Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes

First-ever net energy gain from fusion raises hopes for zero-carbon alternative.

See full article...

 

[linuxophile]

JET never achieved ignition. JET also never achieved breakeven (Q of 0.68).
NIF achieved ignition in 2021 but with a Q of 0.7 so ignition without breakeven.
It has now achieve ignition and greater than breakeven (Q of 1.2) in the same experiment.

Ignition is defined as self sustained fusion not just fusion. ITER is planned to have ignition and a Q > 1. Now are we years from commercially viable? No. They may never be commercially viable and even if they are this event alone doesn't really change the timeline materially. However prior to this humans had never achieved ignition or breakeven fusion. All expectations were that wouldn't happen until 2025 or later when ITER went online.

It is my understanding that you cannot achieve "self-sustained" fusion (unless under stellar conditions of pressure/temperature). Maybe you meant "long-sustained". It is not like fission, where you can have a true self-sustained process (which you try hard to moderate).

 

[Maury Markowitz]

As the article notes it uses inertial confinement and has long been believed to be a dead end in energy production.

It still is. It required ~425 MJ of electricity to produce that 2.5.

Considering a good conversion ratio of 35% to electricity, that means we would need 425 / 0.35 = 1200 MJ of output to break even electrically. That corresponds to a Q of about 50, using the same definition of Q they are using.

This has been known from the start. Here is literally the first public paper on the topic, see page 140 and 141:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4605926

 

[Albino_Boo]

It is much harder to damage tens of thousands of small plants sited all over the place than it is to drone one central facility that is makin ALL of the power for a region.

The Russians can swap from unitary warheads to cluster munitions and cover areas with submuntions. Kharkiv suffered from sustained bombardment using 300mm Smerch artillery rockets. Each rocket spreads 72 submuntions over the size of football pitch. The Iskander missile has also been extensively used with cluster munition warheads. Most Russian missiles built after the 70s have a cluster warhead option. It's a far more difficult to defend an entire urban environment against cluster munitions than to concentrate air defences around power plants.

 

[Ozy]

Here one of the aforementioned small fusion research groups with a promising approach:
(Their website is at LPPFusion.com)

https://mailchi.mp/lppfusion/fusion...er-funding-for-lppfusion-5477797?e=c1f2b20a85 (July 2021)

From the above report:
On LPPFusion’s basic approach, using the dense plasma focus device with hydrogen boron (pB11) fuel: “Pursuit of the p11B fusion fuel cycle is highly desirable, because that cycle does not directly emit neutrons, which greatly complicate concepts based on other fusion fuel cycles..."

The fusion cross-section for p11B fusion is much, much worse than D-T, and occurs at much higher energies. Furthermore, it is physically impossible to get breakeven in a p-B fusion plasma that is in thermal equilibrium (too much radiation loss).

Aneutronic fusion would be wonderful, but let's walk first before we take off in spaceships.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

This is the business plan for space colonization.

Outer Worlds will become reality if we allow businesses to be the ones that colonize (and I use that word with all it's negative implications) space.

For those who can't be bothered to dig into an exceedingly long computerized video game full of shootiness just to experience the story, here's this song. It gets across the most salient points:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvANy49Kqhw

 

[Maury Markowitz]

I would be interested in knowing how you can form a plasma into a pellet. Is this something that only exists for a short time after hitting the cryogenic hydrogen (isotope?) pellet with the lasers, forming the plasma?

The fuel is placed inside a plastic sphere. That is hit by the x-rays and vaporizes. The resulting energy ionizes the fuel into a plasma, as well as driving it inward.

 

[samu0034]

A small step, but a very important small step. Assuming it all holds up on review, they just proved that the process is viable. Now it's just a matter of refining and improving it.

While trying to be appropriately pragmatic, I don't think that's the problem you think it is here. It's a 20% increase in energy. If you just shoot lasers at hydrogen and there is a net energy profit of 20% over the cost of the lasers themselves. You heat up some water, turn it to steam, voila, you get electricity. I'm no mathematician, but I feel like there's no amount of inefficiency that would make this an insufficient energy source. That's like saying that if the amount of energy to light a match is multiplied by 1.2 when said match is applied to coal, that some level of inefficiency would make it better to just use the match to heat up your water. I don't see how that's possible. If you get more energy out of fusing your hydrogen atoms after the application of a laser, it will never be a be a better option to just use the laser to heat your water.

