Fusion Breakthrough... maybe...

(updated with the CORRECT article, not one from a year ago that was similar)

Mon December 12, 2022

For the first time ever, US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a source familiar with the project confirmed to CNN.

The US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce the breakthrough Tuesday.

The result of the experiment is a massive step in a decadeslong quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. Researchers have for decades attempted to recreate nuclear fusion – replicating the fusion that powers the sun.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will make an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough,” the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/politics/nuclear-fusion-energy-us-scientists-climate/index.html

Here is the original article I linked.  The new result is better I guess? Was this one not correct? (since this is a year old)

...Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 1016 watts of power....

...Although the achievement represents a milestone in fusion research, the laboratory stopped short of declaring ignition, the goal for which NIF was named and which it had planned to achieve by 2012. The fusion yield fell short of the 1.9 MJ that the NIF laser brought to bear on the hollow target, called a hohlraum, in which the fuel capsule was suspended. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences review of NIF’s design defined ignition as fusion yield equal to or more than the laser energy input. In NIF’s approach, known as indirect drive, 85% of the laser’s energy is lost in the conversion of UV to x rays that occurs inside the hohlraum.

Stephen Bodner, a former director of the laser fusion program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and a persistent critic of NIF and the indirect drive approach, congratulated the lab on the achievement, saying it was close enough to ignition for him. “They made spectacular progress,” he says. “I’m surprised they found a way to minimize the laser–plasma problems,” he says. He added that “it demonstrates to the world that there’s no fundamental reason why laser fusion can’t work.”

But Bodner cautions that the NIF results won’t extrapolate to higher energy gains due to the inefficiency of the indirect drive process. “If you want to get to high gains, you have to directly illuminate the target,” he says, referring to an approach pursued at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and NRL, where laser beams are symmetrically directed onto the fuel capsule.....

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20210817a/full/

In reply to aircooled :

That article is from August of 2021. Needless to say fusion is still perpetually "x number years away".

My google news feed gives me fusion news everytime I look at. 

If only someone here knew about energy and was willing to talk us through it!

In reply to Robbie (Forum Supporter) :

RossD said:

In reply to aircooled :

That article is from August of 2021. Needless to say fusion is still perpetually "x number years away".

My google news feed gives me fusion news everytime I look at. 

I'm skeptical, too, but there does seem to be something going on. Apparently there's going to be a press conference about it tomorrow:

Hopefully, we’ll learn more during a livestream tomorrow, cryptically billed as an announcement of a “major scientific breakthrough” by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

RossD said:

In reply to aircooled :

That article is from August of 2021. Needless to say fusion is still perpetually "x number years away".

My google news feed gives me fusion news everytime I look at. 

Hah!  So it is!   I guess that does give a good idea what these "breakthroughs" tend to be.  I did find the wrong article though.  I will update the first post appropriately.

Robbie (Forum Supporter) said:

If only someone here knew about energy and was willing to talk us through it!

I don't think we'd be ready for it, though.

Came here expecting something else:
 

I saw a headline today saying US scientists managed a net gain in output... so maybe?

Sorry for the NYT paywall

barefootcyborg5000 said:

I saw a headline today saying US scientists managed a net gain in output... so maybe?

Sorry for the NYT paywall

Paraphrasing but an important asterisk on the breakthrough is that it's a net gain relative to the energy that actually hit the target, not the total energy involved. Reportedly, the lasers being used are very inefficient so it was still a net loss. Not trying detract, a net positive reaction is very promising but there is still a ways to go.

In reply to Error404 :

Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't read the article. Headlines painting rosy pictures and all. 

One step closer...

And I guess that makes fusion power available in something like 30 years?

It does look like the "more in than out" announcement is going to be made soon.  

But the step they have not gotten is sustained fusion- the energy out should be more if all of the fuel is consumed.  And then they need to really sustain that.  And then figure out how to extract all of that energy to power things.

What I read and never thought about before was once it's totally net positive they then have to figure out how to harness the created energy and cover it to useful stuff like electricity. 

Even if they get it so that there's a net positive to power all the things...

...there's not enough freshwater on the planet to cool the system at that scale. 

In reply to Captdownshift (Forum Supporter) :

Sure there is.  Heat and temperature are not the same thing.  The heat is going to be comparable to other power stations, but the temperature is a few orders of magnitude higher.

