Wow. Can't believe the cynicism expressed in the comments here.
The big results do not come right away. But they tend to follow an unexpected result, especially one that involves new or state of the art methods.
Bohr's atom was wrong in every conceivable way and yet it is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of all tine.
In mathematics, even the slightest advance can be monumental if it involves progress in an area using new techniques.
Optimization is a separate problem which depends on a small improvement to unleash the flood gates of research, investment, and let's face it: greed and ambition.
This may turn out to be no improvement at all: just an indication that with enough power and energy, we get a slight energy payback. Or, this may be a method that can be greatly improved. We'll see.
For me, this is why science, math, and engineering are so exciting!
If you were familiar with NIF, you would know that they absolutely will publish the details of the experiment just as they published the details of the experiment that achieved ignition in August 2021: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
What is your point? That we should distrust everything in a scientific journal? You are shifting the goal post. First, you wanted a publication. Now, you say that would not be enough?
I am inclined to believe a publication unless other plasma physicist come out with a contradictory information.
This is my pet peeve with the current way of popularizing science, it's just a step apart from "what these scientists found will shock you! News at eleven!". Seems aimed more towards attracting funding than showing a technological breakthrough.
I think I agree and I share the skepticism for several reasons. Especially lately, we face really high levels of distrusts in most institutions. I can maybe see a reason for this approach in the form of "we don't want to just hand over details of this tech to everyone in the world" ( not that is a very good position, but I can at least understand the rationale ), but that is about it.
You can mess with stats and so on ( especially in social fields ), but it may be nigh impossible to present results in energy field that are not replicable and still claim a win.
Political appointees aren't the ones who announce technical "breakthroughs", those are announced first in technical journals. Now if it was a diplomatic breakthrough, sure, have the state department announce it. But this isn't how it works for science.
> This may turn out to be no improvement at all: just an indication that with enough power and energy, we get a slight energy payback. Or, this may be a method that can be greatly improved. We'll see.
Also two observations to be optimistic: it seems that the sensors were damaged because it exceeded its specifications (so we only know the lower bound of the produced power), and the NIF laser is old (which means it's inefficient). The only (skeptical) worry is that this announcement might lead to another fraud positive investigation event a la Ninov or Schön. I honestly hope not.
They announced more funding so I hope it's enough for them to seriously upgrade the experiment or to build an entirely new one with much improved gear.
Well, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that cynicism is always warranted.
Basically, the very big and undeniable shit hits you, immediately, right now, with regularity, while the hypothetical bits of maybe good news always are touted as breakthrough even though they will just be "for some times later".
Also, if I read the few cheerful comments correctly, this type of fusion basically means that ITER is a waste of time (so the lesson is, even in science, "internationnal cooperation ? shmooperation".)
Also, it's depressing to know that I'm too dumb to really help in any of the good fights, but that I'm constantly contributing to the shit.
So, yeah, kudos to the researchers, let them keep up the good work, but, maybe, only call it a "breakthrough" and have the press conference when it lights a bulb somewhere ?)
> Basically, the very big and undeniable shit hits you, immediately, right now, with regularity, while the hypothetical bits of maybe good news always are touted as breakthrough even though they will just be "for some times later".
This just seems like an argument against transparency in research which I think is the wrong direction to take things since it's more helpful to the overall direction of research to publish incremental results so others can build on them sooner. You may be misconstruing the reporting of small, incremental steps as something akin to crying wolf when really you're just seeing all the hard work that goes into solving big problems that eventually produces "very big undeniable shit". It's all part of the same thing, small steps move you towards a big goal, it's hard to get as excited about them as it is about the final product but you can't have the latter without the former.
> This just seems like an argument against transparency in research.
Sorry if that sounded this way. As I said, "kudos to the researchers". They probably have good reasons to be happy, and we can cheer them for that - but the expections for the word "breakthrough" to be used for the layman are not met, sorry.
There have been lots of press releases from universities looking to capitalize on the research done under their "leadership". Never mind that research is usually financed by grants and similar methods. So many of these announcements claim to be stupendous achievements, and they very well may be, but they tend to come with no real way of achieving commercial success. It's not necessarily the fault of the researchers and they did what they set out to do. It's the marketing teams that make it sickening to the point we've all become calloused to this kind of science spam.
Does ignition fall into the same category? We'll see
Maybe the pandemic that we completely failed to handle ? The "breakthrough" vaccines / meds that kinda help but don't solve the issues as much as "we got lucky at the mutation lottery this time, but wait until millions of Chinese breed the next variant" ?
The war in Europe that was "never supposed to happen anymore because it would be insane because trade etc..." and yet... just does ?
The energy crisis that will be "solved" by piling coal on top of not reducing emissions ?
The fires and floods that can't be dealt with because it would be "catering to liberal propaganda ?"
Social media burning the minds of a generation, including the mind of the one guy that was kinda inspirational once in a while, but is now going the full "James bond vilain" road ?
Now, don't get me wrong, none of this is "new", "unprecedented", "the end of the world", etc... All of this shall pass, and in the long run, somewhere in the distant future, the small steps will accumulate to create a vague form of "good news".
Someday, an actual fusion reactor will be ready to light a bulb. And then...
...then, you'll get protests and FUDs and corruption and NIMBYism to make sure the plant opens somewhere else.
> I would suggest reflecting on that, I do not think the things you are naming are unique.
Oh I wholeheartedly agree that it's neither unique, nor new, nor the first or last times we fucked things up. My pronouns are pessimistic/stoic/sleepy.
> mRNA vaccines were absolutely a breakthrough therapy.
...a "breakthrough" that was incorrectly touted a fix for the pandemic, that would also be used to cure all disease, etc... (Again, not by the researchers themselves, but by pretty much everyone else.)
