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...

 

[Statistical]

There is the second problem: Even with net energy gain, can that energy be collected and converted to electricity with a net gain?

Then there is a third problem even a marginal electrical gain is not sufficient to be commercially viable power plant. We are unsure exactly how much of a gain is needed because nobody has priced a commercial powerplant yet but experts put the required gain at somewhere in the ballpark of 5x to 10x. Q-Plasma would need to be around 25x to allow for less than perfect conversion of plasma heat to electricity to hit the upper end of the that range.

 

[Dcporter]

Electricity non-expert here. How does 0.4 megajoules surplus map to kWs & kWhs? It looks like you have to know how long the experiment ran for — i.e. how much time that 0.4 mJ output is spread over? Anyone know / know if I'm on the right track?

 

[Dark Jaguar]

January, 2068:

"Ma'am, we have a....bit of an anomaly with Reactor One."
"What is it?"
"Well, we have, well, what can only be described as contamination in the plasma harness. I'm not sure that's the right term, though?"
"Interesting, but unhelpful. Can you be a little more specific?"
"Well, you know we've been getting dust into the reactors over time, yes?"
"Yes?"
"We do our best to keep things clean, but the stuff just accumulates. It hasn't been affecting the output of any of the reactors, so we haven't been too concerned about it. The stuff gets in, yes, but mostly just floats in the harness, away from the fusion core and not interfering."
"All right. Get to the point?"
"Right. Well, the clumps in the reactors have been getting bigger over time....again, not a concern. They're still very nearly microscopic and again, far from the actual reaction." A narrowing of her eyes and the slight sound of a tapping foot under her desk warned him to hurry up. "Well, here's the thing. They're in all reactors, but Reactor One has the biggest accumulation of dust to date."
"And...? You know, I do have other things...."
"And..," he hurried on, "one of the dust balls in Reactor One just launched a satellite. An actual satellite! And we're pretty sure what we thought was the glow crystalline refraction is, in fact....well, there's no easy way to put this...is actually an electric grid. That we can see. On what the techs are now calling the 'night side' of the dustball. So...."
"So...?"
"So....what do we do now??"

The whos moving to solar power certainly made Christmas all the noisier. But, I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room here.

 

[quamquam quid loquor]

The most exciting part of this is that the output was unexpected. It hints at potentially new physics more than power generation from ICF.

 

[rojcowles]

probably not with inertial fusion, or at most generous not just inertial fusion, however, it is useful in informing how much input energy is needed to realistically achieve a net positive reaction. But yeah the NIF is basically how the US is able to continue nuclear weapons development post Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

First Light Fusion has an inertial fusion approach where they hit a plastic target containing fusion fuel with a hypervelocity projectile as it falls into a chamber with a deluge of liquid lithium metal and repeat this process several times a second. The shockwave travelling through the target and the fuel after the impact should be sufficient to trigger fusion per their modelling and simulation and once the engineering is worked out the energy released from the fusion event would be absorbed by the already liquid lithium and then presumably this extra heat energy in the lithium is exchanged with a regular steam generation loop and the balance of plant looks very similar to a current nuclear or burny-stuff power station.

Having said that I really don't see the giant laser NIF approach to fusion every being commercially viable, then again I think its main role is validating nuclear weapon designs without violating any treaties so maybe not a big surprise.

 

[mhalpern]

Electricity non-expert here. How does 0.4 megajoules surplus map to kWs & kWhs? It looks like you have to know how long the experiment ran for — i.e. how much time that 0.4 mJ output is spread over? Anyone know / know if I'm on the right track?

for inertial fusion, that output is spread over the course of nanoseconds or less, the issue is thats a HEAT surplus, but no heat engine or generator can ever be perfectly efficient.

 

[mhalpern]

First Light Fusion has an inertial fusion approach where they hit a plastic target containing fusion fuel with a hypervelocity projectile as it falls into a chamber with a deluge of liquid lithium metal and repeat this process several times a second. The shockwave travelling through the target and the fuel after the impact should be sufficient to trigger fusion per their modelling and simulation and once the engineering is worked out the energy released from the fusion event would be absorbed by the already liquid lithium and then presumably this extra heat energy in the lithium is exchanged with a regular steam generation loop and the balance of plant looks very similar to a current nuclear or burny-stuff power station.

