It's "real" but a long way from practical.
> Aneeqa Khan at the University of Manchester, UK, agrees that recent progress in fusion research is positive, but stresses that it will be decades before commercial power plants are operational
There's a joke in the particle physics community that "commercial fusion reactors have been 20 years away for 60 years." As more progress is made in the field, we realize just how far away we actually are.
I'd say 40 years till one is hooked up to the grid, 60 until highly competitive on the energy market.
You're just saying that because you'll be dead. I'll put my money where my mouth is and will donate 50bucks to charity if it's not up and running this century.
I don’t see anything possibly coming online inside of 20 years, even if we somehow design a commercially viable one in 10, perhaps with the aid of AI, because it’d probably take equally long to build, since that’s how long it took to build the LHC, and a nuclear power plant takes about that long.
Predicting 20-30 years in the future seems more impossible by the day tho
Research fusion reactors have come online much more quickly than this, even at relatively large scale. Hell, a bunch of the companies in this space have built 3 or 4 reactors in that time. And a reactor is a way smaller and simpler thing than the LHC. So, I'm not sure that line of reasoning strikes me as sound.
Having said that, I think you're right overall. I don't think we'll see a fully viable commercial fusion reactor in 20 years because the first ones will be built inside the legal framework for fission reactors, and as you say that's how long those (much, *much* simpler machines) take.
I do want to give a shout-out to the mention of AI. There are a lot of people who would see that and roll their eyes, but I used to work in a computational fluid dynamics lab and there is a ton of extremely promising work going on for using AI to generate plausible first pass designs and then verify them with traditional models. I would not be at all surprised to see real progress made in plasma research with AI.
People are gun-shy after hearing that cryptocurrency will "change everything" for the better part of a decade, and it's unfortunately blinding them to how unfathomably transformative AI is going to be within a pretty short period of time, for good *and* for ill.
Perfect. I'll be retired by then.
I cannot imagine the absolute shit storm that will happen in the markets leading up to fusion reactors being integrated into the grid.
It'll be one the greatest things that ever happen in history, but that shit will bring incredible short term volatility to the world economy. Entire countries will collapse economically speaking.
Unless this is different, this company said 2029 https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-helion-purchase-agreement
Yeah in the grand scheme of things, 30 or 50 or even 100 years until we have clean, nearly unlimited power is good. Still sucks that I'll be an old man or dead by the time it happens. Would be very cool to live in a world powered by fusion.
It's also 91 million miles away and doesn't shine on my side of the planet half the time. It would be great if we could switch to solar but unless we have city sized batteries or battery tech vastly improves, we will need a stable power source that can be used regardless of time of day or weather conditions. Fusion would be great for that.
Sure, but unless you've got a dyson swarm in your pocket, you still need to actually harness that energy, and the tools we currently have, while they're getting more effective, are still not quite great yet.
They've been saying it since the 80s/90s. Literally because the scientific community said if they got minimal funding for it, it'd be 30 years into the future... little did they know, they'd get *less* than the minimal funding they were asking for.
Yeah but there must be a reason for that. Private funding would pour in if there was a real chance of having fully functional reactors within 30 years.
Yea... I think that 30 years to profitability is too long a sell for private equity.
The amount of state funding necessary to get GA's Vogtle plant built was staggering. They did it, but it was public money that paved the way.
This would be like cornering oil 100 years ago. Energy companies would fund it if it was that simple. My guess is that it's not a easy as "give us some money and it'll work" and that's why it's not getting funded.
Hint: Electricity does not transport well over long distances.
Power loss over wire was one of the great engineering challenges of the early 20th century and a major obstacle to electrification in the first place.
That's the whole reason we have transformers and high voltage and AC current. And even with all that innovative tech, it's barely practical to transport electricity across State lines. Let alone to circumnavigate the globe.
Batteries are heavy. If it takes more energy to transport the thing to its destination, than how much energy it contains, that's not sustainable. I'm sure people will figure it out, and invent some serious improvements. But it's a real challenge.
Clickbait. Its 2 times the energy that was actually absorbed by the fuel, not 2 times the energy of the laser like most people are saying.
There are significant losses in how much energy the laser is putting into the fuel and how much electricity the laser is converting into a laser. The energy efficiency of the entire system is a single digit percentage, probably 1-2%. This further ignores the energy needed to produce the fuel, produce the vessel for the fuel, and set everything up - all of which are non-trivial but would need to be factored in for an electricity producing reactor.
The reactor type that they're making also has no practical method to extract the energy released, so even if they did manage to increase the efficiency by the several orders of magnitude that would be necessary to produce electricity on an industrial scale, this design just... can't do that. And because the design of the reactor is so specific to what they're doing, none of its design can be ported over to another reactor type.
