This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others:
"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power.
Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper.
It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant.
Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges.
It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%.
And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually.
There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.
The key point about NIF is buried way down in the article:
But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density.
NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)
I don't know why there is any doubt about that. Maybe it's only because I am older and was DoE-adjacent in the relevant timeframe, but I distinctly recall the pitch for funding NIF was 100% pure weapons. They even wrote it down:
"""
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile.
"""
> NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project.
Isn't this wrong? LLNL was an 1952 off-shoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which in turn was founded in 1931. LLNL was not established during or by the Manhattan project, which ended in 1946.
> [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response to the detonation of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb during the Cold War. It later became autonomous in 1971 and was designated a national laboratory in 1981.
> [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department.
They have delayed the announcement of the delay, but it's expected to be another 5+ years.
It's the most complicated machine ever built, with each part built by a different firm in a different country for political reasons.
The first vacuum vessel sector installed was corroded. Korea used steel that didn't meet the specifications. 8 more sectors from four different nations to go, each one could bring its own 5 year delay. Or maybe they don't find any issues on the inspections but only find a leak after the whole machine has been assembled.
That makes me wonder whether it would be feasible to build a bomb type reactor. Detonate a hydrogen bomb in an underground lake 10km down, then extract the steam over the next few days.
There's also the angle that it's just something for the researchers at that lab to do, gives them a purpose. And in exchange, the US has a perpetually well staffed nuclear weapons research lab.
Everyone mildly interested in the topic knows about what's written in the article. There are popular scientists making youtube videos about what is Q, etc.
It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean it's not important.
Agreed. This is a weirdly negative and short-sighted article. It's like... yeah, maybe lasers aren't the way to go, guy. But the fact that we proved it in a practical, empirical test - regardless of the method we used - means that all of our theories are strengthened. All of our research into the topic is either on the right track, or can now be measured against a practical result. It's... huge. It's a huge deal that was rightly praised.
And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive - wonderful traits in students - are likely to do).
In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in their own designs.
I was aware of this but reading this article makes it seem like we're just completely barking up the wrong tree and this entire approach is never going to be practical.
Yeah felt more like a rant. He could have done a TLDR in 10 sentences or less. Like I said above, it sounds more like a professor really ready for emeritus status.
The article mentions that the reaction had a 4% yield with lasers that are 0.5% efficient.
The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy.
Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction.
In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc
Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array.
I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.
This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies. Everything he writes is going to go through that lens. Check the other posts.
I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it'll never work.
Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient.
Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep working on it.
I find the tone of your comment quite harsh in its choice of words. Just as you call the author a "doctrinaire doomer" for not showing huge optimism about the future of our way of life and civilization, you could be labeled an "infantile dreamer" and "deluded denialist" of the very real and concerning findings about the climate change and planetary limits we will be faced with, and already are.
But is such pointed labeling really justified? And more importantly, what good does that kind of barbed language do in a conversation.
The blog post author seems to be concerned about the time and attention spent on something that is not likely (i.e. as his post states is off by several orders of magnitude at least) to realistically help with alleviating the urgent problems of planetary climate change and resource exhaustion.
I agree with that concern.
Faced with finite resources and a time limit, prioritization is essential to ensure the best chance of success. Technologies like fusion detract from finding and implementing more realistic approaches that could help with long-term civilizational sustainability.
Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable pastime, which society could certainly use more of.
> Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical reason why ...
True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested enough...
Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with massively negative ROI's.
The point isn't that fusion isn't worth doing but that NIF isn't actually about power generation and it's disappointing that it always gets into the news as if it was.
> This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies.
Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is "Do the Math" and his arguments are based on the math. If you can contribute a single example where his math is wrong, I'd be more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to ignore your future comments.
> Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."
I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote anything like that.
Sure. But the NIF approach IS doomed. Even if they succeed by reducing fuel costs by 5 orders of magnitude AND manage to capture 100% of the energy AND manage to increase firing rate 6 orders of magnitude it's STILL not even close to competitive with solar power.
That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.)
We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.
Ha ha I read his earlier article about whether we could survive going back to foraging etc. and I think he is too optimistic! I think we have created enough pollution and wrecked ecosystems that 8bn people cannot go walkabout and survive simultaneously. Let alone people’s skill. Food will be the last
concern: human predators and acess to water would be! But that is my take.
That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to hunter gatherer en mass.
The guy is by no means a "doomer" and nowhere does he say everything is futile, give up now. That is the opposite of his point: he wants us all to reflect on our trajectory, subject it to serious critique, and try to turn it into something more likely to carry us through civilizational adolescence[0].
He does have qualms about whether "effectively infinite clean energy" would do us any good right now. Look at what we've done with a temporary surfeit of very cheap (but not clean) energy. We are kicking out the legs of the stool we're sitting on. Human beings perch precariously at the apex of a massive biological edifice, the foundation of which is fundamental to human life, but we have the unfortunate habit of thinking all we need is technology and ingenuity. Far more than new technology, we need the wisdom to apply our tools for the long term flourishing of earth-borne life, of which humanity is a part.
