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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This story title is misleading. And the NIF work is also somewhat misleading.
Nice that LLL's experiment can use NIF to make a one shot, calculated and measured, net gain. But they have not collected and stored the energy as a proof their method of measured net gain is viable in a production enviroment. At most LLL's NIF has demonstrated a more efficient fusion cycle start up. A start up that may not be actually useful in a production fusion plant.
But the story title and contents make for excellent click-bait income for the sites it's posted, and reposted on.
One of VERY cool things occurring at LLL NIF is the glass science happening in relation to NIF work. And other related technology work too. Those advances have already affected current day products in use in other fields. Similar to the early space programs work, NIF related science and engineering produces benefits that help recover some of the costs put into the program.
Nice that LLL's experiment can use NIF to make a one shot, calculated and measured, net gain. But they have not collected and stored the energy as a proof their method of measured net gain is viable in a production enviroment. At most LLL's NIF has demonstrated a more efficient fusion cycle start up. A start up that may not be actually useful in a production fusion plant.
But the story title and contents make for excellent click-bait income for the sites it's posted, and reposted on.
One of VERY cool things occurring at LLL NIF is the glass science happening in relation to NIF work. And other related technology work too. Those advances have already affected current day products in use in other fields. Similar to the early space programs work, NIF related science and engineering produces benefits that help recover some of the costs put into the program.
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I don't think anyone is under the impression that the NIF's method is anything close to being "viable in a production environment".
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Yeah, the lasers hit the inside walls of the gold capsule, vaporize it, and are converted into X-rays. It's these X-rays that shine onto the fuel pellet and implode it symmetrically to obtain high density & temperature.
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Zim the Vixen
Ars Centurion
So, we are curious, how does this relate to the previous result discussed in
https://meincmagazine.com/science/202...al-energies-not-matching-up-with-predictions/ ?
https://meincmagazine.com/science/202...al-energies-not-matching-up-with-predictions/ ?
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Ars commenters aren't, the FT sub-hed could be clearer on the subject.
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I think it's pretty clear. Proving that net energy gain via fusion is possible boosts hopes that fusion can become a viable zero-carbon alternative.
Is there something that I'm missing in the lede that gives some other impression?
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Given the number of remaining obstacles, any reasonable hopes should remain where they were.
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But that's solely your opinion. Obviously others disagree with you, hence the lede.
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Okay, but I wasn't talking about power collection.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.
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An inertial fusion system will never be "sustained" like a Tokamak. The first challenge will be to attain Q=10 or more, to account for inefficiency of the lasers, the steam-turbine-generator part, and the expense of creating the fuel pellets. But the bigger challenge will be to repeat the process often enough. Suppose you generate a net 2 MJ (electric, not thermal) per pulse. A 1 GW power plant would have to repeat pulses at a rate of 1 GW/2 MJ = 500 Hz. While the current lasers take 4-8 hours to cool down after each shot (https://spie.org/news/nuclear-fusion-nifs-hall-of-mirrors-may-solve-worlds-energy-crisis?SSO=1).
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I would include the required energy for complete supply chain in any consideration of its usefulness. It only becomes interesting to use fusion if the equivalent of well to socket is net positive by an order or magnitude or more.
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ArsTechnica5436
Ars Centurion
I wonder if 44 billion dollars could have helped us get fusion power.
No, Elon Musk said Fusion power would probably cost more then solar or wind.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-fusion-more-expensive-wind-solar
"The ITER fusion power plant, soon to be the largest of its kind in the world, is an international collaboration with a sky-high price tag: a whopping $22 billion — a conservative estimate, critics say."
22 billion dollars?
So Elon Musk could have paid for 2 fusion reactors. Instead he's cracking open screaming monkey brains for PR purposes.
No, Elon Musk said Fusion power would probably cost more then solar or wind.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-fusion-more-expensive-wind-solar
"The ITER fusion power plant, soon to be the largest of its kind in the world, is an international collaboration with a sky-high price tag: a whopping $22 billion — a conservative estimate, critics say."
22 billion dollars?