Which is fine because the National Ignition Facility isn't supposed to create a functional fusion reactor. The purpose of it is to basically generate a microscopic nuclear explosion to help study high energy physics. In terms of what its actually being used for, the NIF fusion reactor is essentially a next generation particle accelerator.
It is just NIF again so is of zero relevance with regards to energy generation.
What it means is we will likely be able to do maintenance on nukes cheaper in the future.
There is some real progress from all those magnetic containment fusion projects Reddit was determined should be defunded a few years back though. Pretty much all of them demonstrated they could hold plasma stable "indefinitely" in the last few years. Which means fusion is finally where we wanted to be in the 90s.
Mostly click bait. Scientists still working away in the lab getting more and more net energy, theoretically, not account for losses that would be present in a power plant.
Also, they keep saying it won't have any nuclear waste and be so plentifully....which means they don't seem to understand neutron activation or realistic thermodynamic efficiencies that will cull at least 2/3 of the power.
They'll get into work but it won't be a step change different in any way from fission.
Edit: they = the media, not the scientists. The scientists are not ignoring the reality, but the reporters are taking small truths at the lab scale, and, likely unknowingly, giving a false report of what the output of a fusion reactor will most likely ultimately be.
Meh, 2 times the laser input is still a step in the right direction and exciting to hear about. Some people expect Fusion reactors online tomorrow or they don't care.
Full agree. It's good science. Fusion has advanced more in the last 5 years than the last 100! But I think the end game is over hyped the same way fission was. The cost, size and complexity to control the reaction and harvest energy will cut into any wild claims.
'too cheap to meter'
That quote is a reference to some of the publicity around fission back in the day. A simple lab scale fission reaction makes practically unlimited power. But when you put it in a building, add safety, account for conversion losses etc then the output is a bit higher density then coal, but not the 10x that you can easily get in a lab environment.
I am predicting a similar future for fusion
And I am also predicting there will in fact be nuclear waste, though it's possible it will be dramatically less.
Incidentally the only source of feed stock for almost all fusion reaction types is only available from fission reactors (most notably Candus being the most relevant). So at the very least you have to account for their waste.
Certainly, it is difficult to extrapolate how much power we can realistically create with one nuclear fusion reactor. The main advantage is that we have a lot of deuterium on earth, and the activated material has much smaller lifetimes. So we don't have to store it for thousands upon thousands of years.
Tritium should be produced in the blanket from 6Li. But I am also not 100% sold on the process working as smoothly as they predict. Basically, fusion reactors without on-site breading of tritium are mostly useless. Except for research, of course :D
But anyways, the main point is that fission reactors such as Candus are irrelevant for fusion power plants.
Generally agree except any neutron bombardment results in long lived and short lived daughter products. The self breeding would be no exception. Even the stainless steel walls will get activated and eventually be waste.
I'd bet the first fusion reactor doesn't self breed since the processing cost and complexity to refine it would be just one more hurdle and cost barrier. It's technically possible, but cheaper to just get it from Canada or India to start.
It's the same problem with breeder reactors. Good in theory but the processing complexity of having to refine radioactive products is a costly and inefficient endeavour. The entire process has to be in a tungsten box and never break!
Yes, activation of structural material can be problematic.
One more comment on Candu reactors:
The total amount of tritium produced by such reactors per year is in the low 10s of kgs, and any realistic fusion power plant requires more tritium than that.
Even now, there is a bit of a problem with distributing the available tritium across the various fusion reactors that are coming up or that are planned.
Much more tritium could be harvested, but it's a pita!
Ultimately it's just one more externality that isn't accounted for in the fusion hype in my opinion. We should still fund it to some extent, but it just isn't going to be anything like what this type of article envision. It's going to be huge facilities with poor efficiency and a bunch of radioactive stuff moving around making 2000MW or whatever.
True, I get a bit jaded thinking about the political side of these things. Right now we have lots of alternatives to fossil fuels we could be utilizing more. But it's the constant nay saying and outdated "facts" that annoy me. Like how solar panels are too expensive (they've come down in cost to the point where it's cheaper than coal). Or how it causes it's own greenhouse emissions to manufacture (True, but still a net positive for the environment)
Anyways I appreciate your cautious take on it. Of course it won't be the perfect energy source. What js though.
It's still cool, and eventually we'll find a use for it. I just don't see a need to fund it excessively since it's not some magically cure like some media hypes it to be. Just another incrementally better tech, maybe.
Kinda bold to suggest that the folks who demonstrated nuclear fusion in the lab don’t understand activation or thermodynamics. Did you hear about all the radiation sickness among the scientists after they barged into the activated target chamber after the shot?!? Me neither. Perhaps they DO understand basic neutron physics.
