger more powerful nuke. If a weapon can be built, it will be built. How, when and if it can be used are things you can control not whether someone somewhere will develop it. Especially in war time, all bets are off.

Although, it would be interesting to see fusion reactors on planes and ships powering other types of weapons like lasers and more powerful railguns or faster icbms.

lizknope2• 4 years ago

Soviet Union built this and it wasn't really practical and ended up leading to test ban treaties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Gatsky• 4 years ago

Good things often have dubious or downright evil origins (which would never be justifiable a priori).

A relatively recent example: development of cancer chemotherapy began with the incidental finding that the chemical warfare agent nitrogen mustard reduced the white cell count of affected soldiers.

We make progress building on the shoulders of giants, but those giants are often standing in dung.

mytailorisrich• 4 years ago

Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium.

It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them.

Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.

aidenn02• 4 years ago

A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima because they were fairly sure it was going to work and wouldn't have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on the timelines involved.

Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.

I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.

jpeter• 4 years ago

Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion

adventured4• 4 years ago

Given it's Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla's stock compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth); but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting Starship to Mars. He's not going to be as rich in the future as he was in that moment, and he'll be relentlessly mocked for the context as his ship takes on water (eg when he's worth $60-$80 billion and spent $44 billion buying Twitter and SpaceX needs $10+ billion infused into it to keep pursuing Mars).

DesiLurker4• 4 years ago

Imagine if we've spent 10% of the current military budget ($600B+) on renewables & fusion. We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.

dleslie• 4 years ago

The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?!

Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.

brianyu82• 4 years ago

Assuming you have experience in software, then https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...

arbuge• 4 years ago

https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers

lizknope2• 4 years ago

Google "national ignition facility careers" and this is the first link

https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/careers

wedn3sday• 4 years ago

Former LLNL employee here, they hire a LOT of foreign nationals. Several people that I worked with there were Canadian.

lambdatronics3• 4 years ago

There's always General Fusion.

tootie• 4 years ago

There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway. No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all, but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-f...

opportune6• 4 years ago

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth.

$1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

markasoftware• 4 years ago

Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc.

Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.

stonepresto• 4 years ago

Way more than that. This would shift the entire geopolitical structure of the world. Humanity would never be the same.

oreilles• 4 years ago

Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.

iamgopal3• 4 years ago

How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.

vincnetas2• 4 years ago

With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?

sAbakumoff• 4 years ago

LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.

propogandist• 4 years ago

silver bullet to stop climate change alone

nothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions

sbaiddn• 4 years ago

TL/DR

Lasers are pretty inefficient. How much energy did it take to make 2.05 MJ of lased light?

Does this breakthrough have a reasonable path to to make more electrical energy than it puts in?

puttycat• 4 years ago

2022, not ordered by importance: Dall.E 2, Chat-GPT, Fusion Ignition. Can't wait for 2023.

freediver• 4 years ago

Putting these in the same basket is hardly justified.

zhrvoj• 4 years ago

No, first two will use third. Nikola Tesla dreamed of free energy for the world. I don't think they dream the same... So entropy will go down now?

hoten• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate? Someone with no context can read your comment either way.

alasdair_• 4 years ago

True. AI will have a much bigger impact on humanity in the next two decades than fusion will.

low_tech_punk3• 4 years ago

AI can be quite useful in real-time computation for magnetic confinement. But sure, that's beyond GPT-3's current capability.

brofallon• 4 years ago

I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In comparison fusion seems very expensive and unproven and even when we get everything to work it might not be much better than a solar farm with a big battery pack. But maybe I'm missing something important about the economics?

thehappypm3• 4 years ago

It’s potentially just a much better version of fission.

Fusion won’t cause a runaway reaction — in fact it’s brutally difficult to get it to react at all, hence why this is an achievement.

It also doesn’t use materials that can be used for a bomb, again unlike fission.

As a result it has the potential to be cheaper to implement, cheaper to fuel, with no meltdown risk.

dharmab• 4 years ago

Isn't tritium used in fusion and a potential weapons material?

dogma11385• 4 years ago

Depending on the scale and reactor design, we have really good examples of run away fusion reactions. Run away reactions are easy, controlled ones are hard.

And whilst I won’t doubt that if fusion ever becomes commercially viable the reactors would be walk away safe it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to account for that in your design.

valine4• 4 years ago

Also don’t forget the biggest benefit over solar/wind: it keeps on generating power on cold windless nights.

dark-star• 4 years ago

Wind and solar only provide power during wind / during the day. Fusion can provide 24/7 power. Battery packs can only store so much energy, and Lithium is a contested resource as most of the Lithium produced is required by the automotive industry these days, and the largest deposits are in regions where you maybe don't want to get your Lithium from (child labor, unsafe conditions, politically unstable countries, etc.)

But yeah, future energy will be a mix of available technologies, not a single technology alone. So you need e.g. fusion (or fission) for "baseline" power and wind/solar for peaks

galuano1• 4 years ago

Predictable and abundant supply of fuel, and hopefully greener to produce the powerplant itself.

vfclists• 4 years ago

Industry does not run on solar and wind and sad to say it, current storage energy is not green.

The cleanest energy available now is nuclear fission, but there is no money in it for the energy industry. It is too plentiful and cheap if implemented properly and capitalism does not like plentiful and cheap.

France has had cheap electricity for decades and it seems it has been so cheap that they don't want it anymore.

This is all capitalist boondoggles.

UltraViolence2• 4 years ago

Much more compact, less use of land or sea real estate, more power produced per volume and throttleable.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

Apart from the safety improvements and environmental benefits, it's a way to produce a ton of energy. I believe it's about 4 times as much energy from fusion compared to fission with the same amount of fuel. I'm a fan of solar and wind, but it's going to be way easier to power the entire world sustainably if you've got fusion in the mix.

abecedarius• 4 years ago

High power density. Start and stop on demand. Abundant fuel is another advantage, but in our neighborhood sunlight is also abundant. Fission also has good power density, but not so good on the start/stop flexibility.

zardo4• 4 years ago

But maybe I'm missing something important about the economics?

I think you've understood it.

Imo fusion is never going to be able to compete with renewables+storage with the energy being captured from neutrons. Maybe reactions that release energy in charged particles or photons could, but they're even harder to do.

Analog243• 4 years ago

Could you elaborate on your point a bit more? If you're talking about utilizing the weak force vs. the residual strong force then I'm not sure this argument holds up.

Also, when comparing to renewable+storage you have to consider how much land has to be dedicated to energy use in these scenarios. Wind and solar require orders of magnitude more than a potential fusion reactor (or an existing fission reactor).

anon2915• 4 years ago

Solar and wind have massive environmental impacts. Fusion's foot print is much smaller for the same output. Batteries are rather dangerous. Fusion is -- as far as I understand it -- much less likely to escape a reactor due to how difficult it is to sustain the reaction. Moreover, it's more dependable.

So in sum, the advantages are (1) dependability, (2) safety, and (3) small footprint.

josho2• 4 years ago

Solar and wind have massive environmental impacts

Got a source for this? The only time I've seen this has been political talking points that had no backing.

bitcurious• 4 years ago

Wind and solar have a max theoretical output that is constrained by physical space and competition for its use, in addition to weather patterns, etc.

Fusion energy has a theoretical max that’s orders of magnitude higher.

Wind+solar is the path to decarbonization and sustaining our current world.

Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict.

vlovich1237• 4 years ago

Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict.

Except this is also true for fission. So if fission has failed to transform society, why do you think fusion will?

ridgeguy• 4 years ago

I think when comparing PV/wind to nuclear (fusion or fission) generation, we should include the cost of storage for renewables in the comparison.

Renewable generation + storage gives a system that's capable of meeting base load needs, just as nuclear generation does. Cost comparisons among base load-capable technologies is a better way to evaluate the economics, IMHO.

xzlzx• 4 years ago

Consistent baseline grid load is the difference.

ragebol• 4 years ago

Fusion brings the power of the stars directly to us, without it capturing the energy millions of miles later. It unlocks a Star Trek, post-scarcity future that PV and wind cannot bring due to their space requirements.

Also, you could eventually put one on a spaceship or other planet. For that Star Trek future.

jasonhansel4• 4 years ago

If we get an order of magnitude more energy, we can do an order of magnitude more things; fossil fuels gave us the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear fusion may unlock something similar.

jkelleyrtp2• 4 years ago

LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)

Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05.

With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.

The jumps to get here included

- 40% with the new targets

- 60% with magnetic confinement

- 35% with crycooling of the target

The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.

I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”

It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.

pfdietz12• 4 years ago

The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000, not because of energy breakeven, but to produce enough energy that the shot is financially positive. The amount of fusion energy produced in this shot is worth a penny or two.

(And even then, it's dubious a laser fusion scheme will be competitive with other energy sources.)

echelon• 4 years ago

It will get there. It's just a matter of time and resources.

The destination will be a milestone for humanity, so we should not give up.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Offset the financial viability with the cost of freedom from energy reliance and the need (more like craving) for military interventions

floxy6• 4 years ago

The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000

Why wouldn't a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest on capital costs? Other?