In the end, it definitely bought time for the elderly (and unhealthy), until Omicron actually changed the game.
If we had not got this particular mutation "winning ticket", given the disappointing efficiency of mRNA vaccines on infection and transmission, I'm unfortunately convinced that we would still have to show proof of a recent vaccination to get a coffee. (And since I'm in a particularly bad mood, let's not talk about the long term societal effects of mandates and restrictions and penalization of "not blindly trusting your government", which will reveberate.)
At least, we learnt that "maaaaybe it's worth testing our medecines on the half of humanity that has a functioning uterus" [1], which is a "breakthrough discovery" that almost arrived _after_ nuclear fusion.
My perspective on why this is so contentious is because two things are true:
1) This is one more step on a long road to viable fusion power plants. Every step is important and we've been taking steps like this for a long time and will continue for a long time.
2) This step is being cheer-leaded as the step in order to score political points.
Since #2 is happening, it is preventing reasonable celebration about #1.
Except that #1 is basically wrong. The way I read this is, fusion power is STILL 30-50 years away, but at least the well-paid LLNL nerds got NIF to work, a decade late. It was a decade of defeating plasma instabilities with target redesign. What I am somewhat dismayed about is I question whether this tweaking is applicable, in any way, to a practical method of fusion power generation. The results, I believe, are still highly chaotic, with duds intermixed with terrific shots, indicating only partial success in taming the instabilities that lead to the fizzles. But the only way inertial confinement fusion has any real applicability to power generation is if there is another order of magnitude of yield hiding behind the taming of those instabilities.
Don't forget the context where the NIF is foremost a nuclear weapons research facility (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc793622/) so them cheerleading a small step which is very significant for the nuclear weapons research as a purely civilian achievement is extra grating.
If we can learn everything we need to know about nuclear explosions using something that approximates them without having to actually detonate them then this is still a good thing. Nuclear weapons are terrible but advancing the study of nuclear explosions may have many unforeseen uses that we would be worse off without.
You hold this view but also that actively performing research and development to support their future use is a price worth paying for maybe getting some unexpected benefit?
How dear a price on the means you willing to pay for an entirely hypothetical end?
If humanity is ever going to advance beyond grubbing around on the surface of this planet then we are going to have to continue to create and master extremely dangerous things. Nuclear energy is one of those, both fission and fusion. If it's possible, we should also find a way to control gravity. The weapons applications of such a technology would be far beyond anything we are capable of doing with a nuclear bomb. Does this mean we should ban all research into gravity? Even something as innocuous as orbital mechanics can create a weapon much more powerful than a nuclear bomb. Get a small rocket engine and enough fuel out to a big enough asteroid and you could obliterate an entire continent and nearly all life on earth. Should we ban space travel and exploration?
"The government official, who spoke anonymously to discuss results that are not yet public, said that the fusion experiment at NIF achieved what is known as ignition, where the fusion energy generated equals the laser energy that started the reaction. Ignition is also called energy gain of one."
That's not ignition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition . They are redefining ignition to make the current improvement more trendy, but they are very far away from true ignition.
ICF isn't MCF, but yes, they already had ignition earlier. This is net energy gain if you draw the line at the energy in the lasers (even before the conversion to UV, much less x-rays).
This is not how it works at all. The confinement is produced for a tiny fraction of a second by the inertia of the fuel pellet casing which is driven inward by ablation from a powerful pulse of light. It’s the same basic mechanism as an H-bomb, except unlike an H-bomb, this uses lasers instead of a fission (A-bomb) trigger. And is MUCH smaller.
Does the laser radiation really contribute [significantly] to the confinement? I always assumed once the energy has been deposited into the outer layer of the target, it is the material of the target doing all the work, i.e. heating and confining the fuel.
The laser energy is converted to x-rays by the gold cylinder. But the cylinder only has a conversion ratio of 10~20 percent, so the amount of energy that gets deposited on the capsule is much lower.
You're joking, but I think this is true and often good. The government works for us. The press is there to inform us. An informed citizenry is a vital component for democracy. In my view, government generally shouldn't be keeping secrets.[1] The worse government is at keeping secrets, the happier I am.
[1] Yes, reasonable exceptions apply, including ones relating to privacy, national security, and criminal investigations where an element of surprise is needed.
Really? You're not concerned that government employees may be picking up some income on the side by leaking stories to whichever news outlet pays them the most? That's just a weird thing to be worried about?
I agree that we want accurate information about government abuses to be smuggled out. But that has nothing to do with this situation.
This situation is about one newspaper getting a commercial advantage from publishing information a few hours earlier than their competitors. It reduces the quality of information the public sees, because many people will read only the report they initially see in the NYT, which includes only the commentary by people they decided to talk to. Whereas if all the papers got the information at the same time, people seeing the initial reports could flip between several sources of commentary, and possibly get a more balanced set of views.
As far as I know, there is not a finite allowance of time the public is provided to digest information before forming opinions on it.
That one outlet may have a slight time advantage over another is always going to the case (efficiency and process variations). That one outlet may have a slight informational advantage is always going to be the case (better sources, better journalists).
It's a big deal but its decades away. To do this they need to repeatably do it every few seconds. Right now they can do it once per week.
BIG CAVIET: The energy to power the laser is greater than the return. The return in energy is just greater than the energy the laser put in. So net loss. We need more efficient lasers and be able to make this repeatable and reliable. We are not closer except theory is being proven.
I have been reading these comments like yours for days. I am not picking on you. But the research program isn't being funded to build more efficient lasers. Those already exist. The lasers at the NIF are decades old and haven't been updated because it isn't the point of the research.