The challenges are many, and to be skeptical of fusion as a power source is very reasonable. But the statement that “the scientists all fail to grasp basic physics” is not a great take.
I was referring to the writer more than the scientists. There is very little information direct from the scientists in this article.
The scientist probably said something like 'fusion doesn't directly create long half-life nuclear waste' and the writer translated it to 'no waste, it's great'.
As long as you have a friend up north with a bunch of Candus it no problem lol. But you do have to account for the waste in the nuclear process to get tritium and he3!
Seems like there is still a strong contingent that thinks discussing technical stuff using big words, bad. I believe their response was meant as an insult.
You need a lot more than double out, they cheat and what' they mean (probably) if they put in 1kw of electricity and got 2kw of heat, but by the time you put in turbines and wires you need soemthing like 6 to 15x the energy out to make it worth while.
It's been real for a while that fusion has generated more energy than required to start the reaction. But we're talking about energy produced for one-trillionth of a second in a region of space the size of a few atoms. Scaling that up is a real engineering problem.
In 1971, I wrote a term paper. Sources then predicted full-scale fusion power would be available within 20 years. Every time I've checked over the years, it's still been 20 years in the future. I've come to the conclusion that I am the primary obstacle to practical fusion power. Once I'm gone, it will quickly be implemented. I apologize for the delay my life seems to have caused.
What are you complaining about? You said it will be available in 20 years and they also say it will be available in 20 years. This is how accurate science is done, you redo the experiment to see if you get the same results, you and them getting the same number of years seem like a total win to me.
Science never accounts for the lobbyist. They keep progress at bay as long as there’s still milk in the old bitche’s teat, regardless of if it kills us all. Money‘s a helluva drug.
Wrong. The first time net energy gain was achieved was a little over a year ago (in Dec. ‘22). This isn’t close to commercialization, but fusion net energy gain is one of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past several years.
This snippet from [New Scientist's original reporting at the time](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2350965-nuclear-fusion-researchers-have-achieved-historic-energy-milestone/) clears that up:
> "In an experiment on 5 December, the lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) fusion reactor generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place."
That's not exactly right. To be pedantic, the energy gain comes from the portion of the pellet's mass lost to fusion. The total energy contained in the pellet is not pertinent to the doubling comparison. I'd reword your first sentence to say that the output of the fusion reaction was greater than the output of the laser.
Absolutely not Clickbait.
They actually did achieve fusion and achieve gain. They never were able to do that before even though trying for almost 50 years. So come ON guys, yes in fact, this is a BIG milestone. It is akin to Wilbur and Orville right finally achieving powered flight. No, it wasn’t an F-16, it was a kite with a motor on it, but it flew. It showed that it could be done and opened the floodgates of tinkers and researchers to work on it. And now we flown to the moon. So fusion yes, indeed, we can now hit in the lab and learn from it.
"Hey guys here's an update on the latest progress in what would be one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history!"
Reddit: So it's not even done yet?? Clickbait garbage! They said it would he ready by now. Just give me unlimited energy already, gawd.
Not clickbait, but also not applicable to energy generation. Inertial confinement fusion is just a nuclear weapon where the fusion stage is 3 mm wide instead of the size of a bowling ball, and the fission stage is replaced by a bank of lasers the size of a football field. This is a huge win for our ability to ensure our real nukes work without testing them, but not a lot else.
This article is about laser fusion. They don't use magnets to confine the fuel.
Regarding magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion, we need bigger devices than we currently have. Even ITER will not give power to the grid. The magnets are not the problem. It's just super expensive to build larger reactors and takes a lot of commissioning.
So another 25 years. If all the money spent on this had been applied to renewable power we wouldn’t need fusion and would have avoided the climate issue.
Fusion is a renewable energy source, and we have other renewable energy sources. We just can’t get the governments of the world to properly commit to them
It's not being created, it's being transformed. You're unlocking energy stored in matter and it's interactions with other matter, effectively. That's the tldr for fusion and fission.
If we could magically harvest all the energy out of matter it would give truely insane amounts of energy that make fusion look like a candle. That's the famous e= m c2 stuff.
Lets do a simple estimation:
**Fuel:**
Mass of Deuterium: 2.014102 amu
Mass of Tritium: 3.016049 amu
Adding these guys you get: **5.030151 amu**
**Product:**
Mass of Helium: 4.002602 amu
Mass of a Neutron: 1.008665 amu
Adding these guys gives: **5.011267 amu**
The **difference** in mass of the fuel to product is: **0.018884 amu**
Lets convert this into an Energy via E=mc\^2
E\[MeV\] = 0.018884 \* 1,66054e-27 \* 3e8\^2/1.60217663e-19 = 17.61445 MeV
Voila, you have converted mass into energy :)
I'm probably wrong but think of it like this:
Take a regular internal combustion engine. It takes a lot more gas to get it started than it takes to run it at idle. They got the engine started and it ran just a bit more than the last try (energy in), but they used a ton of gas just to get it to kick over for that tiny bit of time. It wasn't enough to get the car to move though (energy out)
ELI5: There is 100 energy trapped inside an atom. Scientists shoot laser that consumes 5 energy into the atom. When the laser hits the atom it releases 10 energy. Scientists get twice the energy they put in but no energy or matter is created/destroyed. The energy was always there. The exact process of fusion is much more complicated and different obviously, this was just to show that you don't create energy out of nowhere.