YetAnotherNick• 4 years ago

The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000

Is there any calculation to this? What’s the cost of shot? Is there any limetime limit of the laser?

VLM• 4 years ago

Its worth pointing out that per unit energy a lot of money is made making economically unviable cargo ship power, submarine and other military naval power, space ship power sources, diesel-electric locomotives ...

True if you want to replace base load of a civilization size network it needs to be economically viable, but we generate "a lot" of power at higher than market minima. Ironically, "good batteries" are the natural enemy of fusion research.

One fun thing about laser fusion is it theoretically can scale down very low and has a trivial "off" switch making it a good resource for engineering tokamak reactor materials or sensors or similar tasks.

The inner lining of a production fusion reactor is hard to make, so a laser facility would be ideal for research. Which is why we have one...

ClumsyPilot6• 4 years ago

Q is irrelevant, you need throughput. If your Q is one million, but you are processing one tiny capsule per second, you are producing too little money to pay for the facility.

If you can process a tanker worth of hydrogen per second, Q can be just above break even and you will still make money.

bmmayer1• 4 years ago

This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion:

How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?

ceejayoz5• 4 years ago

You're using X energy to release Y energy from the fuel (the pellet, containing deuterium and tritium). It was there already, just not in a usable form.

simiones4• 4 years ago

The energy is "released" from the binding energy of the nuclei. It's similar to how throwing a bottle of nitroglycerine can generate a huge explosion, even though you use a tiny amount of energy to throw it.

jperras• 4 years ago

Energy is released when two atomic nuclei combine to form a larger atomic nuclei.

There's a threshold of energy required to attain this fusion reaction (otherwise there would be no light nuclei in the universe), and once the nuclei combine there's energy that is released, similar to how some chemical reactions can be exothermic in nature.

tekla• 4 years ago

You have a piece of wood. You ignite it with a match. This causes a self sustaining reaction in the form of fire that releases far more energy than the match could ever create.

This is effectively what is happening with any energy generator.

karpierz• 4 years ago

You take a lighter and light gasoline on fire, using X energy. Then once the gasoline catches on fire, it'll burn on its own, releasing Y energy.

Same principle, different means.

dsfyu404ed2• 4 years ago

You know how when you burn something you release the energy in the chemical bonds?

Fusion and fission are like that but for atoms instead of molecules.

a-priori• 4 years ago

It's not "creating" energy, it's releasing energy.

The original atoms (exactly which atoms depends on the reactor, but let's assume it's deuterium and tritium) have a certain starting energy. When you fuse them together the resulting atom (helium-4, if you start with deuterium and tritium) moves it into a lower energy state.

Since the fused atom has lower energy than the input atoms, the fusion reaction releases the difference in energy, which you can then capture.

paxys• 4 years ago

The input energy X is used to create the conditions of high temperature and pressure that are needed for fusion to take place.

When fusion happens, two hydrogen atoms fuse together into one, losing a bit of mass in the process. The mass difference is converted into energy Y (using E=mc2).

In this case, Y was greater than X, so there was a net gain in useful energy.

spullara4• 4 years ago

If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom:

    2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u

vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron:

    4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u

You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configuration. This is the energy released by the fusion reaction via E = mc^2. Here we see the mass difference is:

    5.03015105811 u - 5.010602 u = 0.01954905811 u

Converting that to energy you find that is 17.6 MeV. As you go up the periodic table fusing nuclei you will get less and less marginal energy until you get to iron where at that point fusion become net negative and fission is then takes over where breaking nuclei apart gains energy, marginally more as you go up the periodic table. That's why you want to fuse light particles and fission very heavy particles. It is also why there is so much iron as it is kind of the base state of both of these reactions.

Sporktacular• 4 years ago

The Y comes from the mass of matter converted in to energy. The mass of the material before the reaction is greater than the mass of its products.

The law you're referring to might be the conservation of energy, but that applies to non-nuclear reactions and is more accurately called the law of conservation of mass-energy. In this case the energy in times the mass at the start is still equal to the energy out times the mass at the end. For the energy to increase, the mass must decrease to produce the Y in your equation.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

I think you should think of it as “this lumber only needs 1 match to light it on fire while that lumber requires 10 matches to get started.”

xdavidliu• 4 years ago

sometimes, when two small particles fuse, they become a single larger particle, but the larger particle's mass is slightly less than the sum of the masses of the two smaller particles. The slight difference becomes energy released, and the amount of energy released, roughly speaking, is E = mc^2.

delaaxe• 4 years ago

Latest xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2710/

nkrisc2• 4 years ago

Mass and energy are equivalent. You're using X energy to reduce the mass of your fuel and converting that mass into Y energy. When X < Y you have useful energy production at the cost of the mass of your fuel. Energy is conserved.

The reason nuclear fusion is such a desirable goal is because it only takes a relatively small amount of mass to convert into a relatively large amount of useful energy, and the mass (the fuel) is relatively easy to obtain.

Like all energy generation, it's converting one type of energy into another, more convenient type, to do useful work. Like a hydroelectric dam converting the potential energy of water into more useful electrical energy. Energy is conserved when water spins a turbine, it's just that electrical energy is more useful for work than the potential energy of the water. Of course you can still use the potential (or kinetic) energy of the water directly, such as with a water mill. But the energy to work ratio is worse in that form (especially if the work to be done is far away from the watermill).

Whenever you build a fire you need to input some amount of energy to begin the chemical reaction that releases energy. In this instance we get not electrical energy, but energy in the form of infrared and visible light, to heat our home and light our way. Yet the total energy released by the fire far surpasses the energy you used to start the reaction, but because the wood's mass is consumed, energy is ultimately conserved. You have converted wood (not useful for heating your home) into infrared light (useful for heating your home).

867-53092• 4 years ago

equally confusing is the BBC article which mentions the energy used for the reaction does not include the energy needed to power the lasers, which renders it a net loss

dpacmittal• 4 years ago

Same way you use spark plug to get the engine going in an ICE car

garfieldnate• 4 years ago

I think it's more like a release of potential energy; kind of like how you can lightly nudge a large object teetering on the edge of a cliff and it'll make a huge splash at the bottom. It took a lot of energy to create the big splash, but you didn't need much to trigger it.

rmbyrro• 4 years ago

Nothing is being actually "created", just converted.

ihaveajob• 4 years ago

A daily life parallel: You can use a lighter to put a small amount of energy into a bunch of wood to extract more energy than you put it. In the case of fusion, this energy is coming from fusing hydrogen atoms, rather than a chemical reaction.

emmelaich2• 4 years ago

The answers you got are excellent but a short response might just say you don't start with just X energy.

In a sense it's no more mysterious (conservation of energy-wise) than adding the energy of a spark results in the energy of the wood fire.

i.e. energy is transformed, not created as you quite accurately write.

syngrog66• 4 years ago

E = mc^2

the "extra" comes from the mass

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

Y is the energy that was holding some hydrogen atoms together which you have liberated (while destroying the atoms in question but that's OK cause it's abundant).

elif• 4 years ago

to answer essentially,

because matter is energy, you can use conversion energy to turn matter into its stored energy.

eru13• 4 years ago

The analogy is that settings a pile of wood on fire requires a small amount of fire to start a big fire.

Energy in total is still conserved, but it makes engineering sense to compare the size of the starting fire to the total inferno created.

tgflynn5• 4 years ago

I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones.

I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may encounter national security related obstacles. Obviously a pure fusion bomb would be a game changer for nuclear (non-)proliferation.

spullara4• 4 years ago

I mean almost all of the power in a nuclear bomb comes from fusion. The fission part of it is just like the detonator for the real explosion.

jocaal• 4 years ago

I don't think a pure fusion bomb will have any form of advantage compared to the current hydro-bombs. They wouldn't produce more energy, but will need more gear to reach ignition.

metal_am• 4 years ago

This particular research is literally built off of weapons research (National Ignition Facility).

lambdatronics3• 4 years ago

The bigger the target, the more energy is needed to compress it. So it would require more laser energy to get to 100 MJ or 1 GJ, I think. But maybe only a few times more powerful. (Pity they didn't build in some head room!)

sillysaurusx3• 4 years ago

This tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required: https://twitter.com/latzenpratz/status/1602686252486217728

"had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5 megajoules out, that's still far less than the energy they originally needed for the lasers," says Tony Roulstone of the University of Cambridge.

But it's good to finally see progress. Very few technologies can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor could.

Robotbeat7• 4 years ago

That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.

Rebelgecko• 4 years ago

It was discussed a lot in the threads about this yesterday, but apparently the lab had relatively inefficient lasers. Newer ones are an order of magnitude more efficient

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security

azinman28• 4 years ago

Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?

rsync• 4 years ago

"Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05."

What is the difference between todays announcement and yesterdays ?

I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but apparently this news is different than yesterday ?

highwaylights• 4 years ago

Speculation.

People believed that X:Y was 2.2:2.0, but it's now 3.15:2.05.