Having said that I really don't see the giant laser NIF approach to fusion every being commercially viable, then again I think its main role is validating nuclear weapon designs without violating any treaties so maybe not a big surprise.

yup. and yes it is our way around the nuclear test ban

 

[Ben G]

Is there any path where fusion is financially competitive with solar or wind? Even if all the details were magically worked out tomorrow, you’re still just boiling water to make steam to spin a turbine. The electrical production side of a power plant is going to be identical no mater if you’re burning coal, gas, splitting atoms or fusing them to boil your water. Even if you tax or outlaw coal and gas, I don’t see how fusion is going to be any cheaper than fission, and that’s the least economical method we have currently.

While I’m sure people will come up with places where solar and wind won’t work. However, I’d guess that most of those places also won’t make sense for multi-billion dollar, 10-years of construction fusion plants.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for continuing the research, but we haven’t managed to get Mr Fissions in the last 70 years, so I think our Mr Fusions are still quite a ways off.

 

[llama-lime]

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.

What is the basis for thinking that fusion could be less expensive that natural gas? Much less that it would do this "quickly"?

All hints are that fusion will be unbelievably expensive.

 

[AdamM]

What is the basis for thinking that fusion could be less expensive that natural gas? Much less that it would do this "quickly"?

All hints are that fusion will be unbelievably expensive.

Honestly I have no clue. I was more or less trying to rebut the idea that if fusion was this miraculous cheap energy source that it would be thwarted by coal and natural gas producers with a bag of cash to a politician. Largely because that idea hasn’t been working out for coal.

 

[siggyphiddit]

It is very surprising to have a breakthrough at this facility. As the article notes it uses inertial confinement and has long been believed to be a dead end in energy production. The US has largely used this for gathering observational data for building models to perfect nuclear weapon design after the comprehensive test ban treaty made the old fashion way of building a bomb and detonating it impossible. In fact its successor the national ignition facility which is a larger version of this same design has been skeptically called a blatant nuclear weapons development program under the guise of fusion science by critics for decades. While the truth might not be that black and white it is clear perfecting models used to simulate nuclear weapons is a large part of why both were built and continue to be used with any non-weapon research that might also happen being a bonus.

Of all the various fusion facilities around the world this is the last one I would have expected a breakthrough at. It shows sometimes science does happen unexpectedly. I wonder if they even fully understand why output spiked so high yet. From reports of damaged equipment it seems nobody would expecting it or at least not expecting the magnitude of the increase.

I mean, LLNL is an NNSA-run physics lab. To secure billions in funding for a facility, it's going to need immediate practical use--we're just lucky that the facility can also be used for basic science in it's downtime.

 

[DanNeely]

This site has electricity generation for the UK https://gridwatch.co.uk/ and renewables are basically dead as the wind has stopped blowing and due to it being winter solar is also dead and both have been for the last 39 hours.

How much battery capacity and how big an area of land would be needed to power the UK for that length of time using the 35.5 to 38.5GW's average electricity usage?

Because currently we are just burning lots of natural gas with some coal and biomass.

This is with the UK having 25GW of installed capacity for wind power and 14GW of solar.


We need fusion to become usable a lot faster than it is going to be.

A study reported here maybe a decade ago looked at the northeastern quarter of the US and came up with the cheapest way to get IIRC 99.9% uptime on just renewables as headline capacity of several times typical demand and enough storage for several days of grid operation. The biggest caveat in the model was that they didn't attempt to price the expansion in long distance transmission lines needed to move power from regions that were producing large excesses to regions with large deficits.

Regardless of how that works out, we'll have a long period between when we've got enough renewables to cover happy case and even average case needs and when we can finally scrap natural gas burners as no longer needed emergency backup systems.