I'm baffled by the comments on this topic in particular. Do people just spout off in the comments now despite no background in the field? I don't really recall a time in the past where this was so prevalent on HN. I used to be able to trust that some industry expert would be in the comments section fact checking headlines and adding nuance, but now I see far too many contradictions, strange takes, and obvious red flags (see: "BIG CAVIET").
This always happens when physics is discussed on Hacker News (it is the only topic on which I consider myself an expert). In particular, there are some really weird takes on Quantum Information, in both directions.
I was a research librarian in an academic setting. So, I can do research and have an informed opinion. Now if I was to dispute the information then sure I need to have a masters or PhD in the field to have reasons why the vast majority is wrong. I cannot find a single article from an academic background stating that current laser technology will work. Nor do I see anyone that doesn't say decades away.
We are definitely closer. Achieving ignition and scientific break even is a necessary step before we decide to build a demonstration power plant facility.
Lawrence Livermore national lab was working on this problem (under the LIFE project, including developing much more efficient solid state lasers, etc) but was correctly chastised for it being a waste of money because they had not yet achieved ignition or break even. The engineering challenges to make a commercial power plant can distract from the task of actually achieving break even and ignition. (And they still need to increase the gain to about 25-50 to get enough energy out to make useful electricity without heroic efficiency efforts… although since they have achieved ignition in a repeatable way, this should be doable.)
You have to understand. I got a PhD in this field. For years, scientists in droves stopped applying for grants saying they were actually doing fusion because funding sources just lost faith in the effort. ICF requires a lot more investment in capital to run than MCF generally, it seems. These scientists moved on to study things like novel radiation and ion beam sources (which similar laser-plasma interactions provide) but they stopped going for fusion specifically because the government just lost faith in the effort. Now, the pendulum will swing.
The answer is yes, we can use more efficient lasers. If you ever are lucky enough to get a tour of NIF, they have a cute little exhibit where they show you if they redesigned NIF with modern technology, they could fit the three football field machine into something the size of a table. That display itself is likely 10 years old by now, and laser science has advanced even beyond it. Now that NIF has proven it's possible, I imagine there will finally be money in fusion again (ICF specifically, if I were in MCF I'd be worried sick now) and someone somewhere will make the newer NIF that won't be just taking 300MJ in and 2MJ out.
Other people are already developing the lasers. We have NIF-class lasers now with over 20% efficiency, compared to the <1% efficiency of NIF's lasers. We also have petawatt lasers that can fire once per second.
Not these exact ones. And one of the important things required is scale: can you think of anything that requires tens of megawatts of average pulsed laser energy which ISN’T military? (And the military has very different requirements for wavelength, etc.) And those other efforts can also seek their own funding (there’s not a lot of money in fusion research).
If you’re in a budget constrained environment and you’re not already 100% certain this approach is the right one for future power plants, you focus on achieving the energy gain needed for such a power plant first, and the first step of that is ignition (ie where the heat of the reaction sustains some more of the reaction, not just external heat) and scientific breakeven. Once you’ve shown scientific breakeven and ignition, that’s when it makes sense to start investing a bit in the other balance of plant items.
But the bulk of the effort should still be in increasing the energy gain by leveraging ignition, IMHO.
> We are not closer except theory is being proven.
I think by most definitions that means, "closer". Proof of concept is a huge deal.
POC doesn't mean it will be viable, even once they manage to make it net-positive. Let's say they get the lasers to be more efficient - there are other inefficiencies in the system further upstream you have to account for.
So, yes, there is a long way to go still, and there's no way to be sure it will be economically viable at the end of it. As an example - look at algae biofuel. That was a working example, not just proof of concept but working at scale - but it couldn't compete on price with petroleum when it was below 4-5 dollars or so.
We won't know until we get there. But the promise it holds (easily obtainable fuel, which won't blight the land if the plant fails) is worth the investment.
Even without diving into technical reports, I'm sure that the denominator here is some quantity of energy that's measured after a bunch of tremendously inefficient conversion steps, which, if they were included, would make the ratio much less than unity.
Well yes, because it’s not designed as a power plant but a demonstration device to demonstrate ignition, which can be developed to allow the 25-50 energy gain needed for useful fusion electricity. This is how you WOULD design a demonstration power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
The NIF exists mainly to validate nuclear weapon designs by providing input to models, the ICF thing is more a side gig the nuclear weapons side of the DoE runs to attract talent for the real job.
I’m aware, and yeah this was funded in part because underground nuclear weapons testing was stopped. You could also think of it as fusion researchers figuring out how to use military-scientific-complex funding to pursue fusion energy.
No, think of it like burning oil. Imagine it took >1 barrel of oil's worth of energy to burn a barrel of oil. That would be inefficient. So, we're trying to find solutions to trigger that burning with less input energy.
They're not creating energy, they're basically releasing energy stored over from the Big Bang. Triggering that release with less input energy than output energy is an engineering problem.
Oil is a pretty good example here, some oils do require a lot of energy to burn if they are just sitting there in a puddle. They don't become efficient to burn until you make a modification like aerosolizing the oil and mixing with air or introducing a wick.
Consume a small amount of mass, release a very large amount of energy due to the huge conversion factor. The first law isn't violated because the energy being released is coming from the annihilation of matter.
Mass and energy can in principle be converted given the right process. LLNL consumed the mass that produced the energy.
The short answer is that it's a unit conversion factor. Physicists often work in units where c = 1, and then the equation becomes E=m multiplied by a unit conversion term.
If you imagine (rest) mass to be a special form of energy to begin with, you're already 99% there. The fact that the speed of light squared is used as a conversion factor is superficially due to the way our units system is constructed, and in a deeper way it is due to the fact that fundamental properties of the universe are reflected in all of its fundamental processes (so, in a way these are also conversion factors in the actual mechanics of the universe).