The 10% EROI apparently wasn't impressive enough, it's now 54% EROI on paper (assuming less because of capture inefficiencies).

I'm no expert, but theoretically my understanding is that this ratio should scale along this same pattern for higher values of Y.

adrianmonk• 4 years ago

The official announcement (with the real info) was this morning.

Before that, the only official word was that an announcement was coming, and all the info was unofficial leaks and rumors.

yk2• 4 years ago

Yesterdays news was that this result was leaked to the FT with apparently preliminary numbers. And today there was a press conference that had somewhat better looking numbers.

makestuff• 4 years ago

It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.

Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.

p_j_w2• 4 years ago

This is already used for nuclear weapons research, which is why it's under Dept. of Energy.

jameshart5• 4 years ago

Cheap and abundant energy has a multitude of military applications.

Peaceful ones too, probably.

davedx2• 4 years ago

We've had thermonuclear weapons (h-bombs) for a long time already.

Harnessing the energy in a controlled and sustainable fashion is what's hard.

saboot3• 4 years ago

The appropriate analogy for this technology would be that it may be possible to initiate a thermonuclear weapon without relying on fission at all. Currently we use a fission nuclear bomb just to generate the temperature and pressure needed to start the fusion reaction, same as the one on today's announcement.

So far it hasn't proven to be viable, but time will tell.

lambdatronics3• 4 years ago

Uhhh... it's definitely being used for "stockpile stewardship." The fusion crowd went splitsies with the weapons folks to get this funded in the first place.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

demonstrating the scaling laws at work

One would think that one look at the sky would be enough to say that "hey this fusion thing scales pretty well".

IgorPartola• 4 years ago

I keep getting lost in the numbers here. What was the net gain/loss for the entire system? Without the “lasers are 1% efficient at 20% energy loss with 40% energy transfer loss” and all that.

nine_k• 4 years ago

AFAICT: There's a large net gain compared to the energy emitted by the lasers. There is still a considerable loss compared to the energy consumed by the lasers.

While at it: I don't think the NIF approach will ever be applicable to commercial power generation on Earth. But I hope it will be one day applicable to a fusion-based rocket engine.

joosters• 4 years ago

They needed roughly 500MJ of energy to power the lasers and produce the 2.5MJ of energy, so the net loss was... about 500MJ.

zbobet20126• 4 years ago

The net gain of the entire system at NIF doesn't matter, because the system at NIF was never designed to make a net gain.

People are estimating how this result moves the equation for an overall system that is designed for power production. Most numbers I have seen still leave a theoretically optimal power plant producing around a 30% loss in power with this number.

zardo4• 4 years ago

The targets are really the secret sauce right? If there were a civil ICF for power program, would NIF designs and data even be available to help, or is it all classified?

jkelleyrtp2• 4 years ago

There are pictures of CAD and experimental setups for the targets. They’re also pretty open with the setup numbers, so in theory, you could make your own NIF setup and try to get their target designs working.

From what I understand, a lot of the work from the past years has been trying to piece together geometries, pulse timing, stability, and quality of targets.

nabla9• 4 years ago

3.15 Mj = 0.875 kWh

the unsolved issue with laser fusion (ICF) as an energy source is the fast degradation of high powered lasers. High powered beam degrades optics on it's path and those things are expensive. ITER has similar problem with superconducting magnets.

w0mbat2• 4 years ago

Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don't start celebrating yet. Source: New York Times.

poopbutt6• 4 years ago

I agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue celebrations in general.

cheriot3• 4 years ago

I think the "With modern lasers" part is addressing that.

postingawayonhn3• 4 years ago

As I understand it that's largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised. Building a new facility from scratch would result in a much lower power consumption from the grid.

hackbinary2• 4 years ago

300 MJ is about 83 KWh.

In the UK is 1 KWh is £0.34

So, this costs £28 in electricity to run this experiment. The experiment is a momentary thing.

Clearly there is now some work to, but now this is becoming an engineering problem of how to extend, sustain, and scale this process.

naikrovek2• 4 years ago

don't you think it's nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do.

There's a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself.

If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.

floxy6• 4 years ago

I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications. The "breakeven" thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote. The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That's the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

carabiner3• 4 years ago

They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we've gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion was impossible, the fact they can said they did it, despite 1980s era technology and a shoestring budget for decades, really says something. ICF is just one fusion technology, and probably not the best one, but fusion in general will probably see a massive budget increase worldwide now that it's been proven it can be done.

I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030, assuming funding increases. Once we get them commercialized; coal, wind, solar and other power production will be obsolete for the most part. We can also use fusion heat to separate waste into it's base elements (you can recycle anything!), and help make any process needing a lot of thermal or electrical energy more efficient.

zbobet20126• 4 years ago

A quick peruse through this wikipedia article will tell you what still needs done, and what this means:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

Give it a read. Intertial confinement fusion with a Q > 1 may very well point the way towards a realistic powerplant. Fusion is at a point it deserves investment. The NIF cost about the same as a single b-2 bomber.

Trisell• 4 years ago

If it takes 300 one time in the future to start a long term reaction that’s a price I think we would all pay. The fact that we proved the idea now makes this just an engineering problem.

teilo• 4 years ago

Now add in the 50% efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity (and that's very optimistic), and it's only 1.5 megajoules, or 0.5%, right where I calculated it based on initial information.

IANAP, but I see no path forward to sufficient Q-total using plasma fusion to put this to any practical use. Unless the reaction can somehow be self-sustaining, I do not believe this will ever work.

hyperbovine• 4 years ago

Explains why the experiment took place at 1am.

nothis• 4 years ago

Naive question: Once they get out more than they spend, can they just loop the generated energy back in and keep increasing this exponentially?

sergiotapia• 4 years ago

The future just got a whole lot brighter for my children. This is going to save our planet, not funky wind farms.

adamvalve• 4 years ago

No need to pit them against each other. This achievement wasn't certain. Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is better for everyone.

lostmsu8• 4 years ago

Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is better for everyone.

That is debatable.

loeg2• 4 years ago

This a commercially viable power source ain't.

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

Huge!

So much left to do. Capture that output energy. Streamline the machinery that produced the result. Do it at scale and efficiently.

But that's just engineering, as they say. Which is one thing we are pretty good at!!

e1g• 4 years ago

Recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863 [740 comments]

panosfilianos6• 4 years ago

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn't find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually).

Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$15k a kg. But tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram (!) [3].

This leads to a calculation of ~$700M for the coal plant and ~$3.75B for the fusion plant (of which only ~$1.5M is deuterium)

I have a few questions and I wonder if any can help:

1. Is the above fusion fuel correct?

2. What measures are expected to bring these prices down to price efficiency?

Of course, I am not calculating the cost it would take for the reactor, storage, delivery etc.

Nevertheless, this is an absolutely incredible development and the people working for this progress should be definitely proud of their work. My generation and the ones following will hail this as a breakthrough moment. Thanks!

[1] https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prices_of_chemical_elements

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...

JumpCrisscross4• 4 years ago

tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram

D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.

panosfilianos6• 4 years ago

Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish?

How would it affect the rough calculations above?

trillic• 4 years ago

I'd imagine commodity tritium breeders would be a part of the infrastructure build out and that it will be a highly competitive space as fusion-to-the-home nears reality.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

What is fusion-to-the-home?

gene-h3• 4 years ago

[0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant. They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized cost of energy could get as low as $25/MWh. For this one really needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically competitive in some cases.

While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason to expect it can be scaled up. Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.

[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...

panosfilianos6• 4 years ago

Thanks a ton for that! $25/MWh is great but not the 10x economic impact I expected. Especially since [1] we see PV at $50/MWh currently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

cpleppert• 4 years ago

> Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.

Hydrogen bombs are driven by indirect implosion by a nuclear primary. It isn't a runaway process; the yield of a secondary is limited by the implosion achieved by the primary. Most hypothetical designs for an inertial fusion power plant achieve similar energy gains.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

I think capital costs & construction times are going to be extremely important.

I think the biggest reason nuclear energy stopped being built is it takes too long to get political wins.

NuScale and other SMNRs might be able to help with that.

However, the capital costs & construction time for Fusion Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear reactors.

But are we too far away from it being a reality that anyone is predicting how much?

iamgopal3• 4 years ago

1000 time gains is double performance every 2 year, means in 20 year we would be able to achieve fusion with hydrogen from water at home scale min power plants.

jboy5516• 4 years ago

This isn't for power plants, this is to model the efficiency of the second stage of a stored h-bomb in place of periodically exploding them, which we can't do anymore due to the test-ban treaty.

twarge3• 4 years ago

Remarkable. It's still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation/radioactivity.

If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate fusion.

fastneutron• 4 years ago

Activation products are of a different nature than the fission products and minor actinides you get in fission reactors, and are not necessarily as fearsome to handle, nor is the total activity comparable at all to what you get in spent fuel.