So Elon Musk could have paid for 2 fusion reactors. Instead he's cracking open screaming monkey brains for PR purposes.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Those unjustified feelings based on the NIF redefining what "net-energy gain" could uld possibly mean have no place in good science reporting.
The energy input into this shot was one or two orders of magnitude more than the energy released.
It's fine science. I support the science. It's not a meaningful step to power production.
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Yup the power grid is a network, from producers to users (storage is technically for purposes of a network both a producer and a user) if there's a way for power to get from a producer to the users it will, and RE enables you to have a lot of dispersed producers, plus solar and wind farms (to a lesser extent) themselves are highly parallelized, because it makes construction and maintenance simpler, but as a result, if there's a fault in a panel, or one of the wind turbines is damaged or has to be disabled for maintenance, the other units will happily continue providing power. batteries are even more heavily parallelized, though there might be issues with thermal run away,
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I predict that an earthbound fusion reactor will not reach economical production of electricity while anyone on this forum is still alive. I know I will be dead before then since I have, at best, 2 and maybe a half decades of useful shelf life. I certainly hope I am wrong on fusion power, it would be awesome to have that kind of technology, preferably not in the hands of folks like ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and others of their ilk.
Challenges:
1. Creating a sustainable net positive controlled reaction.
2. Funding and building a containment and electricity production facility.
3. Doing this while the price of PV and wind, and geothermal (and perhaps unknown alternative sources as well) continue to go down rapidly in LCOE, since it is going to be at a minimum 2 decades before ANY plant could be built.
Challenges:
1. Creating a sustainable net positive controlled reaction.
2. Funding and building a containment and electricity production facility.
3. Doing this while the price of PV and wind, and geothermal (and perhaps unknown alternative sources as well) continue to go down rapidly in LCOE, since it is going to be at a minimum 2 decades before ANY plant could be built.
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But there's so many other things besides toothpaste we could do with that fluorine...
as for reactivity of the blanket materials, if the reaction chamber isn't kept full of chemically inert gases (fuel hydrogen excluded) or in a vacuum, you are doing it very wrong
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
I hope the ars poster's "blow up your meters" comment was hyperbole, but you're not wrong.
Measurement error or interference in measurement devices or measurement devices being used wrong or measurement devices that respond toi slowly feature in all sorts of free energy "discoveries".
It's easier to induce a fault in your measurement devices that -says- you produced X energy than to produce the energy.
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
One Iskander missile covers 25,000 square meters with cluster munitions. Firing a salvo of 40 covers 1 million square meters. They will destroy more than a few kv of solar panels, ignite large numbers of batteries and kill several hundred civilians. The next salvo could land as little as 2 hours later. Its not hard to wait and deliberately target anybody in the open trying to install new panels and batteries. If you mix in submuntions with delayed action fuses you will also kill anyone trying to repair any damage.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
That will be very bad for the area hit, whether it contains power production equipment or not.
But the same missile could easily knock a coal plant offline, which would deny power to a bigger area.
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Whereas ONE missile can take out your entire fusion plant. Hmm, which seems harder for the aggressor, manufacturing one missile or hundreds or maybe thousands?
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No. Nor France, nor UK imported gas from Russia. It's about the lack of electricity. And it's nothing funny about that.
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With thermal power plants, particularly the ones that aren't geothermal, you want to have centralized power, because of cubed square efficiency and in the case of nuclear, because you only want to pay for the giant capex of building it and getting the approvals to build it once, but for grid resiliency, you want to maximize the "network effect"* you experience, which wind and solar are naturally suited for. You also want to move away from bespoke transformers where possible.
*network-effect is where the more nodes and routes on a network increase the value and resiliency of said network exponentially, this is true in every type of network.
*network-effect is where the more nodes and routes on a network increase the value and resiliency of said network exponentially, this is true in every type of network.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Natural gas is fungible. France is now exporting gas to Germany, which was previously a big customer of Russian gas.
Also, most of France's energy production shortfall is due to maintenance and repair of French nuclear plants.
You're just lying.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
Come one man. Even if you think X is wrong could it kill you to type X into google.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...-scenario-french-finance-minister-2022-07-10/
France is also exporting NG to Germany now who is an even larger bind. More French NG exported to Germany means less available for French powerplants.