Probably the first step will not be water, but some other fluid like material at those high temps.

In reply to alfadriver :

I remember Mr. Gates posing that new nuclear plants use mercury as a coolant...

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

some use sodium or potassium.  The first nuclear power plant used a mixture of the two, which is a liquid at room temp, like mercury is.  But it's incredibly dangerous- with water reaction being rather violent.

Error404 said:

barefootcyborg5000 said:

I saw a headline today saying US scientists managed a net gain in output... so maybe?

Sorry for the NYT paywall

Paraphrasing but an important asterisk on the breakthrough is that it's a net gain relative to the energy that actually hit the target, not the total energy involved. Reportedly, the lasers being used are very inefficient so it was still a net loss. Not trying detract, a net positive reaction is very promising but there is still a ways to go.

The article from last year already achieved net gain relative to energy that hit the target, so that wouldn't exactly be a breakthrough.  Here's what I'm seeing reported:

According to The Financial Times, which first reported the news Sunday, preliminary results show ignition took place, producing 2.5 megajoules of energy, or 120% of the energy that was consumed by the lasers.

Stampie said:

What I read and never thought about before was once it's totally net positive they then have to figure out how to harness the created energy and cover it to useful stuff like electricity. 

Taking a dirt nap here hand raised when this scenario finally arrives.............

Driven5 said:

 

The article from last year already achieved net gain relative to energy that hit the target, so that wouldn't exactly be a breakthrough.  Here's what I'm seeing reported:

According to The Financial Times, which first reported the news Sunday, preliminary results show ignition took place, producing 2.5 megajoules of energy, or 120% of the energy that was consumed by the lasers.

Yeah, that is the confusing part, and why I accidentally linked an old article.  The breakthrough appears to be the same as last year, but a bit better.  I am thinking the new benchmark takes into account ALL power used.  The old one I think was more the just the power of the lasers hitting the target (not everything else required to get there)?

A so-called “net energy gain” is a major milestone in a decades long attempt to source clean, limitless energy from nuclear fusion – the reaction that happens when two or more atoms are fused together.

The experiment put in 2.05 megajoules of energy to the target and resulted in 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy output – generating more than 50% more energy than was put in. It’s the first time an experiment resulted in a meaningful gain of energy.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/us/energy-officials-announce-nuclear-fusion-climate-scn/index.html

In listening to the official news conference on this (by the scientists) it sounds like the major breakthrough of this test is not really the energy output (which had been done before as shown in the second article posted above) but the fact that they achieved ignition of the fuel (which is probably the same as explosion, but they probably don't want to use that word), which shows the practicality of using a laser to create a fusion reaction.

There appears to be some implication about nuclear weapons development and testing involved (expect that to be left out of the government statements).  I don't think this is necessarily a fusion bomb (power is not really a problem with nukes) but seems to have to do with testing (since testing is pretty restrictive now).

And yes, I would certainly not expect any practical applications soon, but it proves the theory that it's actually possible and seems to imply fusion power can more be described as an eventuality than it had before (which it was more of a theoretically possible).

Summary:  It WAS a breakthrough.

Assuming we're getting somewhat close to commercial viability the next hurdle will be working out an agreeable transition plan...

1.  How will we avoid placing some politicians at a disadvantage to other politicians?

2.  How do we prevent regulatory agencies from dragging approval out to serve their self interests?

3.  How will current energy sector workers and investors be unharmed?

4.  ???

One thought I have is to initially only use the power for carbon sequestration as the technology is well understood, can be placed absolutely anywhere, and renders both  existing and future carbon in the atmosphere completely manageable.

In fact, the solid carbon material that is sequestered from the atmosphere could be converted to hydrocarbons and used as fuel so that no more drilling is required.

Decide how much carbon we want to remove from the current atmosphere (50%, 75%, ???) and lock it back in the ground and the rest just gets continuously recycled from tail pipe emissions to sequestration to hydrocarbon conversion.

Of course, we'd eventually want to create a more direct path between energy generation and energy consumption but there'd be no urgency as we'd be able to set and control CO2 levels at will regardless of how much GHG is being produced.

Thoughts?    

Just how is fusion going to produce energy the planet can use?  Is it going to be fusion producing steam to spin turbines?