 

[mhalpern]

The Russians can swap from unitary warheads to cluster munitions and cover areas with submuntions. Kharkiv suffered from sustained bombardment using 300mm Smerch artillery rockets. Each rocket spreads 72 submuntions over the size of football pitch. The Iskander missile has also been extensively used with cluster munition warheads. Most Russian missiles built after the 70s have a cluster warhead option. It's a far more difficult to defend an entire urban environment against cluster munitions than to concentrate air defences around power plants.

its much harder to take down thousands of "sub grids" than it is to disconnect part of a major grid, also transitioning to a decentralized grid may make it easier to develop and use better standardized transformers.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Spherical of course, with a sun in it's belly. That is, in fact, a greatly simplified but accurate description of a cow's energy source. Cows are solar powered. This is why biologists hate physicists.

That is probably not the ONLY reason...

 

[Maury Markowitz]

as you point out not requiring the same levels of fail safe.

A production reactor will have several kilograms of tritium in lithium, a metal that bursts into flame in contact with water. They will need to hold the whole plant under negative pressure, like they do with CANDU plants due to their tritium production. However, there will be magnitudes more tritium in a fusion plant, and leakage is impossible to completely control (Pickering leaks T into Lake Ontario every couple of years) so it's not going to be a trivial exercise. Doable, yes, cheap no.

I wouldn’t necessarily assume fusion ends up cheaper than fission.

It will absolutely be more expensive in every design that has a hope of working.

Fission plants are basically big pressure cookers. Fusion plants are... well nothing like that.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

Yes and no, storage and/or long distance transmission help, as the intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are intermittent, but its not like with sufficient build out, you wouldn't be getting power for an extended period. there's also geothermal and for edge cases, biomass, but really most storage is just needed to balance out daily generation and use. There might be cases where long term storage is needed, but no one has decarbonized their grids to the point where its an immediate concern yet.

Yep. Storage will become a priority/viable when renewables are overbuilt enough to produce quantities worth storing.

Right now, gas plants are already built and fill the exact same niche.

It will be important to displace them, but at the moment, they have synergy with renewables.

 

[mhalpern]

That is probably not the ONLY reason...

That and the fact that biology is a subset of chemistry which is itself a subset of physics, therefor Dunning-Kruger.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

That is probably not the ONLY reason...

This is why psychologists also hate physicists.

 

[Atterus]

Waiting for Congress to try and slash funding or pretend the alternatives are magically better than fusion OR fission again. Same story every time and people are surprised it goes so slowly compared to stuff with dumptrucks of money. Amazing how little the government cares when the greenie and fossil lobbies throw so much money against a bunch of scientists trying to better the world...

Fusion, like fission, has few political allies because the moment fusion comes online they have the same problem they have with fission: fewer jobs, eradication of political platform, and their insider traded stocks evaporate overnight. Politicans don't want to get rid of their meal tickets. Watch, the same anti-fusion stuff is going to follow like it always does. Or it will just fade away in favor of those big fat pork projects.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

That and the fact that biology is a subset of chemistry which is itself a subset of physics, therefor Dunning-Kruger.

Dunning-Kruger is psychology, a subset of biology, but I would never want a physicist to explain that effect to me.

 

[Maury Markowitz]

It's a 20% increase in energy. If you just shoot lasers at hydrogen and there is a net energy profit of 20% over the cost of the lasers themselves.

No, it's a 20% increase of the laser output. The laser input was 425 MJ, 170 times greater.

Lasers are really inefficient.

 

[mhalpern]

Yep. Storage will become a priority/viable when renewables are overbuilt enough to produce quantities worth storing.

Right now, gas plants are already built and fill the exact same niche.

It will be important to displace them, but at the moment, they have synergy with renewables.

and it is viable, in some places, and grid scale batteries have been built in those places.

 

[co-lee]

They'd charge for your breath too if they could figure out a way to patent it.

On Mars, godemperor charges you to breathe. And don't even think about what getting shadowbanned in the democratic republic of mars looks like ...

 

[cerberusTI]

It still is. It required ~425 MJ of electricity to produce that 2.5.

Considering a good conversion ratio of 35% to electricity, that means we would need 425 / 0.35 = 1200 MJ of output to break even electrically. That corresponds to a Q of about 50, using the same definition of Q they are using.