However, those high energy neutrons do a ridiculous amount of damage to the structural materials, and if there are constant outages to swap and repair components, I don’t see an easy way of making energy economically.

floxy6• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

blackbear_• 4 years ago

Furthermore, fusion does not produce highly radioactive, long lived nuclear waste. “Fusion produces only low level radioactive waste — more than fission does — but this low level waste does not pose any serious danger,” said González de Vicente. Contaminated items, such as protective clothing, cleaning supplies and even medical tubes or swabs, are short lived, low level radioactive waste that can be safely handled with basic precautions.

From https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/safety-in-fusion

twarge3• 4 years ago

Perhaps Dr. dr Vicente is talking about ITER, but surely not a real fusion reactor.

Here's something talking about an actual fusion reactor:

"While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger."

and

"To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating. In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting."

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

kahrl2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

twarge3• 4 years ago

I have a PhD plasma physics, I think I am qualified to make these statements without this sort of dismissal!

psychoslave• 4 years ago

Is that a different approach than the Tokamak, some piece to make it works, or some other relationship? What does it mean for existing projects such as ITER?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

readams• 4 years ago

This works in a totally different way, by heating a tiny target fuel pellet with a laser to cause it to collapse and trigger fusion through basically heating and squeezing: more like how a bomb works. It's not easy to see a direct path from this approach to a power plant, but it might involve lining up a steady stream of fuel targets and doing this in a sort of pulsed mode.

Other approaches attempt to create a continuous plasma where fusion can occur confined in a powerful magnetic field, and heated by radio waves to get it going. So there's always fusion happening rather than in short bursts.

lostmsu8• 4 years ago

In principle inertial confinement is not much different from internal combustion engines where piston compresses the mix, and the explosion energy is harvested. Here lasers compress the mix, and the explosion energy is not yet harvested (but measured).

Tokamaks (the other approach) are more like jet engines in that they sustain burning. But currently the burning in tokamaks requires more energy than it generates.

blablabla123• 4 years ago

For the Fusion the particles need to get close - but not to close. So the particles in the Tokamak get heated up to reach that. Also it's designed to run continuously but the challenge is the magnetic field so the particles won't hit the wall. (And cool down very quickly)

The Inertia based fusion works by providing the heat/energy with lasers, so the fuel would have to be replaced continuously.

tibbydudeza• 4 years ago

Congrats Doc Ok.

ck2• 4 years ago

This was for a few seconds using radioactive "fuel" correct?

So perpetually 10-25 years away at all times?

https://m.xkcd.com/678/

Beware science packaged as press-releases.

raydiatian2• 4 years ago

achieve President Biden’s goal

This seems unnecessarily partisan to mention

alexose• 4 years ago

The full quote is

This historic, first-of-its kind achievement will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy.

That is his administration's goal, and it's the directive that DoE is working under during his presidency.

Unless you have another party in mind that's been vocally championing a net-zero carbon economy?

raydiatian2• 4 years ago

Thank you for educating me. I was unaware Joe Biden invented the concept of bringing down CO2 emissions. It’s important that we’re calling him out by name so that we can illustrate the sixty years of effort put forth by the hard working men and women in nuclear physics. It is, after all, his money that is funding this research effort.

Sincerely, a Biden voter

anon2915• 4 years ago

The GOP has been pro-nuclear for a long time.

johnp271• 4 years ago

Wow so all this was accomplished starting from scratch in January 2021. Given another year or two and a second Biden term we should be finished.

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

This work is the result of decades of effort under many administrations. This PR piece makes it sound like it all happened in the last two years under Biden-Harris and a set of Senators and Representatives who all happen to be from one party. I had to stop reading to get the vomit taste out of my mouth.

valine4• 4 years ago

I am okay with any amount of partisanship if it means more funding for fusion research.

frellus2• 4 years ago

I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?

frellus2• 4 years ago

Oops, answered my own question I guess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon

That ain't good. Although fusion is clearly the future of energy, we have to get our sh*t together on earth so we don't kill ourselves off or devolve with endless wars. Or give up and use fusion to leave the planet efficiently.

tinco2• 4 years ago

So.. we attack our enemies by building large fusion power plants in their countries, and then blowing them up? Why not just build a traditional nuclear fission power plant and blow that up? It seems that would be a lot cheaper.

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

I don't see how this is any different to mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons.

jameshart5• 4 years ago

From your wiki source:

The power densities needed to ignite a fusion reaction still seem attainable only with the aid of a fission explosion, or with large apparatus such as powerful lasers like those at the National Ignition Facility, the Sandia Z-pinch machine, or various magnetic tokamaks. Regardless of any claimed advantages of pure fusion weapons, building those weapons does not appear to be feasible using currently available technologies

Nothing about this result from NIF seems to suggest that igniting fusion is any easier than previously suspected.

mbauman2• 4 years ago

That ain't good.

Your takeaway does not match that article. The article details how "no measurable success was ever achieved" and that the large amount of energy required to start fusion is hugely prohibitive.

I don't see how the NIF's success here changes that.

kimbernator• 4 years ago

We already have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons spread across the planet, with only two ever actually being aimed at anyone. Lots of problems but the threat of weapons at this scale are a well-feared thing already.

JumpCrisscross4• 4 years ago

is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized

Any advance in energy production or propulsion has a weapons counterpart.

mnd999• 4 years ago

Fusion bombs (H bombs) have existed for a long time.

chasd003• 4 years ago

Fusion bombs (H bombs) have existed for a long time.

and their yield can be made arbitrarily large with designs perfected in the 50s. I don't see this tech contributing to weapons. ...well maybe the lasers i guess but not the fusion at least.

tinco2• 4 years ago

There are much simpler ways to generate fissile material for dirty bombs. This technology doesn't seem to be weaponisable in any other way that I can tell.

Steuard• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert (I'm a physics prof who once took a seminar on nuclear arms control back in college), but what they're trying to do here is much, much harder than making an atomic bomb. If you want nuclear weapons, this work on carefully controlled and contained fusion is close to the opposite of what you'd need to do. (Fusion power is in general much cleaner than fission, at least where lasting radioactivity and waste are concerned.)

alfor• 4 years ago

Fusion bombs (H-bombs) were functional in 1952

anfilt2• 4 years ago

Like a fusion reactor can be used as a neutron source to effectively make a breeder reactor.

However, most countries can dig up rocks out of the ground with radioactive isotopes that can act as a neutron source. However, this has legitimate uses as well from research to medical imagining. Also any power generating reactor is gonna want to use those neutrons to make Tritium otherwise it would quickly run out fuel so not something you just want use on something unrelated to running the fusion reactor.

jameshart5• 4 years ago

A process which has been finally accomplished at one of the most advanced research facilities in the world after decades of effort, and which requires as an energy input almost as much energy as the process produces, is not easily weaponized, no.

Fusion reactions are hard to start. To use one as a weapon would require you to deliver the fusion fuel together with a source of enough energy to start the fusion reaction off. So the most effective way to do so has historically been to trigger them with a nuclear fission reaction from an atomic bomb - which results in a Hydrogen bomb.

In other words, weaponizing fusion generally requires you to already have an extremely powerful weapon.

Weaponizing this laser based inertial confinement fusion approach requires you to deliver a facility the size of the Lawrence Livermore lab plus the electricity generating capacity of a significant part of the west coast of America onto your target.

scarier• 4 years ago

The short answer is no.

saul_goodman• 4 years ago

You have to remember that all of the classified details about US hydrogen bomb designs we have were leaked from leaked from Russia after the Soviet Union broke apart. And yet only two countries have managed to become nuclear states since then (Pakistan and North Korea).

It's the engineering that makes nuclear weapons hard to do, not the knowledge.

Quarrelsome• 4 years ago

from my layman understanding I believe fusion reactions are unlike fission reactions in that if they escape the confines of their environment they fizzle out as opposed to runaway like a nuclear explosion.

wnevets2• 4 years ago

I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is wormhole "real"?

aetherson• 4 years ago

It's not like the "wormhole" thing where what was produced isn't really what can plausibly be described as a wormhole. In this case, fusion really did happen, and the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction was about half again what the energy put into the fusion reaction was.

That said, there are two pretty important caveats about how big a deal it is macroscopically:

1. In order to have useful fusion power, we'd need at least another order-of-magnitude or so energy out compared to energy in. Maybe, depending on how optimistic you are about the ability to capture that energy and efficiently feed energy in, closer to two orders of magnitude.

2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion. Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.

wnevets2• 4 years ago

2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion. Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.

Thank you, that is the kind of caveat I was expecting.

leephillips4• 4 years ago

More real than the wormhole. Real enough to get Chuck Shumer to increase next year’s budget, which is why you’re hearing about this at all.

UltraViolence2• 4 years ago

I thought we had passed this mark a long time ago, but only during short stints.

However, the way they're realizing it by shooting a fuel pellet with lasers is unsustainable and impractical IMHO.

simiones4• 4 years ago

If only they were shooting a fuel pellet: they are instead shooting a hohlraum, a precision-engineered piece of gold and that, in turn, shoots the fuel pellet with X-Rays, acting as a kind of aiming/synchronization device. The hohlraum is destroyed in the process, and currently costs millions of dollars to build a new one.

philipkglass2• 4 years ago

The hohlraum is destroyed in the process, and currently costs millions of dollars to build a new one.

