US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough
Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels
Nuclear fusion breakthrough to be announced on Tuesday
- Thread starter eastcane
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I've been to NIF a couple times.
I'm looking forward to hearing the report as well, but they won't really get my attention unless they have done something in a repeatable way that has been observed by many people.
Wouldn't be the first time they teased some "breakthrough" that was never repeated to amp up their funding.
The fact that Granholm herself is announcing this though, is very interesting.
Edit: I'll also add that even if NIF has achieved repeatable ignition, that is step 1 out of about 10,000 to achieve clean fusion energy. There's also the matter of harnessing the excess energy successfully, and repeating the experiment at a frequency of about 60Hz (currently about one shot per day if you are lucky). It's a multi billion dollar proof of concept that won't scale with its current design.
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At least as far as I understand it, NIF counts it as ignition if the energy produced by the imploding capsule exceeds that which it absorbed from the laser energy deposition. From a purely thermodynamical and academic point of view, that is completely correct and valid. However, it doesn't actually mean that the total energy out is greater than that which was put in. Think about the energy losses involved in charging up all the capacitors needed to run 192 of the world's largest lasers, and you can start to understand that the laser energy deposited in the experiment is already a small fraction of the energy input into the system as a whole. So that is another future hurdle to overcome.
I'm looking forward to hearing the report as well, but they won't really get my attention unless they have done something in a repeatable way that has been observed by many people.
Wouldn't be the first time they teased some "breakthrough" that was never repeated to amp up their funding.
The fact that Granholm herself is announcing this though, is very interesting.
Edit: I'll also add that even if NIF has achieved repeatable ignition, that is step 1 out of about 10,000 to achieve clean fusion energy. There's also the matter of harnessing the excess energy successfully, and repeating the experiment at a frequency of about 60Hz (currently about one shot per day if you are lucky). It's a multi billion dollar proof of concept that won't scale with its current design.
Further edit:
At least as far as I understand it, NIF counts it as ignition if the energy produced by the imploding capsule exceeds that which it absorbed from the laser energy deposition. From a purely thermodynamical and academic point of view, that is completely correct and valid. However, it doesn't actually mean that the total energy out is greater than that which was put in. Think about the energy losses involved in charging up all the capacitors needed to run 192 of the world's largest lasers, and you can start to understand that the laser energy deposited in the experiment is already a small fraction of the energy input into the system as a whole. So that is another future hurdle to overcome.
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Cool anecdote:
The film "Star Trek Into Darkness" actually somehow got permission to film on site during a maintenance cycle. The NIF facility serves as the fusion reactor in the Starship Enterprise. No props, they actually went and filmed at a real live fusion facility.
Whatever it is, they've kept it under wraps pretty well, which is also really interesting. I usually get wind of major news. Not usually a ton of details, I'm far from the inner loop of NIF. But I do know some people that are, and I usually hear things. Could just be the holidays or something, but I've heard absolutely nothing about this before the public.
Rippin said he’ll try to explain it to you.Following and looking forward to people much smarter than myself breaking down the press release into language I can understand
They’ve been asking for a Manhattan Project sized funding level for awhile. $100 billion+ for IFE. That’s going back 6 years now. At least.
They have been doing some pretty cool stuff with Fourth Dimension research too. Shooting energy into the Upside Down. Really. Or at least they think so. Or at least that’s what they are telling us to get money.
Here’s a report on fusion that might be of interest.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25991/bringing-fusion-to-the-us-grid
They have been doing some pretty cool stuff with Fourth Dimension research too. Shooting energy into the Upside Down. Really. Or at least they think so. Or at least that’s what they are telling us to get money.
Here’s a report on fusion that might be of interest.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25991/bringing-fusion-to-the-us-grid
'Now, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are expected to announced that they have attained net energy gain by shooting lasers at hydrogen atoms. The 192 laser beams compress the hydrogen atoms down to about 100 times the density of lead and heat them to approximately 100 million degrees Celsius. The high density and temperature causes the atoms to merge into helium.'
That's a thermonuclear temp. The Livermore site, and several other scientific sites stated it the same way. That's 4 or 5 times the temperature of the center of the sun. I'm thinking that temperature dissipates rather quickly though.
We usually don't use Kelvin/Celsius for thermonuclear temps. We usually use eV (electron-Volts). Ten million Kelvin is about 850 eV, which is pretty high even for that scale.
The hohlraum is usually pretty small (mm, or cm at the largest) and the time scales involved are probably going to be shakes (1 shake=10 nanoseconds). The capsule itself is definitely on the mm scale at the largest.
The difficulty has never been triggering nuclear fusion, which is "easy" enough. We have been doing that in thermonuclear weapons for some time, but that is an uncontrolled reaction. The trick is doing it in a controlled and contained fashion.
The problem in NIF is that the capsule wants to blast itself apart in record time as soon as you get the smallest bit of fusion going. So you spend a great deal of energy getting the tiny capsule to implode dense enough to fuse, and then it blows itself apart and stops fusing and you don't get as much energy out as you put in. And/or you spend ten times as much energy holding it together as you yield from the reaction.
You have to use less energy holding it together than you ultimately get out of the reaction. That's the tricky part.
They've been working on this for literally decades. The number I've read is that they got 120% out of it. If so, that is a huge step. They didn't just inch over the line at 100.1%, they blew past it in a way that they have been unable to do for the last 15 years. I'd be really interested to read that report.
That's a big deal, that makes it headline news. Now if it can be duplicated. Wow.