This has been known from the start. Here is literally the first public paper on the topic, see page 140 and 141:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4605926

I feel like the media mangled reporting of this to an unfortunate degree.

Every article is talking about power production as if this makes it imminent, and does so by taking this specific event far out of context.

 

[xoe]

The short answer is nobody knows. This isn't a power plant. It isn't even a experimental powerplant. It isn't even an experiment on how you could make a power plant using fusion.

If commercial fusion powerplants ever exist they are unlikely to look or operating anything like this facility. Understand also you can't compare MJ to MW directly unless the output was over one second. This output is more like TW scale lasting nanoseconds. The fuel capsule is hand placed in the experiment chamber. They often spend weeks or even months between shots calibrating and testing and then it produces fusion for nanoseconds.

So trying to draw any conclusions on how some future hypothetical commercial fusion powerplant would operate from this experiment is just a bridge too far. Any conclusions would simply be science fiction at this point. The only good news is there is huge potential for improvement. The last ignition at this facility last year produced 1.4 MJ output and it now produced 2.5 MJ. That is almost an 80% increase in nominal output. To be anywhere close to viable though it would need to be more on the scale of 100+ MJ output on a 2 MJ input. So we are so far from commercial viability it would be like a week after the wright brothers first flight trying to conceptualize what an international airliner would look like. Any conclusions drawn would almost certainly be wrong.

I'm just imagining something akin to EUV light generation for silicon lithography. Fuel pellets being dropped into a chamber several times and blasted with carefully timed lasers. Don't know how you'd collect the power though.

 

[Chuckstar]

I'm just imagining something akin to EUV light generation for silicon lithography. Fuel pellets being dropped into a chamber several times and blasted with carefully timed lasers. Don't know how you'd collect the power though.

Collecting the power is always going to be the easy part, at least conceptually. If something gets really hotter than its surroundings, you can get that heat into some kind of liquid and carry it away. It’s all the other ancillary necessities of fusion power that get complicated: breeding tritium, dealing with materials being degraded by neutron impacts, etc.

 

[xoe]

If one believes the goal needs to be zero fossil fuel use, then you’ve got to get to zero fossil fuel use. If one believes the goal is to massively reduce fossil fuel use, and that a few hard-to-eliminate uses can take longer to figure out, then there shouldn’t be a problem with some minority of natural gas peakers operating around the world. Personally, I tend to fall in the latter camp, but understand where the former are coming from.

Sure, the goal should be net negative GHG emissions. But we won't get there today. So the optimal goal is probably something like, minimum practical emissions over the period until we attain negative emissions.

If we have a choice between deploying x units of production with zero emissions thereby reducing emissions per unit of production by y and deploying 2x units of production reducing emissions per unit of production by 1.5y. I think the latter makes more sense.

 

[Statistical]

I'm just imagining something akin to EUV light generation for silicon lithography. Fuel pellets being dropped into a chamber several times and blasted with carefully timed lasers. Don't know how you'd collect the power though.

It could but that is currently science fiction. In fact that is how the reactors on the Rcoinante in the TV show The Expanse work as evident by the episode where it stopped working.

Power collection is either direct charged particle collection (even more scifi) or using the thermal output to heat a transfer fluid to turn a turbine. People often say "steam powered" but it wouldn't necessarily have to be steam there are other concepts for high temperature closed cycle turbines.

This diagram is for a helium cooled fission reactor but the same concept could be used with a fusion heat source as well.

Of course both those problems are really only problems to solve once you can reach a Q of 25+ (that is 25 times the output energy from fusion compared to the input energy) until then it is like designing the interior layout of a moon shuttle before you have built a rocket.

 

[Manganese]

Fusion reactions emit no carbon

Uh, not be the pedant in the room but that's not technically true. Fusion absolutely creates carbon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process

 

[Particle in a red wave 22-24]

Cheap abundent power - can't come fast enough in these fucked up times.

 

[Chuckstar]

Uh, not be the pedant in the room but that's not technically true. Fusion absolutely creates carbon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process

I hope it’s not emitting it, though.

 

[Albino_Boo]

its much harder to take down thousands of "sub grids" than it is to disconnect part of a major grid, also transitioning to a decentralized grid may make it easier to develop and use better standardized transformers.