Hohlraums are expensive but not millions of dollars. This 2004 report puts the cost at about $2500 each (still far too expensive for a power plant of course) while examining ways to get them under $1 each.

"Cost-Effective Target Fabrication For Inertial Fusion Energy"

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518

jmyeet• 4 years ago

I hope commercial fusion power generation becomes a reality but I'm far from convinced that's the case. What we see here is just solving one problem with many more to go.

Energy output exceeding energy input produces a surplus of energy. That's a must and that's the breakthrough LLNL is announcing but le tme list the some of the known barriers to producing electricity:

1. How stable is the reaction? What failure modes does it have? While fusion doesn't have the same failure modes as fission does (eg Chernobyl) it could still result in significant damage to the container or even the facility;

2. What's the relationship between capex ("capital expendiutre"), lifetime, maintenance and power generation. An extreme example is if your power plant costs $50B with annual mainteance of $2B and a life of 30 years but only produces 100MW of power then even though the fuel is free it's not economical because those capex and operational costs have to be amortized over the life of the plant;

3. How available are the fuels? Of course hydrogen is abundant but most of it is protium (H1), which is not useful for current fusion research. Most of it is DT fusion, meaning deuterium (H2) - tritium (H3). Deuterium is naturally occuring (IIRC ~1ppm). Tritium is not. It needs to be bred.

4. What about neutrons? Neutrons create two problems. The first is energy loss. High speed neutrons are energy loss from your system. Inertial confinement (ie this result) tries to capture neutrons with a "shell". Older designs (eg ITER) use a tokamak, which is magnetic containment of a superheated plasma. Magnetic fields are great for containing electrons and hydrogen nucei because they're positively charged. Neutrons obviously have no electric charge so just escape. The second problem is the damage these neutrons cause (ie "neutron embrittlement").

5. How do you convert that energy into power? Nuclear fission, for example, heats water into steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. This isn't particularly efficient and greatly adds to the costs. It's another system that needs to be maintained. "Direct energy conversion" would be the holy grail here but that's all very theoretical at this point.

Once you start adding up efficiencies in the different stages of electricity generation you have to do significanlty better than simply exceeding power input.

It's a notable achievement but as the release says, viable power generation is still a long way away (ie decades).

pelorat3• 4 years ago

This experiment was never intended to/or form the basis of a nuclear fusion reactor.

snshn• 4 years ago

I like how over 60 years after the nuclear boom, it somehow just happened to happen today. Just when the world is ready to transition to electric vehicles on a global scale, just when oil companies aren't able to make as much money from oil as they used to, just when one of the major suppliers of fossil fuels (Russia) is at war with the West, it has somehow magically happened. What a coinky-dink.

Throw lots of money at something when you need it to happen and then it will happen. Or have control over the technology and don't let it see the light of day until it benefits you financially and makes your enemies lose their main stream of income. I truly applaud this timing and will err on the side of conspiracy rather than coincidence reading more about this "breakthrough".

Alifatisk• 4 years ago

You're right when I think about it, the timing is amazing

LarryMullins7• 4 years ago

I like how over 60 years after the nuclear boom, it somehow just happened to happen today. Just when the world is ready to transition to electric vehicles on a global scale, just when oil companies aren't able to make as much money from oil as they used to, just when one of the major suppliers of fossil fuels (Russia) is at war with the West, it has somehow magically happened. What a coinky-dink.

It would be coincidental timing, if the most breathless headlines were actually true. But in reality we're still decades away from commercially viable fusion power generation. A fusion energy gain factor of Q=1 is little more than a psychological hurdle. Imagine you have a process that consumes 1 gigawatt of power and produces 1 gigawatt + one additional watt of power; that's Q=1. And it's certainly not commercially viable.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Is that you, Lyndon?

PaulHoule4• 4 years ago

Lyndon Larouche came to my high school (in New Hampshire) for the presidential primaries in 1988 and talked about antimatter as an energy source.

Years later I saw a picture of an Iranian woman holding a sign that said "Nuclear Power is a Human Right" and thought... She much be a LaRouchite.

I wound up voting for Diane Sare, another LaRouchite, for US Senate in New York this year even though I know they're a coercive organization like the Scientologists or the Longtermists and I disagreed with her position on Ukraine -- we had a really sad ballot this year since they made it much harder for 3rd party candidates to get one and she was the only one.

LaRouchites are the only people left who want to stamp out the Beatles but they are required to not only listen to only classical music but are only allowed to listen to Brahms and anything older. If I ran into a LaRouchite and wanted to make them squirm I would talk to them about Debussy.

pdonis3• 4 years ago

Calling this "ignition" is a misnomer. The correct term, as given in the article (as opposed to the headline) is exceeding breakeven: more fusion energy output than energy input to the target.

"Ignition" means the reaction becomes self-sustaining and does not require any further input of energy to continue.

dogma11385• 4 years ago

And it was just that the after the initial laser pulse that triggered ignition there was no need to sustain it to continue to heat up the fuel to induce fusion.

The fact that this indeed was ignition was one of the main reasons why the fusion reaction itself was net positive.

pdonis3• 4 years ago

it was just that the after the initial laser pulse that triggered ignition there was no need to sustain it to continue to heat up the fuel to induce fusion

I don't see this anywhere in the article. Is there a better reference for what actually happened during the experiment?

Robotbeat7• 4 years ago

They actually achieved both ignition and scientific breakeven. The resultant fusion heat helped produced significantly more fusion, not just relying on external energy (ie from the laser implosion).

donquixote252• 4 years ago

No, this is ignition. However, the reason why this is a big deal is because it is scientific break-even.

The first time they achieved ignition was in August of 2021. See paper below:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...

lostmsu8• 4 years ago

the reaction becomes self-sustaining

This is applicable only to continuously running reactions like in jet engines.

pdonis3• 4 years ago

Which would also include any other method currently being pursued to achieve fusion, besides laser confinement. I'm guessing that the laser confinement community had to invent another meaning for "ignition" since the usual one would not be applicable to them.

JaggerFoo• 4 years ago

Ok, so how long do I have to wait to get a coffee-can sized device to power my house?

JohnBerea• 4 years ago

Let's say this all works out and over the next few decades fusion replaces all other electricity generation, and we're past the point where all the initial infrastructure costs have been paid for.

How much will my electric bill be reduced?

happyopossum• 4 years ago

This is kind of a silly question given the time horizons and other potential factors that can crop up in 30 years, but my electric bill has separate charges for generation and delivery. Even if generation drops by 90%, it'd still only cut my bill in half.

chasd003• 4 years ago

i doubt your electric bill would be reduced at all. It would probably increase at a more constant rate instead of dramatic ups and downs though. So there's that..

dotancohen3• 4 years ago

  > How much will my electric bill be reduced?

Your bill will be the same, or higher. But you'll be doing so much more with electricity. Push a button, and your clothes are clean in seconds. Push a button, and your beard is shaved in seconds. Push a button, and four of your five senses are entertained for hours.

nonethewiser2• 4 years ago

Why cant you currently do those things then?

Ancalagon• 4 years ago

Initial investment cost to build reactors would in all likelihood be very high just by the nature of these being some of the most complex machines on the planet. It seems unlikely any sort of fast manufacturing line could be created to build these, and they’d all likely be built one at a time like fission reactors.

Running costs and maintenance would also be high, the fuel alone is expensive (right now), and I’ve heard that wear and tear on parts of the reactors can be high so much of the housing for the reactor would need to be replaced with time.

You’ve probably also got a small army of engineers running each one of these reactors you’ve got to pay.

All that said, the energy produced via fusion is EXTREMELY abundant. I imagine with later reactor iterations (after supply chains have been setup and electrical transportation routes upgrades) electricity could become very cheap even relative to renewables.

drusenko• 4 years ago

If you live in California, even if electricity generation cost nothing at all it would still only lower your bill by ~15%. Transmission & distribution of electricity is the expensive part not generating it. It doesn’t need to be expensive, yet here we are.

mFixman• 4 years ago

Widespread energy generation nuclear fission is politically impossible in most Western countries.

Why are people optimistic that fusion won't have the same kind of problems, such as new plants being too expensive to build and old obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?

BudaDude• 4 years ago

I'm a bit more optimistic about this. This technology will be more important for space exploration than it will be (currently) on the ground.

BeetleB2• 4 years ago

IIUC, there is no concern about radioactivity with fusion.

fullstackchris• 4 years ago

I'm sure they said the same thing about coal plants before any of them ever existed

dontwearitout• 4 years ago

Fission's amazing potentially is nerfed by three main things: proliferation risk, meltdown risk, and waste handling. These are all solved problems but dramatically raise the cost (you need armed guards, and the reactor has to be built to withstand a 747 strike, etc etc). The fuel cost is a very small fraction of the price of nuclear.

If you can eliminate or reduce the need for armed guards and mountains of red tape, this has the potential to solve many of fission's problems while providing the same benefits (unlimited zero carbon power with dirt cheap fuel).

