First-ever net energy gain from fusion raises hopes for zero-carbon alternative.
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Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes
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current reactors dont even attempt to extract energy, just measure it, so the milestone is "break even" and duration of reaction
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Huh, hadn't thought of that. Thanks!
Did read an article that suggested that space based solar could be economically viable, despite the sky high capital costs, horrific maintenance challenges for the space based components and massive conversion inefficiencies, if it also is viewed as the way to close the gap on the final few percentage points of demand that can't be met through renewables+storage so we can eventually decommission every thermal power plant.
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Or just build more fission reactors instead of waiting for the possibility of fusion being a reality.
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I don't think this will result in inertial confinement power plants. The cool thing will be if they can figure out why this experiment over performed expectations and use it in magnetically confined reactors.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
It is confusing because there are two different terms and they are often conflated.
Ignition is a self sustaining fusion reaction without any additional energy required once ignition happens. Ignition doesn't necessarily mean more energy in and energy output. The NIF achieved ignition in 2021 but it had a 70% return on energy.
Break even is just that energy out equals energy in but a self sustaining isn't a requirement although it certainly help. In the prior article it was modeled not actually achieved. Other near break even events (JTER) have happened but they required outside energy to sustain the fusion reaction (no ignition).
Both are separate and equally important milestones but they are often conflated into one. This event is the first one that does both. It achieved ignition something your linked event did not and it also produced more energy than was input something that didn't happen in the 2021 event.
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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.
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The usual answer is to use the energy to heat some working fluid (turning water into steam, for example) and use standard turbines like fission and coal plants.
There has been discussion of direct conversion of the kinetic energy of the particles "somehow," but those particles would need to be charged. If you've got a lot of neutrons and gamma rays they would just heat up the containment blanket.
The particles that come out of the reaction depend on what isotopes of hydrogen they're using. Deuterium fusion produces helium, neutrons and gamma rays, so I'd guess thermal conversion is required.
So, boiling water. A fusion-powered steam engine, in other words.
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There are completely different physics going on, so it's unlikely to help much.
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Although "water can be produced from oceans with electricity" = desalination.
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Something unexpected is happening in the physics. I am not saying it's rewrite the books kind of unexpected. I am saying there is probably some kind of interaction happening that we were not expecting. Understand that and, who knows?
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The NIF isn't a power plant, it's a research facility designed for flexibility and instrumentation. The input energy and efficiency of the NIF's laser driver system is immaterial as it has little relation to the systems that would be used in a power station. By the same token the NIF isn't designed to extract energy from the fusion process or to run continuously so complaining that it didn't is fatuous.
The gain from the reaction itself is what matters because that determines the efficiency floor for all the other systems to make a power plant based around that reaction economically viable. It might be that ICF is never viable but the wall plug draw of the NIF will have nothing to do with that determination.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Or there's a measurement error.
It's worth validating, it's not worth jumping to conclusions.
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Given the understanding of plasma confinement and turbulence is low to begin with, it's not at all surprising that 'unexpected' results show up. However, given the differences in plasma regimes (density/temperature), confinement mechanisms (inertial vs. magnetic), and heating mechanisms (laser/radiation vs. ohmic/neutral particles/RF), the chances of any understanding of what's happening here being relevant to magnetically confined plasmas is low.
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Sorry, meant last year. Feels like earlier this year, though, considering how time’s been flying.
All that the damage to the facility means is that they didn’t expect this on this round of shots, not that they didn’t think the method/facility was capable of it. There’s a huge difference between the two.
Like I said, they’ve had consistency issues, so pointing out they’ve had consistency issues is hardly telling me anything new.
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It is energy production research, just it's research that assumes that in a working system, the input energy would be fission and the output wouldn't be concerned with electricity.
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This is very cool. I'd love to see the fusion dream of cheap zero carbon easily available energy come true.
But, I suspect, given who is doing this research and what looks like very very high costs to ever get this working, that fusion like fission will become the domain of large military industrial contractors for whom success is not particularly important as long as the dollars keep flowing.