What do you think 72 submuntions that are designed to destroy or damage armored vehicles will do to solar panels and battery installations.

View: https://youtu.be/CtgTM5kmPsY

Watch the video and see the effects

 

[slugabed]

Is there any even slightly practical path towards useful power production from inertial confinement? I thought the “green power” aspect of NIF was basically just greenwashing PR for its true purpose of nuclear weapons research (as this article mentions).

It would please me greatly to learn that my cynicism is wrong, so if anyone’s in a position to explain how wrong I am, please do so.

Even having demonstrated a positive energy gain, that doesn’t mean inertial fusion can be turned into a practical power plant. Is there any way to actually capture the net energy and keep the cycle going?

I can't explain how the toaster works, so I'm not going to try to explain how wrong you are. I can point you to the NIF website where you can see the work that's being done, and tell you that many dozens of brilliant people (disclosure: one of whom lives across the street from me) have devoted their entire professional lives to the furtherance of the science. The ones I've met aren't the least bit interested in the fission side of things.

The NIF is a research facility. Their job is to better understand what they think they know and to determine how much they don't know yet. Long before you can say "this is how we make it work" you have to know "what is it".

The inertial confinement path to continuous production of heat/electricity is not as clearly apparent as the purely magnetic containment methods so far proposed, but research is funny sometimes. You never know what you'll find.

 

[numerobis]

Sabotage won’t do anything because economics promotes use of cheaper energy sources. Coal use has been falling for years even under friendly administrations. It’s not economical to use and there isn’t a damn thing Texas can do to change that calculation.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
Natural gas use has gone up as have renewables. An energy source like fusion would quickly put natural gas in a similar position as coal.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained...y-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
Believe it or not electric companies don’t like paying more than they have to either and will quickly switch to cheaper energy sources.

Edit: Wording

It's hard to pay for a "baseload" style power plant in a grid of solar, wind, and batteries. What you need in such a grid is a plant that's going to produce energy once in a rare while to supplement the solar and wind when they run short for an extended period. So it needs to be cheap to build, but the fuel cost doesn't really matter.

Fusion doesn't seem likely to be that kind of power plant. It's going to be fantastically expensive to build, but the fuel cost is small.

Until we run out of ways to harvest solar energy (which is what solar, wind, and hydro all are), it's going to be hard to figure out why we should bother building new fusion plants rather than simply expanding our use of the fusion reactor chilling out just 8.5 light minutes away.

 

[numerobis]

What do you think 72 submuntions that are designed to destroy or damage armored vehicles will do to solar panels and battery installations.

View: https://youtu.be/CtgTM5kmPsY

Watch the video and see the effects

Very little. It'll smash up a few kW of solar panels at a time.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

What do you think 72 submuntions that are designed to destroy or damage armored vehicles will do to solar panels and battery installations.

View: https://youtu.be/CtgTM5kmPsY

Watch the video and see the effects

It'll do plenty of damage in the area it hits.

It won't do much to power availability 100 miles away if they have their own production 100 miles away.

Geographic diversity is still important for renewables, but distributed generation is harder to attack in that way than centralized production.

 

[Veritas super omens]

The short answer is nobody knows. This isn't a power plant. It isn't even a experimental powerplant. It isn't even an experiment on how you could make a power plant using fusion.

If commercial fusion powerplants ever exist they are unlikely to look or operating anything like this facility. Understand also you can't compare MJ to MW directly unless the output is over exactly one second. This experiment is more like TW scale power but lasting nanoseconds. The fuel capsule is hand placed in the experiment chamber. They often spend weeks or even months between shots calibrating and testing and then it initiated fusion for nanoseconds. Sometimes it fails to initiate fusion at all. Sometimes it initiates fusion but it isn't self sustaining (ignition). Until this month all attempts had never reached break even. So this is gathering data but nothing like a powerplant. They aren't even trying the non-fusion powerplant stuff. Like how would you feed new fuel in, how would you convert the thermal output into usable electricity how would you handle the neutron damage to the facility from continual operation.

So trying to draw any conclusions on how some future hypothetical commercial fusion powerplant would operate from this experiment is just a bridge too far. Any conclusions would simply be science fiction. The only good news is there is huge potential for improvement. The last ignition at this facility last year produced 1.4 MJ output and it now produced 2.5 MJ. That is almost an 80% increase in nominal output. To be anywhere close to viable though it would need to be more on the scale of 1000+ MJ output on the same 2 MJ laser input. So we are so far from commercial viability it would be like a week after the Wright brothers first flight trying to conceptualize what an international airliner would look like. Any conclusions drawn would almost certainly be wrong.