DoughnutHole• 4 years ago

such as new plants being too expensive to build and old obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?

There's no guarantee that these issues will be surmountable.

But fusion largely avoids the fear association with past fission disasters and fears about nuclear waste. This is a non-trivial political problem in many parts of the world, especially much of Europe. If fusion becomes economical (big if) and the differences between it and fission are well communicated it might be easier for the world to swallow.

I think visions of a 100% fusion world are fairly pie in the sky. Most of our energy most of the time will probably come from already viable renewables. But renewables cannot offer consistent baseline power all day, year-round, in every part of the world. We need either huge breakthroughs in storage, or carbon-free baseline generation. Economical fusion if it were achieved could offer that without some of the most politically difficult drawbacks of fission.

I'd probably still bet the farm on renewables + storage though, at least for my lifetime.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

It is already widespread, being used for 10-20% of US energy, isn't it? And 30-40% in several European countries. I think it's definitely possible since it's already in place, we just need to talk about it more.

risyachka• 4 years ago

The main backlash for fission is not cost but danger.

Fusion removes it.

megaman821• 4 years ago

If ignition was achieved, why would they have to keep on shooting more fuel pellets? Shouldn't they just ignite one fuel pellet and feed in more fuel?

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

That's not really how NIF works. It's really a tiny bomb. It destroys the apparatus every time. It even wrecks the optics in the laser primary, which they have to regularly replace.

typon• 4 years ago

This makes me feel America is back. This is a big achievement and should not be underplayed whatsoever. Whichever country achieves practical fusion is going to be dominant in the next century.

drumhead• 4 years ago

America never went away. The major scientific and tecnological achievements of the the last 30 years are virtually all American.

padjo• 4 years ago

I’m pretty sure this heavily politicised press release is designed to make you think America is back.

apienx• 4 years ago

Exciting! Is this work published somewhere? I'm curious to hear more about the setup and other experimental conditions.

s_dev• 4 years ago

Christopher Nolan couldn't have timed the release of Oppenheimer better.

falcor84• 4 years ago

Well, it would have been better if the release date was this week, no? (I see it's currently scheduled for 2023-07-21)

citilife• 4 years ago

Given the resulting output was "2x higher than expected", I'll wait patiently for any peer reviewed work on the subject and a replication (or improvement) of the results.

In the presentation they mentioned they couldn't reproduce the results immediately due to the containment imperfections -- at least that was my understanding.

johnthuss• 4 years ago

"NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic laser system...-located at LLNL in Livermore, Calif.—is the size of a sports stadium"

That's an important piece of information - the thing is gigantic!

valine4• 4 years ago

Even if it doesn’t get smaller (unlikely), we as a society build stadiums all the time. Large construction projects are a small price to pay for abundant clean energy.

93po2• 4 years ago

Why is it important? I picked a random nuclear plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station) and it's 4000 acres/more than 6 square miles.

gfodor• 4 years ago

Another good time to remind everyone that the inventor of the maser (which led to the laser), Charles Townes, was discouraged by his department chair (allegedly): "Look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work, we know it's not going to work. You're wasting money, Just stop!" A few months later, it worked. [1]

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/29/charles_townes_nobel_...

nielsbot• 4 years ago

"If we'd known it was impossible, we never would have succeeded!"

quickthrower23• 4 years ago

He later explained that he was able to refuse to stop his research because he had tenure, so there was nothing they could really do to stop him.

Not having to chase your next meal can make a big difference

doikor• 4 years ago

This is why tenure for fundamental research is very important. You have to be free to fail without consequences or you won't be able to take the risks to figure this stuff out.

chaosbolt• 4 years ago

Exactly, this is the biggest problem with modern universities.

I wish billionaires would fund things like this directly as in no patent no nothing, just from the goodness of their hearts, which they claim is there seeing how much they all pledge to charities... But the reality is different, Oxford pledged to donate the rights to their covid vaccine for free then was urged by the bill & melinda "foundation" to reverse course and sold it to pharma companies.

Palpatineli• 4 years ago

Calling this fusion ignition is stupid. Laser fusion is unlike other fusion devices in that the efficiency of laser is extremely low. It is true that the reaction created 3MJ when the laser energy input INTO THE REACTION CHAMBER is 2MJ. But the whole laser system took 300MJ to run for this one shot. Thus the real Q value is extremely low compared to other fusion methods.

pmarreck4• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I understand your criticism

leephillips4• 4 years ago

Note that the announcements refer to laser energy supplied to the target, not laser energy entering the chamber. The former is a fraction of the latter, and the basis for the term “scientific gain”. The actual target gain may be < 1.

brianyu82• 4 years ago

What an amazing achievement. I was curious, so I looked up the open software roles at LLNL[0]. I'm very curious how the salary compares to your average bay area tech salary.

[0] https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...

nonethewiser2• 4 years ago

See for yourself https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Lawrence-Livermore-National...

145k TC for Software Engineer. Better than I'd expect from a government job, although a qualified applicant could obviously make so much more elsewhere. And supporting the needs of a bunch of PhD's doesn't really sound fun.

phtrivier6• 4 years ago

Since I absolutely decided to take this in the worst possible way (get the downvotes ready)

What is the timeframe for those lasers to light a bulb somewhere, vs the timeframe of those lasers killing someone on a battlefield ? (As in, how much of is applicable for the military?)

adventured4• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what you're talking about. What is it you think you took in the worst possible way?

The lasers in question are mediocre for battlefield use. The consequences for the military are trivial, unless you're talking about 70 years from now when the US military is using fusion to power some of its military bases, subs or carriers.

phtrivier6• 4 years ago

I decided to take this "fusion breakthrough" with a massive dose of salt additionned with twice it's weight in pepper and bile.

At least the Nature article had a good ratio of actual information about the experiment, its limitations and prospect, as opposed to massive hyperbole from other commenters already popping the champagne as if the energy crisis was over.

This made sound grumpy, which, truth be written, I am.

(And, jealous, too, of course. I wouldn't mind a bit of actual success, once in a while.)

Or maybe the grunts working on the experiment know better, and are _also_ grinding their teeths at the PR effort ? Maybe _they_ also feel unsatisfied because they still haven't met their own goal ? I suppose nuclear fusion physicists must have imposter syndrome, too ? Who knows.

MrFoof2• 4 years ago

I’m glad we might see fission power plants in my lifetime (next 30-50 years). My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch.

Yet I’m concerned that shortly thereafter, the giant robotic laser death spiders will destroy entire cities. This might also be be before we’ve built the arcologies to launch into outer space to escape the giant robot laser death spiders.

pmarreck4• 4 years ago

fission power

you probably meant "fusion"

My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch.

Well, except for the front-facing camera, but that's trivial to add at this point. And as a 50 year old, I agree. I feel like being incarnated in '72 has gotten me ethereal tickets to the greatest technological expansion/brouhaha in all of human history, and I don't know what my soul did to deserve this pleasure. Everything I've been into as a kid "before it was cool" has absolutely exploded: Computers, electronic music, gaming, telecom, AI, green energy/electric cars... but also science, medicine, etc. are making tremendous progress (I'm down 35 lbs thanks to Mounjaro, a brand new drug). Hell, even that weird side interest in UFO's (one of the first sections of the library I discovered as a kid) has paid dividends with the USG finally admitting they're real. BRB, I have to pinch myself. Unironic "what a time to be alive"!

giant robot laser death spiders

you should probably worry more about the silent airborne drone army suicide bombers first. (What was the movie that actually featured a scene with those, btw? I think it had Morgan Freeman? EDIT: Found it, thanks to those other technological wonders, Google and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk)

There will always be dangers with progress. Two steps forward, one step back. But I leave you with this. I asked ChatGPT to summarize this article as a sarcastic poem https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/everything-sam-bankman-f... and here's what it gave me, and I'm still chuckling about how awesome this is:

Sam Bankman-Fried talks a lot

But it's all just hot air

He tries to seem transparent

But he's just trying to repair

His reputation, once so grand

Is now as tarnished as can be

He's just a fraud, don't be fooled

By his attempts at publicity.

anotherman554• 4 years ago

The original Dick Tracy Watch introduced in 1946 didn't have a camera. A newer model featuring a camera came out in a 1964 comic.

I haven't read Dick Tracy in a long time, but if it's still being made I bet Tracy's watch has been upgraded with a bunch of new features the Apple Watch lacks.

MrFoof2• 4 years ago

Yes, fusion. I 1000% blame mobile autocorrect.

What was the movie that actually featured a scene with those, btw? I think it had Morgan Freeman

It was specifically a SimCity 2000 reference.

_a_a_a_2• 4 years ago

Maybe I missed it but it's not a net positive output. From the article, the implication it is:

"LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output"

From newscientist, the same info followed by a rider:

"generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place"

belval• 4 years ago

This was explained by another commenter yesterday, but this is not an issue. The 3.15:2.05 ratio is the news as it is the part that was difficult to achieve. The 300MJ accounts for significant laser inefficiencies in much the same way that the 3.15MJ of output won't convert to 3.15MJ of electricity as the conversion is not loss less.