Would love to see it play out differently....
But, I suspect, given who is doing this research and what looks like very very high costs to ever get this working, that fusion like fission will become the domain of large military industrial contractors for whom success is not particularly important as long as the dollars keep flowing.
Would love to see it play out differently....
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More useless knowledge. /S
as someone once posted "All knowledge is useless, until its not."
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This is the real issue with NIF as a fusion experiment. It’s not really directly applicable to what anyone but Los Alamos is trying to do with fusion. It always had a reasonable likelihood of reaching this threshold before anyone else, but at what utility to the technology of fusion power?
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Without doing so all you have is a very large, very expensive space heater. Born in the 1950's the promise of fusion breakthroughs has been always ten years away. This is a milestone, not the end goal.
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All this work on fusion and we still do not focus as much energy on the already existing fusion reactor we have, the Sun.
I have been reading that fusion is "just around the corner" or "10/20 years away" and that has been said since before the Pons/Fleishman debacle. Fusion would still need to be converted somehow into energy and today we convert the sun's fusion reaction into energy via photovoltaics and wind turbines. I'd rather see more money put into increasing solar collection capabilities and storage than this potential always down the road fusion program.
Though not quite related, I also feel we do not do enough to tap into Earth's own internal energy source, geo-thermal. Iceland is doing good work there, but here again, if we put more money (and science) into how to tap geo-thermal when it is not as close to the surface, humanity taps into pretty much a forever power source.
Fusion is not a hoax, but its potential for changing the path of humanity's destruction on this planet is too long term and limited (ie it will never be cheap). Solar, microwave beaming, hydro, tidal, wind, and geo-thermal make the most sense in removing humanity from fossil fuels, because we not only can do that today, there is large room for growth.
edit: corrections
I have been reading that fusion is "just around the corner" or "10/20 years away" and that has been said since before the Pons/Fleishman debacle. Fusion would still need to be converted somehow into energy and today we convert the sun's fusion reaction into energy via photovoltaics and wind turbines. I'd rather see more money put into increasing solar collection capabilities and storage than this potential always down the road fusion program.
Though not quite related, I also feel we do not do enough to tap into Earth's own internal energy source, geo-thermal. Iceland is doing good work there, but here again, if we put more money (and science) into how to tap geo-thermal when it is not as close to the surface, humanity taps into pretty much a forever power source.
Fusion is not a hoax, but its potential for changing the path of humanity's destruction on this planet is too long term and limited (ie it will never be cheap). Solar, microwave beaming, hydro, tidal, wind, and geo-thermal make the most sense in removing humanity from fossil fuels, because we not only can do that today, there is large room for growth.
edit: corrections
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Can someone explain this? Are the reactions so similar to the physics in fusion weapons that the simulations come across? Does it help with new weapons development or is somehow related to checking how fusion bombs 'age'?
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One watt is 1 joule per second.
I'm not sure how to measure this cycle (e.g. just the actual pulse phase, the entire thing from accumulation to fusion, etc), so no clue in this case how to make the conversion.
I think we'd a sustained reaction to make watt-hours meaningful.
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More so I think it may be cheaper than the necessary storage to cover rarer events which stress an entire interconnect like storm that almost took down Texas' power grid. Where you have wide spread high usage over the course of a week. So we might just be talking about 1% of power generation here.
I do think that renewables and storage are perfectly viable especially by the time we need to build it out. So we won't need fusion, but fusion may still offer some economic benefits.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
That isn't even close to true though. If everyone was spending trillions of dollars on fusion and nobody building/researching PV panels you might have a valid point. Except the opposite is true. Nearly nothing (relatively speaking on global economy scales) is spent on fusion power. This facility only got greenlighted for the value in modeling nuclear weapons. If that didn't exist exactly $0 would have been spent.
The PV power market is $180B annually expected to grow to $290B by the end of the decade. Fusion research is a rounding error on that.
https://www.globenewswire.com/en/ne...-18-Billion-Globally-by-2028-at-6-9-CAGR.html
So we are doing both and the vast majority of the money is going towards the more immediate practical power source.