 

[Ozy]

1) Inertial fusion is one of the least likely pathways for fusion energy production.

2) Those lasers are not anywhere near 100% efficient, so they're a long way away from net energy gain.

3) That was energy "produced", not energy collected and converted into electricity, so even further away from net energy gain.

Conclusion: a nice milestone, but irrelevant in terms of fusion energy

 

[Chuckstar]

They managed to ignite a fusion reaction earlier this year. Once you ignite, surplus power is right around the corner, since ignition is defined as the point where the reaction is self-sustaining. Once you have a self-sustaining reaction, getting additional power is a matter of keeping enough D+T in the area to feed the self-sustaining feedback loop. That is, the inertial confinement process has been successful, now it’s the amount/geometry of the fuel that gets adjusted.

They did have an issue with consistency of the reaction, when they were doing the tests that reached ignition. One test reached ignition and another repeat test didn’t. So hearing that the reaction produced more energy than expected is not necessarily a huge surprise. It probably doesn’t imply any change in fundamental physics, but rather the difficulty of modeling the exact evolution of such a high pressure/temperature reaction, and even the difficulty of repeating such an experiment exactly the same as the previous run.

 

[mhalpern]

Just run the heat through some pipes to make steam that turns some turbines. It's... what pretty much all our generators do. I swear even Star Trek warp cores probably end up making energy via a boiler room at some point.

you run into thermodynamic issues, yes in theory this could work and get net possitive useful energy the less efficient your conversion from heat/plasma to useful electricity the bigger the reactor has to be,

 

[Chuckstar]

you run into thermodynamic issues, yes in theory this could work and get net possitive useful energy the less efficient your conversion from heat/plasma to useful electricity the bigger the reactor has to be,

You also have to overcome the inefficiency of converting that electricity back to laser light. Not to mention having to purify D and get some T somewhere.

 

[SoktaMiles]

Always exciting when you blow up your meters!

Power over 9000!

 

[mhalpern]

Honestly I have no clue. I was more or less trying to rebut the idea that if fusion was this miraculous cheap energy source that it would be thwarted by coal and natural gas producers with a bag of cash to a politician. Largely because that idea hasn’t been working out for coal.

the thing is, adjusted for inflation, the cost of renewables has trended down, mostly, it has gone up recently due to supply chain issues, but so has everything. The cap ex for a fusion plant will probably make it more expensive than fission however

 

[Derecho Imminent]

For now nay-sayers will be saying "but its not confirmed and technically its not complete" and then later when confirmed they will be like "old news - this was announced last year".

 

[PhaseShifter]

The statement is usually that it has been 20 years away.

That being said, the original estimates were before we found out just how complicated the plasma physics and containment would be. Right now things like the results of this test along with others indicate that we likely finally have a good enough undrstanding to actually progress into practical reactors now that the theoretical work has progressed far enough.

In the '80s, it was 30 years.
The time given in the joke seems to be ticking down somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 the actual rate time passes, so I expect I'll actually see a working fusion reactor sometime between my retirement and death.

 

[Chuckstar]

It is very surprising to have a breakthrough at this facility. As the article notes it uses inertial confinement and has long been believed to be a dead end in energy production. The US has largely used this for gathering observational data for building models to perfect nuclear weapon design after the comprehensive test ban treaty made the old fashion way of building a bomb and detonating it impossible. Even with Nova Laser the potential for net energy production looke dismal. When the US built the national ignition facility a larger version of the same concept it was called a blatant nuclear weapons development program under the guise of fusion science by critics for decades. While the truth might not be that black and white it is clear perfecting models used to simulate nuclear weapons is a large part of why both were built and continue to be used with any non-weapon research that might also happen being a bonus.

Of all the various fusion facilities around the world this is the last one I would have expected a breakthrough at. It shows sometimes science does happen unexpectedly. I wonder if they even fully understand why output spiked so high yet. From reports of damaged equipment it seems nobody would expecting it or at least not expecting the magnitude of the increase.