3.15 MJ. That's even better than the rumors, and is nearly 3 times more energy then they have ever gotten out of it before. It's about 150% of the energy in the lasers.
For reference, I last worked at Livermore in 2006, and they were sure that NIF was going to be making exactly these headlines within a year. It took 16.
The number is important to report and it is great they actually led with that. There is about 2.1 MJ of energy in the lasers when they are fully utilized. In the past, Livermore has obfuscated by claiming they got more than 100% energy without giving the hard numbers right away. They didn't outright lie, but they only got more than 100% by changing what they considered "energy in" to something far less than what the broad scientific definition of that meant and from their own previously stated intentions. They first claimed to have gotten over a 100% return about ten years ago, when in fact they had about a 1% return. In short, they've lost a lot of credibility and by leading with the hard number of 3.15 MJ, they are gunning to get it back.
It's a huge leap. Their biggest reported shot prior to this was only about 1.2 MJ. The question I have now is about repeatability, but that will come in time. At least we know now that it is possible with such a procedure, which was something still hotly debated.
For the record, ITER and MCF designs in Europe have never produced a positive yield either. They are a bit ahead on engineering the next gen devices, but they still haven't even proved the concept yet.
All that said, what I said upthread still stands. This is a proof of concept machine and there is no way this machine or this design can reliably produce any energy for harnessing whatsoever. The lasers themselves are only about 1% efficient in generating their beams, so in essence they are still using 200 MJ to fire the machine and getting 3.15 out. That much is an engineering problem and a next gen device will be better and get better yield to boot. But we have a very very long way to go.
Another way of putting that I read somewhere is that this isn't so much a "Kitty Hawk" moment so much as it is that someone put an airfoil into a wind tunnel and was able to measure a very very very small amount of lift. Not enough lift to lift up a human or fuselage or even a motor big enough to power the fan required. But now that we now that powered flight is at least theoretically possible, we can set about trying to engineer to it and maybe someday eventually get a plane. It's a good analogy.
At least now they are saying it's between 20 and 40 years away, rather than 50-60 yrs.
LOL. Yeah, this is one of those things that knocks 10 years off those estimates, but in general you can add a zero to any projections involving fusion power.
It will be several years more of learning with what we have at NIF before we can intelligently design a "next gen" machine. And a decade before it gets the green light to get built, and probably 20 before it is actually built and active and we are learning more. People that say it is 20 years away from commercial viability are hopelessly optimistic. We are 20 years away from the next set of advanced experiments that might enable a small non-commercially viable demonstration plant in another 20 years after that. Unlike Kitty Hawk and early days of flight, each of these experiments takes billions of dollars, years of careful planning, and a state sponsor. It'll be awhile.
Yeah, I figure it's 40 years down the road. Which means I'll probably be dead. Unless I'm still alive at 94. If it happens in 30 years I might have a chance, but I doubt it will.LOL. Yeah, this is one of those things that knocks 10 years off those estimates, but in general you can add a zero to any projections involving fusion power.
It will be several years more of learning with what we have at NIF before we can intelligently design a "next gen" machine. And a decade before it gets the green light to get built, and probably 20 before it is actually built and active and we are learning more. People that say it is 20 years away from commercial viability are hopelessly optimistic. We are 20 years away from the next set of advanced experiments that might enable a small non-commercially viable demonstration plant in another 20 years after that. Unlike Kitty Hawk and early days of flight, each of these experiments takes billions of dollars, years of careful planning, and a state sponsor. It'll be awhile.
Yes, well there are a ton of applications that this can be applied to presently, including stockpile stewardship as mentioned in the video. But I didn't get the sense from the video that they were claiming commercially viable fusion was coming soon so much as that this is a really important milestone in that decades long effort.
Edit: Having this capability for the stockpile stewardship program was actually the whole point of NIF in the first place and why the DOE tolerated spending billions on it. It serving as a groundbreaking public physics experiment was a nice bonus. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't go into the details of how exactly it helps for those purposes or respond to direct questions on that front.
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https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/milestone-shot-enhances-future-stockpile-stewardship-fusion-energy-scienceI wouldn’t understand it anyway
It better enables their model testing of whether an older nuclear weapon appears to be still functional. It guides them in what to do to make it functional, or with less errors/problems that would cause it to malfunction. The data from this fusion breakthrough provides further data that can be applied to that process with more accuracy.
Seems like we're really talking 50-60 years to me before it's a production ready, and globally extensible alternative to any other energy source.... at which time we get to fight some more wars regarding who's going to control the resources needed to produce the energy itself, or the raw materials used to construct the machine / facility used to produce the energy.... not to mention we get to have some economic meltdowns as all other forms of energy production begin to fall by the wayside and certain business sectors begin to lose value completely.LOL. Yeah, this is one of those things that knocks 10 years off those estimates, but in general you can add a zero to any projections involving fusion power.
It will be several years more of learning with what we have at NIF before we can intelligently design a "next gen" machine. And a decade before it gets the green light to get built, and probably 20 before it is actually built and active and we are learning more. People that say it is 20 years away from commercial viability are hopelessly optimistic. We are 20 years away from the next set of advanced experiments that might enable a small non-commercially viable demonstration plant in another 20 years after that. Unlike Kitty Hawk and early days of flight, each of these experiments takes billions of dollars, years of careful planning, and a state sponsor. It'll be awhile.
As long as we can contain the nuclear reaction to labs and production facilities rather than on warheads... we should come out alright.
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