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...and finding a viable source for Tritium that does not involve constructing a bunch of fission reactors to feed the fusion reactors.
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After the Texas freeze a couple years ago, Texas literally put forward a state bill to ban companies who create electricity using clean energy sources or other smaller providers from being on ERCOT's Board of Directors. ERCOT, who manages their grid and dictates who can provide power to it.
Read that again: They essentially made it so ERCOT, the governing body who controls Texas' grid, made it so no one outside giant companies that operate in fossil fuels can be on it.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
It lasted nanonseconds. Still a huge amount of energy in a small time period can be buffered by a heat transfer fluid. To visualize imagine a tank of water with a supersized gas burner heating it. It blasts the tank for one second every 10 seconds. Using the water as a "heat battery" you could produce steam and run that steam through a turbine and produce continual power from an intermittent source. Now would you do that with natural gas burner. No because it would be simpler and easier to use a burner 1/10th the output and run it continually.
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The weapons-related experiments at NIF relate to how the materials work — mostly, but not exclusively, targeted at changes due to age. The idea is to improve the assumptions used in the computer models of bombs, so we can fine-tune the shelf-life assumptions. The publicly-announced data is essentially bonus science that can be done with the same setup (or greenwashing, if one views weapons stewardship more cynically).
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fission induced fusion is expected to be similar to inertial confinement fusion with the physics involved.
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That was essentially my reading (although the article is a little sketchy). A breakthrough for laser ignition but still ~30yrs behind tokamaks.
(JET had more out than in, sustained for a few seconds, in the early 90s - of course it took a lot more energy to get it fired up!)
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
MJ and kWh are measured of energy.
0.4 MJ is 0.111 kWh. (0.1 kWh not 111 kWh)
However keep in mind it produces that 0.1 kWh by producing hundreds of TW of thermal output that lasted for a few nanoseconds.
0.4 MJ is 0.111 kWh. (0.1 kWh not 111 kWh)
However keep in mind it produces that 0.1 kWh by producing hundreds of TW of thermal output that lasted for a few nanoseconds.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
You slipped a decimal point here. It's 111 Wh or 0.111 kWh
See https://www.unitconverters.net/energy/megajoule-to-kilowatt-hour.htm
1 kWh is 1000 * 3600 Watt-seconds (aka Joules), or 3.6 MJ
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I agree. However, if the reports of them getting more out than expected are true, that's actually more interesting to me than simply achieving break-even. The best words you can ever hear from a scientist on stuff like this is "woah, I didn't expect that" because it's possible there's some mechanism there that we didn't know about and which could yield a breakthrough, or just make progress faster. I'm really interested in hearing those details, what they think is the reason for more energy produced than expected (if that's true at all). It could always just be a "oh, we forgot the carry the one" somewhere, but these are smart people, so I feel safe in assuming there's more to it than that, and I'm hopeful whatever it is winds up being a very useful bit of gained knowledge that accelerates fusion research generally.
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0.1 kWh net?
Not very impressive except for the specific milestone of being net positive. But still a loooooong way to go to reach anything with even moderate utility with this technology.
Not very impressive except for the specific milestone of being net positive. But still a loooooong way to go to reach anything with even moderate utility with this technology.
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We do have one proof of concept for fusion come to think of it. Solar (and a little less directly, wind) already harvest the product of an utterly massive self sustaining fusion reaction. It's just that way more of it's energy is lost due to the tiny defect of most of the sun's light missing the earth. Then again maybe that's also for the best... A sun-laser aiming all of the sun's energy output at earth might overload the grid.
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That's nice, but by this late date there is no plausible path for fusion energy to stop, or even slow, the ongoing global warming catastrophe. To do that we would have to replace all the world's fossil fuel uses with every non-fossil energy source now in hand: wind, Solar, and nuclear fission, along with the transmission, storage, and artificial fuels technologies needed to make full use of them.
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