It’s not at all clear why you think it would be a surprise to have a breakthrough at this facility. They achieved ignition earlier this year, after all, which is the much more difficult breakthrough.

My understanding is that what would be a surprise is if laser inertial confinement resulted in a system that could produce net energy in usable form to generate commercial electricity. It shouldn’t be at all a surprise, at this point, that they can do a single shot with net positive energy release in the reaction.

 

[ranthog]

Net energy gain is still a LONG way off from net usable electricity gain... They are just accumulating all of the heat energy they observed still. They are no where near getting usable electricity out of system like this, and that doesn't even begin to account for input costs. My read shows they are using lasers with highly refined fuel beads that costs a lot of money to make and are HIGHLY precise in their construction. I hope I'm wrong, but this still seems 30 years away.

I'm more excited for Helion Energy's fusion generators. It uses a slightly different fuel mixture that produces charged Hydrogen instead of non ionized neutrons in the reaction. They are beginning with the end result of electricity generation in mind.

Things like net energy gain and sustained fusion are usually the goals of current test reactors. Everything in existance today or being built is to prove out the necessary prerequisite control of fusion.

There is very little reason to build a reactor today that is designed to produce electricity when you don't have control down. It would just be a waste of money.

 

[andygates]

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?

Some of the early inertial power concepts (Feynman doodles) pictured a long vertical shaft down which we drop fuel pellets on a timer. Lasers do the pew pew and the fusion chamber gets hot. The rest is traditional steam power.

To increase power, drop pellets faster.

 

[ranthog]

Is there any path where fusion is financially competitive with solar or wind? Even if all the details were magically worked out tomorrow, you’re still just boiling water to make steam to spin a turbine. The electrical production side of a power plant is going to be identical no mater if you’re burning coal, gas, splitting atoms or fusing them to boil your water. Even if you tax or outlaw coal and gas, I don’t see how fusion is going to be any cheaper than fission, and that’s the least economical method we have currently.

While I’m sure people will come up with places where solar and wind won’t work. However, I’d guess that most of those places also won’t make sense for multi-billion dollar, 10-years of construction fusion plants.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for continuing the research, but we haven’t managed to get Mr Fissions in the last 70 years, so I think our Mr Fusions are still quite a ways off.

It won't have to compete with solar and wind. Solar and wind alone are not going to be what powers the grid. Likely where Fusion will have a home is in helping to provide the last few percent of power to the grid, which is going to cost significantly more per kW-hr than the first 95% of production.

 

[randomname19937]

Is there any path where fusion is financially competitive with solar or wind? Even if all the details were magically worked out tomorrow, you’re still just boiling water to make steam to spin a turbine. The electrical production side of a power plant is going to be identical no mater if you’re burning coal, gas, splitting atoms or refusing them to boil your water. Even if you tax or outlaw coal and gas, I don’t see how fusion is going to be any cheaper than fission, and that’s the least economical method we have currently.

While I’m sure people will come up with places where solar and wind won’t work. However, I’d guess that most of those places also won’t make sense for multi-billion dollar, 10-years of construction fusion plants.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for continuing the research, but we haven’t managed to get Mr Fissions in the last 70 years, so I think our Mr Fusions are still quite a ways off.

A 1GW (average output) coal plant needs to spend some $370M on coal (at Polish prices and plant efficiency). Fusion fuel cost is negligible (tritium is bred on-site) - so we have $370M a year for repairs to make it competitive with coal.

 

[rojcowles]

The hard problems are making the failure modes "safe", making the "default" energy generation (rather than practically needing to hand-force every last molecule into just the right place), and then there's the neutron bombardment utterly ruining the material the fusion generator is made out of. If the whole shebang's gotta be replaced every couple years, and we scale that up worldwide, well that's a lot of resources. That said, it's certainly not nearly as much as what goes into all our much dirtier energy generating systems. Speaking of, while some fusion materials result in non-radioactive byproducts, others don't. Unfortunately the ones that have more harmful byproducts tend to generate more energy and use less rare materials to start with.