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The first problem is that this announcement is not even confirmed within the team that did it, let alone peer reviewed. We should not be reading this.
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I agree with the assessment “commercially available“ and not “commercially viable“. Big difference where the latter can be fixed with politics while the former requires engineering.
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This is Ars Science: Ignition! by John Clark is highly recommend
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or more likely, 1 HV transformer/power line, or hundreds of sub stations.
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here's the thing, damaged solar panels still produce power, (see who's got power post hurricane) not all of them would be damaged, ohh and there can be dozens if not hundreds of solar/wind farms for every major thermal plant. and you can keep it on LV and MV lines you don't need as many bespoke HV links because you are dealing with less power.
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That was a reaction to: "Don't know how you'd collect the power though."
Is that not talking about power collection?
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
But it's totally understandable if it isn't...
That is more-or-less exactly the headlines that a lot of the major news sites were running starting last night (I didn't actually read any of the articles because of the BS headlines). In fact, just a little bit ago CNN (I think) was still going with a headline involving "Infinite Free Energy".
And I'd like to be able to say that this is all just the press being ignorant and credulous but the fusion community's public relations does all it can to encourage such misleading coverage (if I were cynical, which I am, I would attribute this to fusion research being colossally expensive and generally government funded and thus needing hype to keep the funding flowing).
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sorry... yawn... it has been how many decades (!) of research and we are finally just squeaking past break even? And the numbers are trivial. 2.5 Mega Joules sounds like a big number... until you do the math. 2.5 MJ - 2.1 MJ = 0.4 MJ NET. That's it. 0.4 MJ. Or, to put that into perspective, 0.4 MJ = 0.111 KW-Hours. That's not quite enough to run a 60W light bulb for 2 hours. Bear in mind, that this only looks at the specific energy used to ignite the fusion. It does not include the total system cost for heating & lighting the facility, pre & post energy activities, etc.
The issue isn't whether we will produce excess energy. The real question is whether controlled fusion will ever produce enough excess energy to be a viable source of power. As the late professor Lawrence Lidsky stated (http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf) :
A fundamental reason concerns the
difference between scientists’ and engineers’ view of what it means to solve a problem. Although they are usually able to agree on the definition of a “good problem,” scientists and engineers often have different perspectives as to what constitutes a “good answer.”
We have been chasing the fusion ball for decades and billions of dollars with nothing to show for it. Lidsky wrote his paper in 1993 and to-date, there has been no appreciable challenge to his thesis. It is not a matter of IF we can achieve fusion, but how we can do it at scale, for decades, reliably and inexpensively that is superior to fission.
The issue isn't whether we will produce excess energy. The real question is whether controlled fusion will ever produce enough excess energy to be a viable source of power. As the late professor Lawrence Lidsky stated (http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf) :
A fundamental reason concerns the
difference between scientists’ and engineers’ view of what it means to solve a problem. Although they are usually able to agree on the definition of a “good problem,” scientists and engineers often have different perspectives as to what constitutes a “good answer.”
We have been chasing the fusion ball for decades and billions of dollars with nothing to show for it. Lidsky wrote his paper in 1993 and to-date, there has been no appreciable challenge to his thesis. It is not a matter of IF we can achieve fusion, but how we can do it at scale, for decades, reliably and inexpensively that is superior to fission.
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It may be cheaper to pay a small premium for the power of the fusion plants than it is to build out the storage needed for the last 1% of power generation/storage. That would be the potential niche for these facilities, outside of unusual conditions such as areas that are not part of a large grid with significant geographical distribution.
I'd note that there is a good chance you will just run the fusion plant as base load. Just having 1% or 2% generation capacity that runs as baseload may help to reduce major capital expenses for storage and over capacity on wind and solar generation.
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honestly, I see the last few percent of power requirements, and the transportation sectors that can't go electric as likely sharing a solution in most cases, and that is most likely (IMO) biofuels, you'd already have the infrastructure, because some sectors can't avoid liquid hydrocarbons,
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They will try to scare people with no jobs.
To that I say. It will all work it self out. We should not stop progress becuase of fears of no work. Hell, maybe the livable 6 hour work day is coming.
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