Releasing more energy than what's put in to run the facility is a necessary property of all power plants. It costs energy to mine and process fossil and fission fuels, it costs energy to produce and maintain solar farms. None of this breaks thermodynamics, because none of this is reversing the flow of entropy. Energy is released, it's not created out of nothing.
In this specific case, hydrogen atoms are fused together, which is a reaction that releases energy because the resulting combined atomic nucleus is at a lower energy state than the atoms that went in. This technically holds true for fusion up until you get iron nuclei, with heavier atoms than iron requiring energy to be put into the reaction when fusing. This is the other side of the equation, which we are already using for nuclear fission plants.
Bashing nuclei together hard enough to overcome their innate repulsion is where most of the input energy is going in fusion reactors. It is comparable to the concept of activation energy in chemical reactions.
Keep in mind that this announcement does not cover the total energy cost of running the reactor, "only" the theoretical amount of energy released into the chamber by the ignition laser. So we're a long, long way off from achieving what they call "unity" (an input/output ratio of 1:1) in practical terms. In theory, fusion reactions achieving practical unity can be self-sustaining. Although this specific way of triggering a fusion reaction is not continuous, it could theoretically be re-worked into a permanently running reactor that is pulse-driven in the same way an internal combustion engine is.
They're converting mass into energy, so it's conserved. The problem they're trying to overcome is that the energy it takes to convert the mass into energy is more than the energy they get out.
At this point it sounds like the actual energy they put in is less than they get out, but the energy it takes to put the energy in still makes it a loss overall.
To put it simply, a huge amount of energy is used to produce so much heat and pressure, that the following occurs:
For every 1 deuterium nucleus involved, it fuses with 1 tritium nucleus => producing 1 helium nucleus, 1 free neutron, and 17.6 MeV of energy.
The energy released then causes more deuterium and tritium to fuse, producing more energy, and so on, in a chain reaction.
The goal, in order for this to be used to produce electricity for consumption, is for us to be able to kick start this process by introducing less than 17.6 MeV of energy per deuterium-tritium pair, so that after you account for the energy spent to fuse those atoms, there's a net energy left over for us to use.
Put even more simply, we're throwing heat/pressure at atoms, to cause them to fuse, and in the process convert some of that mass to energy.
Somewhat similar to internal combustion engine where a small energy of a spark causes a reaction which produces much more energy - which comes from fuel.
Energy is released in the fusion reaction just like in an H bomb. The "more energy out then in" thing is about the difficulty of creating a fusion reaction that's not a bomb. It takes a large amount of energy, typically more than you're able to release from the reaction.
Others will have better answers, but if you just think about it, exploding a nuclear device emits a lot more energy than it took to release it. It’s a conversion, you’re not violating anything.
Obviously causing a nuclear explosion is not a very good way to generate energy. :)
This sounded like a very flashy hiring event and a political rally. I turned off when they started advertising job openings - after thanking the President so, so many times and making clear how this was only possible thanks to the funding from the current administration.
The findings themself seem like scoring after moving the goalposts. This is still very, very far from even a path towards realistic fusion-based energy production. What a farce.
What a cynical response to a genuine scientific advance. Getting net power from fusion is an incredibly difficult task, and scientific breakeven (and ignition, i.e. where the fusion energy contributes to heating further fusion reactions) is the first step, and this hasn’t been done before. Why not celebrate that? Why such cynicism?
We are developing literally a new way of making nuclear fire, a method which previously required an atomic bomb to produce. The first small kindled flame is definitely a triumph, even if we haven’t yet built a power plant for it.
The concern over startup energy is like saying we can't have internal combustion engines until the engine can start itself with gasoline. Turns out we've gotten along fine starting cars with electricity for about 100 years, including a long while where we had to hand crank them ourselves. Surplus is just a matter of runtime once you're getting more than you put in to maintain it.
In this case, it's not clear how the analogy could apply, because you can't realistically deliver more fuel to the "reactor" while it's "running". An ultrafast laser pulse hits a target and it undergoes fusion for a few nanoseconds, maybe less, generating a huge explosion. You can't operate a fuel injector on that timeframe. So you need a big gain in terms of efficiency.
You can hopefully make a bigger fuel pellet, but that kind of scaling hasn't been demonstrated and isn't guaranteed, because it begins to disperse as soon as fusion initiates in this inertial confinement scheme. So "just" a matter of runtime is harder than it might seem at first.
I'm curious if you could power boats like this, though. It might not be economical for electricity. But the power-to-weight ratio is probably pretty good.
You do not need a continuous stream injecting at every nano second...you can operate much slower than that. If you watched the stream, they said a few hertz is enough. A milisecond is an eternity compared to a nanosecond, you remove the neutrons away from the interaction site well before the next start of the rep-rate when you inject the next pellet / holhraum. You just need to have something to capture the neutrons and convert that into heat to boil water, which will accumulate over various repetitions of course (water boils much slower than a GHz), and that thing need not be where the pellets are blasted.
That said, I'd need to think about it the design, I just don't think it's impossible.
typical confinement time for ICF is on the order of a tenth of a nanosecond. I don't expect they have made a factor-of-millions improvement on this. I generally avoid watching videos whenever possible, but I think you are referring to the frequency at which the fuel pellets can be repeatedly ignited by a laser — there are no plans to use the output of one fuel pellet to directly ignite the next. In fact not even the "magneto-inertial" techniques with putative confinement times in the microseconds have a roadmap to achieve this.
You don't use the ignition of one pellet for the next...each pellet ignites itself.
It isn't a nuclear fission reaction where it is a chain reaction between pellets. Each pellet interaction produces energy, and you capture that energy. It is ignition for the pellet, not other pellets in the machine. The boiling of water thankfully happens on a much longer timescale, being accumulationf of energy of many pellets over a few cycles.