I'm kinda... going off an amalgam of barely remembered fusion articles I've read over the decades so forgive me if I get any of the details wrong. There's a reason these things are joked about as "eternally ten years away", fusion has never been as "set it and forget it" style of energy production. Still, this is a big step. We just don't know high the staircase is yet. In the meantime, the transition to wind, solar, thermal, and hydro should continue apace. Act like fusion isn't available for now, until it is.

True, starting and running a fusion plant cannot be significantly more difficult than a current thermal power plant otherwise it'll only ever be a scientific or technical curiosity, though to be fair even regular power stations have their own operational challenges going safely from a cold state to fully running.

One of the other hard problems that people who go to fusion conferences ... or are sad enough to listen to the recordings of the conference sessions afterwards ... are aware of is logistics and supply chain scaling for fusion specific materials. It may be well and good to get to break even but if you need a team of PhDs to spend months lovingly hand crafting every fuel pellet and the entire global supply of Unobtanium for the first demo plant its not going to be world changing.

Things like bulk Deuterium, Tritium, Boron or Helium3 for fuel, tons of pure Lithium for breeder blankets to capture neutrons for Tritium production, exotic alloys or ceramics to withstand the intense neutron bombardment on the plasma facing walls and the diverters, etc, etc. Not insurmountable to be fair but as some of these supply chains don't exist right now it might take a while for a competitive market to spin up.

There's also the bureaucratic challenges of licensing and permitting fusion plants as distinct from fission plants and safe transport of radioactive fusion materials to a power plant and from a plant after its decommissioned, and these may be harder challenges than the engineering.

Also I have to wonder if even if we meet the optimistic projections of a few of the commercial companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems or Tokamak Energy and get a demo plant generating net electricity and feeding that to the grid by the early/mid 2030's would the scale out of wind and solar with ever increasing amounts of grid scale electricity storage have achieved the sort of levels to provide affordable 24/7/365 baseload power and there just won't be a market for fusion power plants?

 

[Chuckstar]

A 1GW (average output) coal plant needs to spend some $370M on coal (at Polish prices and plant efficiency). Fusion fuel cost is negligible (tritium is bred on-site) - so we have $370M a year for repairs to make it competitive with coal.

I guarantee you that the upfront costs for a fusion plant will be larger than for a coal plant.

 

[Statistical]

It’s not at all clear why you think it would be a surprise to have a breakthrough at this facility. They achieved ignition earlier this year, after all, which is the much more difficult breakthrough.

My understanding is that what would be a surprise is if laser inertial confinement resulted in a system that could produce net energy in usable form to generate commercial electricity. It shouldn’t be at all a surprise, at this point, that they can do a single shot with net positive energy release in the reaction.

Do you have a cite for that because I can't find any articles or cites to support that claim. There were papers published in 2022 confirming the 2021 ignition.

They achieved ignition in 2021 however 1) the energy output was only 70% of the energy input and 2) despite trying to replicate it for a year they couldn't. So to replicate ignition again and not produce the same 70% output but a claimed 120% is a pretty big and unexpected deal.

On August 8, 2021, NIF focused 192 laser beams with a total energy of 1.92 MJ (about a 100-watt light would use in 5 hours) on a small gold-lined cylinder made of depleted uranium. Inside this cylinder was a tiny capsule filled with frozen deuterium and tritium (two heavy isotopes of hydrogen, abbreviated DT). When the beams slammed into the capsule, it heated the fuel enough to initiate fusion, which then continued for nearly ten billionths of a second, heating some of the remaining DT mixture to the point of fusing and producing more than 1.3 megaJoules. While this shot still consumed more energy than it produced (they’re still at the “damp wood” stage), it’s the closest anyone has yet come to breaking even, energy-wise, and the first to achieve ignition.

While this experiment is an encouraging advance, Livermore has not yet been able to replicate it – subsequent shots have come close to ignition but have fallen short. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – each shot is a learning experience, and Livermore is looking at the variables associated with every shot (the exact performance of each laser beam, the amount of deuterium and tritium in the capsule that’s frozen versus gaseous, the shape of the DT ice, and so forth) – learning how each of these, individually and in combination, affects the output of the shots is helping researchers to hone in on the factors that are most important so they can work on perfecting the technique and on matching, and then to exceed, the results from last year.