In other words: it's a net-positive output for that reaction, not the whole process, there is still a lot of work to be done before you and I exchange comments on a server powered by fusion energy in homes powered by fusion energy.

_a_a_a_2• 4 years ago

Granted...

in much the same way that the 3.15MJ of output won't convert to 3.15MJ of electricity as the conversion is not loss less

...and very much touche! That's a good point. But I do feel the overall loss should have been made clear and distinct from the gain in one part of the whole. Gross vs net perhaps?

dang• 4 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971953 - Dec 2022 (82 comments)

Two threads from before the announcement:

Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863 - Dec 2022 (755 comments)

Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33968357 - Dec 2022 (160 comments)

aidenn02• 4 years ago

So for my entire lifetime Fusion has been 30-50 years away. Now it's 29-49 years away?

jackspratts• 4 years ago

correct. about as long as a typical academic research career, with an extra margin thrown in for emeritus positions to be on the safe side. get the boffins' grand kids through college etc. anyway, there won't be grids in 50 years. or if for some sentimental reason there still are 95% of us will be off the failure prone things while making, storing and using our own uninterruptible power safely at home. much sooner really. i can't even imagine being on the grid in 10 years let alone 49. no way then to distribute the staggering costs for what will be the planet's most expensive and complex power plants.

- js.

spencerchubb• 4 years ago

The most surprising thing I've learned from this is we're only allocating $624 million / year to this program. We really need better mechanisms for deciding how to allocate taxes.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

Would you rather the us takes second place in researching space and energy tech?

jboy5516• 4 years ago

Its actually pretty good, since this is primarily weapons testing. The real money is being spent in the EU, where there is at least a chance of getting a sustainable fusion reaction.

davrosthedalek5• 4 years ago

It's, depending what calculation you believe, around 20 billion for ITER. Started in 2013, first plasma in 2025, first full fusion in 2035. So about a billion per year. Of course, costs are calculated differently, and I'm not sure on what time scale the 600 million are, but it's not that drastically different.

Research wise, it's a pretty big chunk of money. But yeah, more money in research would be nice. (Disclaimer: I am a scientist with grants.)

jasonhansel4• 4 years ago

Not really. IIRC the NIF needs to pretend that it's about nuclear weapons to secure DoE funding; they (like us) know that it's really about developing fusion as an energy source.

kobalsky• 4 years ago

ELI5 level question.

Please correct me if I'm saying something stupid.

If you toss a solar mass of water into the sun it just becomes fuel.

So, could a fusion reactor, when efficiency is improved, use water as fuel?

ArtificialAI• 4 years ago

Yes, that's generally correct. If you were to toss a solar mass of water into the sun, it would become fuel for the sun's fusion reactions. Fusion reactors work in a similar way, but on a much smaller scale. They use fuel, typically hydrogen or a mixture of hydrogen and helium, and use intense heat and pressure to fuse the atoms together, releasing a large amount of energy in the process.

logical_ferry• 4 years ago

On a scale of 1 to invention of fire/wheel/smelting/electricity/computers, how relevant is this? I have trouble comprehending the historical impact.

lostmsu8• 4 years ago

It is less of inventing and more of engineering. But I would put it along with ARPANET.

low_tech_punk3• 4 years ago

wright brothers first flight?

devmor5• 4 years ago

This is some of the most incredible and inspiring scientific news in my lifetime. I am overcome with excitement right now.

busyant• 4 years ago

I'm sure this has been considered, but I haven't ready anything about the "geo-political" effects of virtually unlimited energy from fusion.

I imagine that power dynamics would change drastically, but I have no clue, really.

I understand that's still far away, but are there any articles/discussions on how large scale fusion-generated energy would change the world?

josho2• 4 years ago

Oh it will be interesting. Assuming it is possible to commercialize this at scale then relatively overnight we'll some some of the following:

* The middle-east no longer becomes a strategic region. Wealthy regimes see their income disappear. The US has supported Israel as a strategic check in the region, but with oil losing its value the US no longer needs to fund Israeli security. We are likely to see skirmishes if not major wars, but this time it's over empires in decline, rather than empires with strategic resources.

* Texas' GDP declines substantially creating significant unemployment. Will government scape goat immigration and create further social problems, or invest in leading the transition creating a new wave of energy industries.

* Developing countries swiftly raise their standard of living as cheap energy is brought online. No idea what this ramification would be.

sam0x17• 4 years ago

Early in my career I had the pleasure of interning at LLNL (ironically, working on a completely open source compiler project) but I was able to go on a number of tours of NIF. It was extremely cool. They have a whole team of software engineers writing software just to keep all the mirrors calibrated and things like that. In person it is much bigger than it seems in pictures.

maerF0x02• 4 years ago

“We have had a theoretical understanding of fusion for over a century, but the journey from knowing to doing can be long and arduous. Today’s milestone shows what we can do with perseverance,” said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

This part gives me so much hope as we have understandings of what is theoretically possible, and in due time humanity reaches them. This gives me a lot of hope especially in the fields of curing major diseases and in longevity!

trhr• 4 years ago

I have an idea. Why don't we just take all the nuclear weapons we've accumulated around the planet and explode them in the South China Sea?

cm2187• 4 years ago

It's a weird scientific annoncement, punctuated with quotes from politicians...

leephillips4• 4 years ago

Old news: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13008

xyst• 4 years ago

One more step towards getting away from dirty fossil fuels.

I just hope we have enough time to see it implemented at scale (ie, powering entire states/cities/towns/municipalities, swapping infra in place).

I also hope the O&G industry doesn’t attempt to block this with fake science (ie, decades of climate denial, greenwashing via “recycling” campaigns).

yuvalkarmi• 4 years ago

Tangential, but fun: the following is NOT what this post says. The following is the response to a the ChatGPT prompt "write the press release by an imagined body called the Department of Energy announcing the achievement of fusion ignition." Mind you, ChatGPT training data ends in 2021, so it's definitely not aware of this news:

"The Department of Energy is pleased to announce the successful achievement of fusion ignition in our latest experiment. This breakthrough marks a major milestone in our pursuit of clean, limitless energy.

Fusion, the process by which atomic nuclei combine to release vast amounts of energy, has long been considered the Holy Grail of energy production. It has the potential to provide an virtually limitless supply of clean, safe energy, without the harmful greenhouse gas emissions or dangerous waste products of other forms of energy production.

For decades, scientists and engineers have been working to unlock the secrets of fusion and harness its power. This has been a challenging and complex endeavor, but we are now closer than ever to achieving our goal. The successful fusion ignition in our experiment marks the first time that this process has been achieved outside of the core of a star. This is a significant step forward in our efforts to harness the power of fusion and bring it to practical use.

We believe that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the way we produce energy, and we are committed to pursuing this technology with all of the resources at our disposal. In the coming years, we will continue to conduct experiments and research, with the goal of developing a fusion reactor that can provide a stable, reliable source of energy.

We are extremely proud of this achievement, and we will continue to work tirelessly to develop this technology and bring it to the world. This is an exciting time for energy production, and we are confident that fusion will play a major role in our collective future. We are grateful for the support of our colleagues and partners in this effort, and we look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible."

bulbosaur123• 4 years ago

TL:DR please, how big of a deal is this and when can we approximately expect cheap or costless energy? And is it sort of like perpetual energy generator? And if yes, doesn't that break law of physics? And if not, why not?

So many questions. Pardon my ignorance.

mlindner• 4 years ago

The design of the National Ignition Facility was never intended to study commercially viable fusion power. It's exclusively a physics testing facility with origins for testing the physics of thermonuclear fusion weapons for better bomb design.

Nothing that happens at the NIF is very useful in heading towards commercially viable fusion. The design of the testing apparatus is also similarly incompatible with making a sustained fusion device as there is no way to continuously feed in fuel into the device, nor methods of extracting the energy.

EamonnMR• 4 years ago

Those sound like problems less complicated than a huge array of laser beams, but the devil's in ths details I suppose.

seandoe2• 4 years ago

Swaying public perception in an optimistic direction is enough of an effect to justify the cost and effort of this achievement.

daxfohl2• 4 years ago

My pessimistic self feels like the short-term effect is that it sets a deadline by which oil companies know they have to extract and sell all the existing oil on the planet, and a doubling down on increased emissions now because fusion will solve it eventually.

chrisco2552• 4 years ago

There are hundreds of years worth of oil deposits (possibly more) even at current usage rates. "Selling all the oil" isn't in the realm of possibility.

daxfohl2• 4 years ago

Still, as much as possible before the party is over.

tommica• 4 years ago

Gratz to the scientists, seems like an impressive achievement!

sbussard• 4 years ago

Scientists spend their whole lives researching a particular topic, but as soon as there’s a breakthrough the politicians take credit. Unbelievable!!

Excellent milestone for humanity nonetheless

randomsearch2• 4 years ago

This is a really hard question to answer, but do you think in peacetime 1930s if you’d asked someone how long it would take to build the bomb, they’d say “we’re only a few decades away with proper funding”?