The pellets produce a net energy release larger than the energy used by the laser. This energy gain is called "ignition" in fusion parlance. A fuel pellet does not ignite itself — otherwise, they would be destroyed as soon as they are produced, like the critical ball in a nuclear warhead. That's what I was saying from the beginning: the laser does not function like the spark plug on a car engine; it is required for every ignition. It's pretty clear if you go back and read the analogy I initially responded to.
The next step is rep-rate, which a lot of the field has neglected, while some people (tooting my horn, my lab) were amongst the few pushing it. The thing is people couldn't even achieve the result with one shot, but now that it seems feasible now, hopefully scientists (and more importantly funders) will start to care about increasing rep-rate.
Yes, although they need to still leverage this ignition/scientific-breakeven achievement to get the higher energy gains needed for a practical power plant. Not just 1.5x but 25-50x. With ignition now being repeatable, that should be a doable proposition.
So, one of the things that I probably shouldn't say is the NIF design is not really optimized for fusion specifically (I won't say too much but you can guess why). There are schemes out there that can be more efficient, for example, not even bothering to convert to UV and then x-rays (start at UV in fact, or crank up the intensity of light, the light in NIF is very intense but modern high intensity systems are orders of magnitude more intense, they are however dramatically lower in pulse energy). That plus using modern laser tech when you realize NIF was designed in the 80s, we can definitely make it much more efficient eventually.
Don’t need to be too coy about the fact that NIF was built to recreate the processes inside an H-bomb after underground nuclear testing was banned. They literally use the same concept of a “Hohlraum” (here in miniature) where heat and light (from a fission trigger in the case on an H-bomb, lasers in the case of NIF) convert to x-rays on the outer casing and evenly illuminate the fuel pellet casing which ablates a bit to drive implosion which triggers the actual compression heating of the fuel pellet. Heck, some previous tests even used a uranium tamper (because in part, uranium has high inertia due its density thus prolonging the period of high pressure), just like a real H-bomb.
I don't see why not. Requirements are to inject the fuel (in pellet form) and ignite it with a laser pulse. Right now I believe the pellet is contained in an hohlraum that is held in place in order to perform the test but you could drop (or shoot) that assembly into the chamber and time the laser pulse to hit it when it's in the right location. That doesn't sound like it's beyond the realm of physical possibility.
So what was the advance here really? The experiment generated a bit more energy than usually, going over a certain purely theoretical threshold where it's "ignition" only if you ignore all the externalities required for driving the experiment?
It was advertised like the Higgs boson while it was really more like Elon Musk announcing that a fully autonomous Tesla had completed the first full circuit on a test track.
It's a big deal because no fusion experiment to date has achieved ignition. It's a validation of our modeling and engineering capability and it means that we probably can build a commercial reactor down the road.
Let me put it this way, if NIF failed to achieve ignition then it would be a very ominous sign.
No one ever seriously thought that NIF would ever lead directly to a commercial reactor, LCF is far too finicky to ever reliably be used in a commercial setting.
This is not just more than usual, but actual ignition. They reportedly achieved ignition last year as well, but not a confirmed and repeatable scientific breakeven so they didn’t have a big announcement until today.
Ignition is critical as it means that, to use an analogy, a flame has been kindled. The heat of fusion is driving significantly more fusion, no longer just the laser alone. In other words, a sort of chain reaction. That is THE key to eventually scaling this efficaciously to higher gains, like the 25-50 needed for useful electricity production.
There is no "triumph" here, just an improved $10M container that, blasted with 50 kWh of the highest-grade energy, electric power, produced 0.7 kWh of the lowest-grade energy, fast neutrons. Check the value of a kWh on your electric bill.
This is a scientific and technological advancement, not a practical commercial engineering one. It is the necessary precursor to any future commercial one. To call that cynical is just ignorance.
Goodness gracious. This is the definition of cynical -- an argumentation of "why hasn't this solved everything?" and an appeal to an electric bill. I don't know why these fusion energy discussions seems to attract the worst of our impatience and edge-lord cynicism. At least we haven't had a smarmy "always 5 decades away" post yet.
Science and engineering is made of hundreds of unsung triumphs with incremental decades-long payoffs. Like it or not, the "Q>1" mark has been a target for decades. I am glad to see it finally surpassed, and look forward to the order-of-magnitude increase we need to make the economics work.
What improvements are available? Get more neutron kinesis from each target, say 10 kWh? Bring the input energy down, through more efficient lasers, maybe even to 1 kWh? Bring the cost of the target down, from $10M each to, what, $10? Let us assume further that tritium is free, and that collecting the neutrons and driving a steam turbine (the major cost of operating a nuke) is also free.
But 10 kWh of hot neutrons translates to, at best, 4 kWh of electrical energy, and $2.50 per kWh is an order of magnitude more than we pay now. So, even in the best of all conceivable outcomes, this turkey does not fly.
We get "breakthroughs" of greater magnitude on a regular schedule in solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, that do not get trumpeted by the DoE.
This is a weapons program, operated by weapons researchers, pursuing weapons goals. The announcement is an attempt by the US DoE to help secure funding by making it look like they are involved in something besides nuclear weapons. How cynical do you need for it to be?
One misses the point if one assumes that this is about which technology is most appropriate for de-carbonizing the world in the near future -- it is clear that the LCoE of wind and solar are phenomenal, and will continue to ramp up with the exponential curve of adoption. Solar and wind, AND storage, will get there first by a long shot. For that, I am grateful. Yay for learning curves.
But I don't accept your premise of an exclusive or. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. The economics of fusion will not be what we need as a game changer for this generation, but learning curves and technological progress are like contributing to your 401k when you're in your 20s, and they will apply to fusion just like they did for solar. And by next generation, it would be lovely to have a gamut of technologies to choose from for different use-cases (powering spaceflight, for example).