The sequence of events was
August 2021 - achieve first ignition with 70% yield (1.4 MJ on 1.92 MJ shot)
Rest of 2021 and through Nov 2022 - multiple attempts to replicate but zero successful ignitions.
Dec 2022 - achieve second successful ignition but with 70% yield but a 120% yield (2.5 MJ on 2.1 MJ shot).

Maybe that sequence of events was perfectly predictable to you but it was surprising to me, surprising to plenty of people around the world and given the damage to the facility I am going to presume surprisingly to the people doing it.

 

[Ozy]

They managed to ignite a fusion reaction earlier this year. Once you ignite, surplus power is right around the corner, since ignition is defined as the point where the reaction is self-sustaining. Once you have a self-sustaining reaction, getting additional power is a matter of keeping enough D+T in the area to feed the self-sustaining feedback loop. That is, the inertial confinement process has been successful, now it’s the amount/geometry of the fuel that gets adjusted.

That's not how ignition in inertial confinement works. They ignited one pellet with a burst of laser energy. To continue to produce energy, they need to shoot in another pellet and hit it with another laser burst.

 

[PokemonPets]

Fantastic news. Hopefully with this, we will have literally unlimited energy for free, clean and safe.

With this breakthrough, there won't be anymore water problem as well. Since water can be produced from oceans with electricity

 

[Ozy]

Some of the early inertial power concepts (Feynman doodles) pictured a long vertical shaft down which we drop fuel pellets on a timer. Lasers do the pew pew and the fusion chamber gets hot. The rest is traditional steam power.

To increase power, drop pellets faster.

Doodles don't imply practicality.

 

[mhalpern]

You also have to overcome the inefficiency of converting that electricity back to laser light. Not to mention having to purify D and get some T somewhere.

the T I believe would be from neutron bombardment of Lithium, and in theory the energetic neutrons can come from the fusion reaction itself, as for converting it back to laser, I doubt a working plant would be laser, except maybe to aid in start up, but you still need to use some for the confinement system, which itself has inefficiency, if for instance its electromagnetic confinement (most likely) your probably running the superconductor coolant into the power gen loop, as well as everything else,

 

[TMilligan]

How is this different from the more energy out than in claim from 8 years ago? Maybe I'm missing something because it's Monday morning and brain no work good, so hopefully someone can explain this in a way that leaves me less confused.

There is this strange paragraph in that article:

Hurricane’s current output, although more than the hydrogen fuel put into the reaction, hasn’t yet reached the stated goal to achieve “ignition," where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. At that point it might be possible to make a sustainable power plant based on the technology.

I feel like there needs to be a clear fusion milestone list like there is with autonomous driving 1-5. Perhaps that article means it made more energy than it took to create the hydrogen fuel while this one created more energy than making the fuel + the energy in the lasers?

Enjoying the commentary on all this. Hopefully more comes to light during the full announcement tomorrow.

 

[andygates]

Honestly I have no clue. I was more or less trying to rebut the idea that if fusion was this miraculous cheap energy source that it would be thwarted by coal and natural gas producers with a bag of cash to a politician. Largely because that idea hasn’t been working out for coal.

Fossil fuels are only cheap because the industry and governments externalise the cost of putting CO2 into the environment. That's no longer okay.

 

[Asvarduil]

If the report is correct then there is going to be a lot more investment into fusion over the next few years

"10 years from now" may not be here, now, but I'd offer the meme about fusion power be reduced to something more reasonable, like, say, 5 years.

 

[Statistical]

Fantastic news. Hopefully with this, we will have literally unlimited energy for free, clean and safe.

With this breakthrough, there won't be anymore water problem as well. Since water can be produced from oceans with electricity

Hopefully that is sarcasm (I can't tell anymore) because literally none of that is correct.