> I view myself as intrinsically optimistic, so I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future—such worrying is not consistent with who I am.
From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.
This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific.
For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
The criticism for commercial fusion is very similar.
Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
I think there is an important missed point: research funding is rivalrous, and not infinite. NIF is such a dead end that there is a huge risk that the positive result sucks the air out of a crowded room and de facto takes away resources from "societal" fusion energy projects that have a shot at actually being useful.
...how? Commercial fusion does not compete with NIF. Nobody invests in NIF expecting to make a return, the government spends money on it hoping for science. NIF is not to my knowledge part of government programs that aim to accelerate commercial fusion.
Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and the energy being produced as a result.
Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.
>Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets.
The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).
It's been actualized recently, but there's a sort of vaporware bermuda triangle within physics of revolutionary holy grail advancements that repeatedly garner an enormous amount of hype and press, but almost always fails to materialize into anything useful.
It consists of
* Room temperature semiconductors
* Useful fusion power
* Quantum computers something anything useful outside of a simulation
It's a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty years away for forty years. I wouldn't go as far as saying any of these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.
Is this more a property of these breakthroughs being very hard or very desirable? What would be achievements of similar impact that might be more achievable?
I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally amazing, possible, future technologies.
I get the feeling the article preaches to the choir.
The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types.
Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details.
This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.
I lived with somebody who worked on NIF --- back in the early days, before anything was built (they did theory modelling on the laser/holraum interaction). They said the entire project was really just busywork to keep american scientists from working on other country's defense projects. And also predicted that while NIF might eventually break even, it was never a design that would be useful for power generation, and was only slightly useful for stockpile stewardship.
I always saw NIF as bomb research by another name, frequency of ignition required is absurd. TOKAMAKs have much more promise but still face massive challenges.
I live near the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (aka The Laser Lab) and took a tour one day. They have an enormous bank of huge capacitors (think refrigerator-sized) that they charge off the power grid since there's no way in hell they can get sufficient energy directly. Laser fusion is one of those things that's possible but seems unlikely to ever be practical, though something may useful still come from it.
I used to work at the Rochester LLE! I never worked on capacitor logistics, but I heard that it was a PITA to work with local utilities to get those on the grid (but nowhere near as much as the PITA to get that building zoned for Brighton in the first place)
NIF was never made to generate power. NIF uses lasers which are less efficient, but were cheaper to build. We have better lasers. What is important about NIF's result is that they demonstrated 'burning' plasma. The yield might be increased by adding more fuel.
The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice?
They claim cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short.
Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary.
The author does celebrate it but points out something that the media should have:
"So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even at 100% efficiency, we’d get just 25 times more energy out, or 75 MJ. That’s still not enough to pay for the price of admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
Might want to rephrase that, because if you go from 10% distance to the goal to 1% to 0.1% etc, but never reach the goal, it doesn't matter if that happens every few years or every second, you still never reach the goal.
I'm skeptical if commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic. We get tricked by existence of stars but stars actually produce a really low amount of energy per unit mass: 0.2mW/kg [1]. It just so happens that stars are really massive (~333,000 times the mass of Earth). Stars can thus solve the neutron problem with gravity.
Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons.
I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That's all.
Solar, in particular, is our future.
And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have.
This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2].
You can write a same gloomy article about invention of an electric bulb or even a wheel. Imagine cutting down an entire tree that also kills Fred when the tree fell, herculean efforts to then slice it off to create a wheel in which Cole the lost his fingers, and what do you do with that wheel ? Create a claypot ? You could have just used a wooden pot instead. Not to mention the clay pot broke.
Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.
The conclusion here veers quite rapidly into scientific endism (we've more or less reached the pinnacle of human science, and no further significant advances are likely to be made) and malthusianism (we lack the resources to do so anyway and are headed for decline as a species).
For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".
To judge by how many Hollywood blockbusters have featured ever-larger-and-flashier Sci-Fi ray guns and robots and space ships and such...I'm thinking that most humans are quite naturally drawn to "Big! New!! Shiny!!!" things.
And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology / mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.
I thought the laser "ignition" was just a demonstrator for being able to create circumstances where fusion occurs, not something that could ever be scaled up to a power plant? But this article talks about repetition rates? Would we theoretically have fusion powerplants where we ignite a plasma over and over again from scratch, using lasers? I thought that's what tokamaks and stellerators were for: keeping the fusion reaction going once ignited?
[+] [-] hliyan|2 years ago|reply
"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper.
It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant.
Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges.
It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%.
And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually.
There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
[+] [-] gostsamo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstross|2 years ago|reply
But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density.
NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)
[+] [-] jeffbee|2 years ago|reply
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733
""" The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile. """
[+] [-] jessriedel|2 years ago|reply
Isn't this wrong? LLNL was an 1952 off-shoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which in turn was founded in 1931. LLNL was not established during or by the Manhattan project, which ended in 1946.
> [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response to the detonation of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb during the Cold War. It later became autonomous in 1971 and was designated a national laboratory in 1981.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...
> [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Berkeley_National_Lab...
> Although the Manhattan Project ceased to exist on 31 December 1946, the Manhattan District was not abolished until 15 August 1947
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#After_the_wa...
[+] [-] Stevvo|2 years ago|reply
They have delayed the announcement of the delay, but it's expected to be another 5+ years.
It's the most complicated machine ever built, with each part built by a different firm in a different country for political reasons. The first vacuum vessel sector installed was corroded. Korea used steel that didn't meet the specifications. 8 more sectors from four different nations to go, each one could bring its own 5 year delay. Or maybe they don't find any issues on the inspections but only find a leak after the whole machine has been assembled.
[+] [-] 0x000xca0xfe|2 years ago|reply
Isn't the research basically done, as in "we can build big enough bombs to annihilate whatever we want"?
[+] [-] weberer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikhailfranco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
How do you know it's not the other way around:
That they're using the gigantic piggy bank of the military to fund actual fusion research?
I agree that ICF doesn't seem like a winning strategy. But surely it's not complete waste, either, right?
[+] [-] morkalork|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpjanik|2 years ago|reply
It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean it's not important.
[+] [-] catapart|2 years ago|reply
And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive - wonderful traits in students - are likely to do).
In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in their own designs.
[+] [-] tootie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkelleyrtp|2 years ago|reply
The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy.
Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction.
In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc
Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array.
I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.
[+] [-] mjamesaustin|2 years ago|reply
Nowhere in this article does it mention the gains from using more efficient lasers, instead treating the 400MJ input as a constant. Bad reporting.
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it'll never work.
Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient.
Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep working on it.
[+] [-] sustn|2 years ago|reply
The blog post author seems to be concerned about the time and attention spent on something that is not likely (i.e. as his post states is off by several orders of magnitude at least) to realistically help with alleviating the urgent problems of planetary climate change and resource exhaustion. I agree with that concern.
Faced with finite resources and a time limit, prioritization is essential to ensure the best chance of success. Technologies like fusion detract from finding and implementing more realistic approaches that could help with long-term civilizational sustainability.
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable pastime, which society could certainly use more of.
> Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical reason why ...
True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested enough...
Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with massively negative ROI's.
[+] [-] chpatrick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|2 years ago|reply
Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is "Do the Math" and his arguments are based on the math. If you can contribute a single example where his math is wrong, I'd be more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to ignore your future comments.
> Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."
I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote anything like that.
[+] [-] boxed|2 years ago|reply
That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.)
We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to hunter gatherer en mass.
[+] [-] walleeee|2 years ago|reply
He does have qualms about whether "effectively infinite clean energy" would do us any good right now. Look at what we've done with a temporary surfeit of very cheap (but not clean) energy. We are kicking out the legs of the stool we're sitting on. Human beings perch precariously at the apex of a massive biological edifice, the foundation of which is fundamental to human life, but we have the unfortunate habit of thinking all we need is technology and ingenuity. Far more than new technology, we need the wisdom to apply our tools for the long term flourishing of earth-borne life, of which humanity is a part.
[0]: https://youtu.be/6-1oUMNX64Y
[+] [-] hotpotamus|2 years ago|reply
From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.
[+] [-] Veedrac|2 years ago|reply
For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
[+] [-] dale_glass|2 years ago|reply
Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
[+] [-] throwawaymaths|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veedrac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dale_glass|2 years ago|reply
Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.
[+] [-] willis936|2 years ago|reply
The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets.
The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|2 years ago|reply
It consists of
It's a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty years away for forty years. I wouldn't go as far as saying any of these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.[+] [-] ajmurmann|2 years ago|reply
I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally amazing, possible, future technologies.
[+] [-] dist-epoch|2 years ago|reply
Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a nice side effect, but don't confuse it with the existence purpose of the lab.
[+] [-] ironborn123|2 years ago|reply
The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types.
Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details.
This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.
[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMasz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bajeezus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gene-h|2 years ago|reply
The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short.
Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary.
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...
[+] [-] reedf1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahnu|2 years ago|reply
"So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even at 100% efficiency, we’d get just 25 times more energy out, or 75 MJ. That’s still not enough to pay for the price of admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
[+] [-] johnnyworker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|2 years ago|reply
Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons.
I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That's all.
Solar, in particular, is our future.
And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have.
This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2].
[1]: https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/...
[2]: https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refiner...
[+] [-] KorematsuFredt|2 years ago|reply
Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.
[+] [-] alexwebb2|2 years ago|reply
For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology / mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.
[+] [-] alkonaut|2 years ago|reply