The world is enriched by scientific and engineering progress, and just because I like Messi doesn't mean I think Ronaldo is shit. I think there is a tendency in these fusion discussions to put up a strawman and to assume that any excitement about fusion detracts from the practical tools that we can apply today. I can only assume that this tendency comes from the green-washing energy companies have engaged in (e.g. "green hydrogen" from natural gas). I understand this cynicism, because it has been earned. However cynicism can prevent us from being happy for real accomplishments -- and yes, the Q>1 is as arbitrary as celebrating the year 2000, but it IS an accomplishment.
If anybody ever demonstrates electric power from fusion, lo those many decades on, the world might stifle a yawn, looking on from its paradise of fantastically cheap and abundant solar and wind power.
One thing is certain: the nuke weapons will be incrementally more sophisticated.
I started wondering why the beginning was an advertisement for diversity and inclusion, along with a constant back-patting of the current administration, even though this was a decades-long endeavor spanning both republican and democratic leadership.
Because the people who worked on it decades ago aren't making daily decisions about their careers any more. Young people are, and it would be really dumb to recruit people to solve the real and hard problems of improving this technology from only like 25% of the population.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. --Stephen Jay Gould
As someone who graduated into our country investing in air bases, cafeterias, supply chains, bullets, diesel and barracks in 2 occupied countries instead of this, I'd say thanking the president is in order.
I have to wonder if you are an investor in one of the private companies trying to do fusion, because NIF beat all of them.
Just a note, no one (really, no one) is doing ICF outside of national labs because no one has the resources to fund ICF other than governments. If you're wondering why your fusion friends aren't excited about this, it's because now the pendulum will swing and people will abandon MCF in droves, because ICF actually achieved ignition whereas MCF hasn't yet.
A lot of fools who poured their money into all the trendy start ups are soon to realize they made their bets wrong. Everyone else is playing defense now.
[0] I said MCF hasn't "gotten close" but it has, that was a bit harsh. It's just NIF beat them.
Sorry, but if I can get a politician to do the right thing for the wrong reason then score one for me.
Political hoopla in exchange for further research into fusion? (Especially now that ignition has been achieved?) I'll make that trade every time.
Bonus points if they want to trumpet the heroic effort in the schools to get more kids interested in the science?
This nation has to get there first. If that causes liberals and conservatives to snipe at each other and compete to advance the frontier then that's nothing but a win for the US. I hope conservatives are mad. I want you to be butthurt.
You're complaining like I care about your cause. I don't. Neither do I care about the liberal cause. I only care about how I can manipulate the both of you and your fellow political fuzzy wuzzies to the benefit of this republic using your pseudo-religious polito-babble.
Could someone who understands the science explain how excited I, as someone passionate about clean energy, should be about this, or how big a grain of salt I should take it with?
It's yet another "over unity" announcement. The fact that it comes from NIF at LLNL makes it a bit more credible that fusion actually occurred than some of the profit-motivated announcements of late.
However it will still take decades (if ever) to turn this into a working electric power system.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there haven't been "over unity" announcements before this -- aside from bombs. The Q of 1.5 here is the story. All Qs before have been under 1.
Huh, ok. After some quick Googling, Wikipedia paints JET has having tried, and failed, to reach Q=1, only getting 0.67, which was way back in 1997.
It's very strange to read that we get Q=0.67 in 1997 in a tokomak, and then Q=1.5 in 2022 with a totally different laser inertial confinement design. That... seems to be the written history.
I know Iter would be surpassing the record, but the timelines are long to the point that one loses hope in the project.
I feel like most of these "breakthrough" announcements are just PR for reasearchers, startups and the energy industry in general. I get it, they need the money. Everyone needs money. But they're going about it in a clickbait-y way: appealing to anxiety over losing our comfortable way of living. Nobody wants to hear about deep sacrifices to recover from reckless human development over the last few hundred years. Instead, people are more interested in hearing about a quick fix that isn't going to require them to lift a finger, however unlikely it will be realized.
Correct. The two hard problems are sustaining a reaction over a period of time and, given that first constraint, having that reaction generate more collectible energy than is being used to sustain it.
We solved the problem of using fusion to create vast amounts of energy in a short amount of time half a century ago, but the primary application for that approach is excavation (and all ways that word can be applied euphemistically), not energy production.
Indeed, you can build a fusor in your garage that fuses quite happily. The hard part is making a practical power generation system from this. Net energy is very hard.
It's a breakthrough at a fundamental level, but at the higher level of looking at the whole fusion installation as a blackbox with a grid hookup it is still nowhere near a net energy producer. Rather, the amount of energy required to sustain fusion just dropped dramatically, so we're closer but we are still quite far from actually making this useful. Still, an impressive step.
To me the major question is if once fusion is viable (assuming we get there) if it can compete on a cost basis with renewables (yes, base load etc).
The energy budget alone would naively suggest to me that it can't.
Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?
Just throw down more collectors, improve storage, and call it a day.
> Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?
Because Fusion and Gen IV Fission the kind of tech that would also dramatically improve standards of living.
Renewables + storage essentially keeps the present day standards of living without CO2 emissions. Big deal. That proposition won't convince the very high IQ people you need to drop from Wall St. and FAAMG.
People work to improve their standards of living, thinking that it would be possible to mount a global effort to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 200 years from now is a proposition which is solely realistic in the minds of naive and monodimensional people like the Greta Thumberg, Extinction rebellion etc.
Gen IV fission I'd support. I think we're an awful lot closer to that than practical energy-generation fusion.