The pay off achieved by accelerating fusion development seems to justify almost any amount of spending. Is it worth going for it?

The most important subquestion for me: is there a sufficiently brilliant living scientist who has the technical ability, managerial skills, and integrity to be trusted to deliver? I wonder if this is the reason we haven’t already done it.

sergiomattei• 4 years ago

Science is a collaborative achievement. There isn’t one scientist that can deliver at this scale and complexity.

randomsearch2• 4 years ago

Oppenheimer

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung• 4 years ago

Thank you, Biden!

lukeplato• 4 years ago

What does this mean for ITER and magnetic confinement fusion?

einpoklum• 4 years ago

US DOE: Excessive uncritical media hype achieved.

empiricus2• 4 years ago

I still don't understand why we waste time and money with fusion. Fision so much easier. Should focus on it. Fusion is ok, but 100 years into the future when we are bored.

empiricus2• 4 years ago

Actually just a rhetorical question. We are so irational that fusion makes perfect sense.

XCSme• 4 years ago

ChatGPT can answer this:

Fission is currently the most common method of generating nuclear power, and it has been used in power plants for many years. It is a relatively well-understood technology and it can provide a large amount of energy with relatively little fuel. However, fission produces radioactive waste and the risk of accidents, such as the one that occurred at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011.
In contrast, fusion has the potential to provide even more energy than fission and it produces very little radioactive waste. It is considered a safer and more sustainable source of energy than fission.

supergirl3• 4 years ago

everyone should watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY to put this into perspective.

for some reason, all the news articles are extremely misleading.

previous output ratio for this fusion method was something like 70%, now it is 150%. it's a useful improvement, but not a major breakthrough. the whole system still consumes 100x more energy than it produces. 100MJ of energy is needed to power the laser. the laser generates only 2MJ of energy that powers fusion. fusion generates 3MJ of output energy. so all the articles are saying "they put 2MJ energy and got 3MJ energy back". no, they put 102MJ and got 3MJ.

DesiLurker4• 4 years ago

as somebody already explained to you earlier, the NIF uses arcane lasers because their focus is not lasers at the moment, it is fusion. At current tech level we have about 20% laser efficiency (with some types as much as 50%, not sure if they apply). this experiment specifically was about energy positive from a fusion reaction which has never been done except for uncontrolled things like hydrogen bombs. as far as a fusion milestone goes, this is a big deal.

Also, the other thing most commenters are missing here is the remaining problems are incrementally solvable so we should see steady improvements in laser efficiency and pellet optimization going forward. this is even doable with VC money (which we have some now but not significant). in that sense it is a pretty decent development.

dsign• 4 years ago

HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument.

It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus.

Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve Civilization Survival, much less Singularity Ignition.

My suggestion: highly educated Homo Sapiens may not be the right course. There is a proven way of saving the planet which, by virtue of its remarkably sustainable intellect, we should be investing more on: koalas.

mclightning2• 4 years ago

I have been a HN user for a long time. Honestly, I disagree. Most HN users commenting here with smart stuff about fusion, just read it on another page a day or a week ago, from a bite-sized article or a reddit comment. Everyone, for the most part, parroting what they read on a short note somewhere else. Some more committed ones read the synopsis of a few papers before writing something smart.

Anything you read on the internet, explaining any advanced scientific concepts like fusion etc... take it with a huge grain of salt.

We are all parrots.

willis9364• 4 years ago

Some commenters have devoted their career to it.

pontifier2• 4 years ago

It doesn't matter if people agree, it only matters if it works or not.

quickthrower23• 4 years ago

HN comments is an exploration of the topic. There is no stated goal to reach consensus. Also there is no requirement to be deeply knowledgeable about physics, energy or fusion to comment.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

Maybe if the article would contain the HN names of the scientists in the experiment in bold instead of Senator names, it would be easier to find them (I'm sure some of them are around here). We should just find those sources, it's not that hard in the internet age.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing

What is meant by this?

julienreszka2• 4 years ago

Since the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water was signed in 1963, all nuclear weapons tests must be performed underground. This is typically done by digging a deep shaft or tunnel in the earth and detonating the weapon at the bottom of the shaft or tunnel. The explosion is monitored by a variety of equipment, such as seismographs, radiation detectors, and air samplers. The data gathered from these tests helps to understand the weapon's performance and its potential impact.

In addition, computer simulations are often used to test the effects of a nuclear weapon, such as the predicted fallout and atmospheric effects. These simulations are based on data collected from previous nuclear tests as well as theoretical models.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

Is this ChatGPT? It doesn't answer the question.

When I ask ChatGPT it says:

"fusion is not directly related to nuclear weapons or the maintenance of a nuclear deterrent"

over_bridge2• 4 years ago

Are there any thoughts on how this will become a power plant yet? It's awesome to see it filled up, reacted and then reset as a proof of concept, but can it ever be a continuous flow through the chamber without losing that ignition temp? Or will it be more like a 4 cylinder engine where each reactor is at a different stage of being filled, heated, reacting and emptying, with the net result being continuous?

Edit: Taking the internal combustion metaphor further, I'm imagining these connected in a circle. The grid is the starter motor to power the first laser, then each active chamber powers the laser on the next one (probably by capacitor not directly). Thus the energy production moves around the circle with each chamber being flushed and refilled before the laser powers back on. How far off is that image in my head? I've never actually seen it described

gateroid• 4 years ago

NIF never was designed to be a power plant or have anything to do with power generation. This is something most commenters don't appear to appreciate. It's an experimental facility that, when distilled to its simplest explanation, lets us study things when you squish them really, really hard. It turns out, fusion is one of the things you can study when you squish stuff really hard - and one of the big challenges was controlling how you do the squishing (which turns out to be pretty difficult).

There are lots of other problems that NIF also studies that boil down to "what does this do when we squish it" that have nothing to do with fusion or energy production. Aside from the weapons program applications, there are experiments that take place there in materials science, understanding extreme environments ("what do these elements we believe sit in the core of Jupiter act like at those pressures?"), etc.

TLDR: Think of NIF as a lab for energetically squishing things. It's not a power plant, it's not a prototype for a power plant, it's not a pre-prototype for a power plant, etc. It's a lab for basic physics research. It's about as close to being a prototype for a power plant as a test tube in a lab full of hydrocarbons is to being a prototype of an internal combustion engine.

over_bridge2• 4 years ago

Yeah obviously. I was asking about the next stage.

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

What’s the difference between "ignition" and every other “fusion achieved“ news story I’ve seen in the last 40 years?

This has the feel of those “water discovered on Mars for the first time ever” headlines.

omnicognate• 4 years ago

Well, for one thing achieving it is the purpose for which the "National Ignition Facility" was created. It's right there in the name. They're justified in having a bit of a party about it.

93po2• 4 years ago

My laymen understanding is that this is showing the first net-positive energy fusion, which has always been the biggest roadblock.

pontifier2• 4 years ago

Inertial Fusion in a Magnetic field is something I've been pushing for a long time. There are a lot of interesting variations on this design, and I hope I can get more interest in my design at http://www.DDproFusion.com

helpm33• 4 years ago

3.15 MJ is equivalent to 1.5 lb TNT, so it was quite a bang in their target chamber. Just for comparison, it's also just short of one kWh, so it would run an electric car for about three-four miles.

gabesullice• 4 years ago

After the Wright brother's first demonstration of powered flight, I like to imagine all the pessimists in this thread would have said that commercial air transport would never be viable because wood and fabric don't have the material properties to carry a ton of steel.

jokteur• 4 years ago

Yes, try to imagine a London - Tokyo non stop flight in 1902. Would be pretty crazy to imagine, considering that the longest distance the Wright brother flew was 180m.

kahrl2• 4 years ago

This is a false equivalence.

jerrygoyal• 4 years ago

remember those "experts" who said fusion won't be feasible before second-half of this century?

rurban• 4 years ago

So for how many milliseconds did it run? Those things are incredibly unstable, I see only one private US company making the stability breakthrough

forthorbor• 4 years ago

This is a huge deal, but not as big as it is being made out to be. This is only a fractional output, there is still significant work required to make this feasible for use outside the lab.

afiori• 4 years ago

I recommend reading [0] for (only slightly outdated) context on the field and its progresses.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

mansoor_• 4 years ago

A couple points:

- Yes the efficiency of the laser is poor and modern tech is more efficient, but not enough to make it an energy producing process. The best lasers are ~50% energy efficient.

- This can only be maintained for short periods of time and the time to restart the process in long. Not only that, tritium is a rare isotope. These are probably the largest challenges to overcome.

- The energy is released in the form of high-speed particles, and there is no efficient energy capture process.

The significance of their achievements is overblown. Yes, they achieved ignition, but no it is just an incremental process towards commercial fusion power.

ag3152• 4 years ago

Cool technical achievement, but it has essentially no implications for economically or politically significant energy generation anytime soon.

SkyMarshal• 4 years ago

It's interesting that they beat ITER to ignition. I wonder if this changes the direction of fusion research and funding in any way.

US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

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