Yes, unless there is information out there that is quite occult, there is no path from a laser ignition to a sustainable fusion reaction suitable for a fusion power generation facility. Anybody have access to occult* information.


*not THAT kind of occult, occult as in hidden.

 

[Veritas super omens]

No, it's a 20% increase of the laser output. The laser input was 425 MJ, 170 times greater.

Lasers are really inefficient.

But they are so hot, they're cool.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

Yes, unless there is information out there that is quite occult, there is no path from a laser ignition to a sustainable fusion reaction suitable for a fusion power generation facility. Anybody have access to occult* information.


*not THAT kind of occult, occult as in hidden.

I believe this is the background of the newer DOOM games.

 

[Truscott]

The article mentions, "a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma".

What is a "pellet of plasma"? To me a pellet is a solid, and a plasma is a, well, it's a plasma.

 

[mhalpern]

What do you think 72 submuntions that are designed to destroy or damage armored vehicles will do to solar panels and battery installations.

View: https://youtu.be/CtgTM5kmPsY

Watch the video and see the effects

that'd still only take out 1 or two of them, the thing is with decentralized grids is that generator and users are really close, now it might not be consistent power as the connections between the sub grids are destroyed, but it'd be some power

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

The article mentions, "a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma".

What is a "pellet of plasma"? To me a pellet is a solid, and a plasma is a, well, it's a plasma.

It's a pellet of hydrogen. It's turned into a plasma when hit with the shark-free laser.

 

[Ben G]

The pellet is the fusion fuel. The fuel inside the capsule briefly turns into a plasma when the lasers cause the fuel to undergo fusion. So it isn't forming plasma into a pellet it is forming a pellet into plasma. Yes the capsule very quickly vaporizes when that happens.

I’m taking the risk of being totally wrong and looking like a fool, but isn’t the capsule vaporizing a requirement for the fusion to happen? I thought that vaporizing the capsule created the plasma that smushed the fuel that was inside the capsule into fusing.

As someone else mentioned, I thought this is what allows the DOE to do nuclear weapons modeling without violating the test ban treaty. Using lasers to vaporize the capsule and create a plasma instead of using a nuclear fission primary (“a-bomb”) explosion to create a plasma to start your fusion reaction is lot less messy.

 

[mhalpern]

Very little. It'll smash up a few kW of solar panels at a time.

also note how various solar farms have continued to be productive (though often at a reduced output) after sustaining major hurricane damage

 

[randomname19937]

Here one of the aforementioned small fusion research groups with a promising approach:
(Their website is at LPPFusion.com)

https://mailchi.mp/lppfusion/fusion...er-funding-for-lppfusion-5477797?e=c1f2b20a85 (July 2021)

From the above report:
On LPPFusion’s basic approach, using the dense plasma focus device with hydrogen boron (pB11) fuel: “Pursuit of the p11B fusion fuel cycle is highly desirable, because that cycle does not directly emit neutrons, which greatly complicate concepts based on other fusion fuel cycles..."

LPP is pursuing a rather fringe approach to fusion (dense plasma focus) - it's interesting but, unfortunately, unlikely to succeed. There are a lot of unknowns and quite a bit of wishful thinking. In order to operate, the plasma (albeit a very small volume of it and for a very brief time) needs to enter a never-seen-before regime where the plasma frequency is higher than cyclotron frequency, preventing the plasma from radiating the energy away as cyclotron radiation.
There's another topology, however, which might be able to produce fusion from low-neutronic or aneutronic fuels - the field-reversed configuration. There are several ways to produce these - one is to merge spheromaks with opposing toroidal fields - the approach pursued by TAE Technologies (formerly Tri-Alpha Energy). Another approach uses odd-parity rotating magnetic fields (a bit like an induction motor, but operating at RF frequencies) to induce the toroidal current in plasma, creating and supporting the FRC configuration - a system known as Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration. TAE Technologies explicitly states that their goal is to achieve p-B11 fusion. PFRC is a newer project and as far as I know they are not aiming for unconventional fuels at this point.