Our biggest example of how to make fusion work involves a gigantic gravity well, which we are not going to produce on Earth without some very theoretical (and, if made practical, very dangerous) technology.
I'm unclear on how either fusion or Gen-IV fission would improve our standard of living though. Can you give some examples? This is an angle I haven't heard. The average American household (at least) already has all the energy it needs running into it; can't really put much more in without giving the average American household the energy density needed to blow up their neighborhood, which I don't think improves our standard of living.
Fact is, if we keep adding waste heat created from some stored energy, be it fossil, fission or fusion, to the environment, net temperature of the earth has to rise to get rid of said waste heat via additional radiation into space. The cheaper that energy is the more the temperature will rise. In that sense, the only "clean" energy sources are what is radiated in from the sun and what is conducted out from the core.
Ah, the handwavey "just". It has so many uses, here including the exact opposite. "Just improve this breakthrough a bit and commercialize it and we can bypass all the problems with conventional solar."
SOOOO handwavey. "Improve Storage" is a thing they've been working on longer than fusion energy. It's proven to be similarly intractable, and prone to bad science reporting ("10-15 years away").
Battery technology has been improving very steadily since the advent of solar and even though it is expensive if you look at the battery storage requirement as a function of PV installed power the only thing that has marred the equation is the incredible speed with which PV has become cheaper.
And no, it's not 10-15 years away, you can buy a battery backed PV system with well over a night's storage capacity today from a large number of vendors. Search for Hybrid PV systems.
Good news! They are working on that. As a society, we can research more than one thing at a time.
If your position is that we're spending too much money on fusion research, and not enough storage and solar, perhaps you could share what you think we're spending on those things, and propose a better allocation?
As basic research, it's an excellent announcement and I'm excited about it. There are all manner of interesting applications for laboratory fusion in the matter-reconfiguration space (we still have no solution for replacing helium as a resource, and there's a finite amount of the stuff available planet-wide).
But as a power source?
When the conversation moves to "So when can I run my own fusion reactor in my basement," I tune out given that I can install my own self-sufficiency solar array in my backyard right now. The energy exchange from fusion to electricity problem is already solved as long as one isn't constraining one's fusion source to a truly exotic configuration that is rarely seen in nature (given how common and powerful gravitationally-induced fusion is).
I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get to the point where fusion power generation is commercially viable, but practically speaking that's likely something for my grandkids to get excited about, at the earliest... While we can do the photovoltaics installations right now.
I'd suggest waiting 4~24 hours (NOT the deluge of breathless 30 minute write-ups that will be coming) for some popular science news outlets to write about it and provide context. Ars Technica is my outlet of choice, but I'd welcome other suggestions.
It’s a big deal because it demonstrates scientific break even for the first time and confirms that the process of achieving ignition is repeatable. Ignition is important because it’s how the process can be scaled in a chain reaction where the heat of the reaction sustains the reaction, not just laser energy alone. To get useful electricity, you usually need an energy gain of 25-50.
NIF is a scientific demonstration facility, not in any way designed to be a power plant, nor should it be. it’s wasteful to build a steam turbine and boiler and efficient lasers when you haven’t even demonstrated ignition yet. Now that they have ignition, they can start thinking about the power plant a little bit more. But they still need to increase the gain to like 25-50 by leveraging ignition.
Fusion promises the energy density of fission (traditional nuclear power) with very-little/none of nuclear waste and dirty bomb problems. Compared to oil/coal, fusion is free and clean energy. Compared to traditional nuclear, fusion is ~99.99% free and clean energy.
This is the first little ember of that promise of fusion power. It's going to take a lot more research and time, but they have proved that it is possible. It's all 'just' engineering from here. Think 1-4 decades.
It's not a working plant by any means. But if this continues apace, your children are likely to spend most of their lives in a world with free and clean energy for all the nations of the Earth. Energy so abundant and clean that your children will be able to reverse climate change by powering machines to filter out all the excess CO2, for starters. After that, who knows?
The positive about this is that it's inertial confinement. The tokamak design as is being built in the massive boondoggle that is ITER is (IMHO) fundamentally flawed. When dealing with a superheated plasma, you fundamentally have the problem of turbulence. So as neutrons escape (and lose energy while they do it) they destroy your container (aka "neutron embrittlement", one of my favorite terms). Add turbulence for something at 100 million degrees and I just don't see how that's viable.
Inertial containment essentially wraps the fusing mass in something to absorb the neutrons.
Still, even though exceeding the laser energy as direct energy output is significant, we're still nowhere near positive electricity output. There's efficiency loss with lasers, operating costs and degradation with lasers and efficiency loss in converting that energy to electricity.
The most obvious way is boiling water and turning a steam turbine. It's tried and true but is also a process with its own efficiency limits. There's a lot of talk of direct energy conversion but this still seems like pie in the sky.
For the record, the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines.
I personally support non-ITER methods of further research in this area. Hopefully something will come of it. I'm not yet convinced commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic but I'd like to be proven wrong. I still see space-based solar power collection as the most likely future of humanity's power generation.
> the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines.
For wind and hydro, the fluid motion is directly coupled to the rotor of a generator. Coal, gas, and nukes produce only heat, that must drive a heat engine to drive the generator. The lossy step is the heat engine. The turbine is incidental.
That said, the steam turbines used with coal and nukes require frequent expensive maintenance, a thing not true of water or air turbines. This is why coal and nukes are today uncompetitive, and daily fall further behind.
There's quite a lot of muddled or misunderstood things in this post.
ICF targets don't absorb neutrons.
Direct conversion is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator We use steam turbines because they're both efficient and convenient engineering wise. They aren't bad at what they do by any means, so I don't understand why you're saying all these generation technologies using steam is some sort of big criticism.
Thermionic generators are an option when you want to minimize size and complexity however. The reactors the USSR launched on radar satellites used them for example. NASA is considering similar designs for Mars and deep space missions (no, I'm not talking about RTGs, but rather single digit Megawatt scale mini reactors under the MegaPower program).
Not that I'm any expert, but given that these giant lasers are the definition of niche products I imagine they're also the least optimized.
From some quick googling, apparently the overall efficiency of a steam power station is around 29% (https://www.eeeguide.com/steam-turbine-efficiency/), measured by heat-in vs heat-equivalent-electricity-out. So once we get past the laser inefficiencies, we get 29% of net power.
From my completely lay-person understanding, the "hard part" was getting more energy out of the reaction than was put in. Now it's an optimization problem, unless there's a hard constraint on the design of these lasers that can't be improved beyond a certain point
As I understand it, yes that's exactly how it's meant to work... You drop in a pellet, blast it to the point of fusion, capture the energy, then repeat.
Fuel cells store and release energy chemically (analogously to batteries), they do not generate it. So they aren't comparable to methods of electricity generation.
I'm hoping that this is confirmation that inertial confinement is a viable path to fusion and that it will herald a surge in investment in the technology.
> I’m also proud to announce today that I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough
Just so we have it, General Fusion and maybe others are working on a fusion reactor that uses liquid metal to compress the plasma instead of lasers, which is sort of a fusion Diesel engine:
My guess is that turbulence and frictional losses in the metal might prevent getting over unity, but since the goal is to heat the metal to run a turbine, maybe that doesn't matter. Also it sounds like they are trying to manufacture tritium rather than generate electricity.
Noise could also be an issue, but it's "easy" enough to put it in a vacuum chamber like this one:
Hmmm... Possible that I have heard incorrectly. I will have to wait for the transcript, as close captioning did not work.
edit: You were correct. The "not" before the "five decades" was spoken muted and I missed it.
Dr. Budll talking - "... probably decades, uh not six decades, i don't think, i think not five decades, which is what we used to say, i think it is moving into foreground... "
Another clean energy boondoggle, which means we will be using more and more carbon in the future.
People forget that until recently France managed to generate 75% of electricity from fission energy using 1970s technology.
French nuclear activists even managed to shutdown a much improved fission energy reactor when an inquiry had given it clean bill of health.
How much cleaner could fission energy be if all the money invested in fusion energy had been invested in fission energy instead?
You know where all the drive towards fusion energy comes from - the carbon industry secretly funding activists and channelling resources from the best form of clean energy to one which for the last 70 years has been promising to be available in the next 30 years.
You could say the same about any "new" energy technology though. Solar was a 'bondoggle' and a complete waste of time and money... right up until it wasn't.
Fusion is at the point Fission was in the 1940s. It works pretty well in a lab using extremely expensive equipment, makes a net loss of energy, and isn't ready for grid-scale production. But that will change if we continue to invest heavily in the commercialization of the technology.
The biggest advantages of fusion energy are its safety and non-proliferation aspects. You can very easily produce Plutonium using a commercial nuclear fission reactor plus some reprocessing facilities. That's not possible with Fusion since it uses non-fissile materials that can't be processed into a weapon. There are very few nations that should be trusted with fissile materials, and therefore very few that should be trusted with fission reactors.
Do you see how the announcement veered of into the weapons advantage this gave the US?
If it all works will the US be willing to allow other countries to have its energy technology if it means "safe" nuclear weapons?
Just think of the advantage it gives. You can bomb out an area knowing that there were will no nuclear fallout denying you access to it once you've eliminated the population.
If fusion is successful will the countries with the technologies make them freely available to other countries?
Take the US for instance. They have provoked Russia into invading Ukraine to keep Ukraine from joining NATO and thus permitting advanced NATO weaponry to be placed on Ukrainian soil, and having succeeded in getting a ban on Russian energy exports to Europe and blowing up the Nordstream gas pipelies, they are charging Europe 4 times as much for LNG while profiting from oil imports from Venezuela whose export to other countries they have sanctioned.
Surprisingly Europe is not charging US energy companies for massive windfall profits, but they are ready to do it to theirs.
Why should we believe that fusion energy will be different? Fusion energy if it becomes available may be "clean", but will it be cheap and freely available?
The countries who can be "trusted" with fission energy are the biggest carbon emitters,so why do you and they believe that they can't be trusted with fission energy so no one else should have it?
If they alone switched to fission energy that would be a huge drop in carbon emissions, so what is stopping them if they are truly sincere about carbon emissions?
I'm a nonexpert and don't have time to develop expertise, even lay expertise, in this field. What I want to see before I get excited about fusion iss a practical application of the technology. I'd like to see it power something real: a factory, a server farm, or some other energy intensive facility.
Hopefully this is an important first step, but this seems like an extraordinarily hard problem. Often, scaling these technologies is the most challenging part of implementing them.
it's not about powering something powerful, I'm not sure if you're actually a "kid" like your username suggests, but when generating energy we're looking about the input and output of Watts or Megawatts. So how much energy do I have to put in to get to which output. What you do with that energy doesn't matter, it can be a server farm, it can be your grandmas kettle
Maybe Dang can use ChatGPT to pre-generate some standard low-information replies on every post? It could save a lot of time. I volunteer to help train it to do the "I can build this in two weeks" and "why does company X need so many people" replies.
I don't want to be 'that guy' buuuutttt can you turn down the hostility a few notches please?
I understand that HN is a multicultural place and that people across the globe express their opinions in different ways however, a quick look through your previous comments before deciding to down-vote or flag made me take a look at your previous comment history before deciding whether to down-vote or flag it.
We are all new to HN at some stage which is why I've taken the time to write this in an attempt to be kind, gentle and guiding.
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377