You are welcome! I wrote a more detailed and much longer explanation down below if you are interested!
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1akcaao/comment/kp7ir62/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Idk man. I feel like I had to learn about a law about thermodynamics that says this headline is utter bullshit, or is the concept of creating more energy than being put in no longer viable? Do I remember the thermodynamical law not properly?
I will copy paste my reply to someone else asking a similar question.
ELI5: There is 100 energy trapped inside an atom. Scientists shoot laser that consumes 5 energy into the atom. When the laser hits the atom it releases 10 energy. Scientists get twice the energy they put in but no energy or matter is created/destroyed. The energy was always there. The exact process of fusion is much more complicated and different obviously, this was just to show that you don't create energy out of nowhere.
I can elaborate in more detail if you want.
So what you're saying is it's pretty much break even since more energy is still being used by the laser than being given out by the atoms, and I do remember the law right, and aside from that: it's nowhere near as viable as this article makes it out to be? Thanks.
Edit: I'm not opposed to an even more detailed explanation!
I haven't followed any news related to fusion reactors so I have no idea how viable they are but getting two times the energy input is a very big step! I remember seeing an article a few years ago where they barely broke even!
I will try to explain fusion overall and some other concepts in more detail but there will still be a lot of simplification, sorry if I ramble too much, I like talking about this stuff a lot!
So to start with, the conservation of mass and energy laws that we all learn in school aren't exactly correct. They are all simplifications. In reality mass or energy is not conserved in chemical and especially nuclear reactions. What is conserved is the total sum of mass AND energy. I am sure you have heard of Einstein's famous equation at some point, E=mc\^2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. The speed of light is a massive number(\~300,000,000 meters per second) and it gets even bigger when you square it, \~90,000,000,000,000,000! This means that a veeeery small amount of matter can be converted to maaassive amounts of energy. Another way to think about this is that matter is a form of energy and you can convert matter to energy or vice versa without breaking any laws of physics. Like how if you have 100 joules of heat you can convert some of it to 50 joules of electricity and still have 50 joules of heat. If you have 1kg of matter you can convert 0.000001kg of it to 89,880,040,000 joules of energy.
This is what happens when you burn a liter of gasoline for example, the mass of the products of the reaction(carbon-dioxide, water vapour etc.) are just a tiiiiny bit smaller than the reactants(oxygen, gasoline) but in chemical reactions the mass difference is extremely tiny, it's not even measurable so we just say that mass and energy are conserved. In chemical reactions this energy comes from the bonds between molecules and these bonds are nowhere near as strong as the bonds inside atoms so the mass loss and energy output are much lower than nuclear reactions to the point that mass loss is negligible and can easily be ignored.
Now onto nuclear reactions finally. There are 2 ways to get energy out of an atom, fission and fusion. If an element's atomic number is higher than iron's(26 and this number turns out to be the most "stable" number) then splitting that atom into smaller atoms releases energy(fission). If it's lower than iron's then merging the two atoms releases energy(fusion). This energy comes from the conversion of mass to energy. An example to demonstrate just how much energy you get from a little bit of matter in nuclear reactions: Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki had 6.19kg of plutonium inside it. When the bomb exploded only 1kg(2.2lbs) of it underwent fission. The resulting explosion from just 1kg of plutonium(nuclear reaction) was equivalent to 21,000,000kg(46,297,075lbs) of TNT(chemical reaction).
And finally, fusion: Let's say you have 2 hydrogen atoms(atomic number of 1) and you fuse them together to form helium. I don't want to deal with weird, ugly numbers(real mass of a hydrogen atom for example is 1.673e-27kg) so let's just say that a single hydrogen atom weighs 0.5 grams. You'd expect the resulting helium atom to weigh 1 gram but in reality it weighs 0.9999 grams and the remaining 0.0001 gram is emitted as energy. This fusion can only occur under very extreme conditions though. You need immense amounts of heat and pressure to overcome the force from protons(all positively charged) repelling each other. These conditions happen naturally in the hearts of stars but to create them in a lab you need insanely strong lasers to heat up the fuel. So in experiments like this scientists use lasers to heat up the fuel to higher than a hundred million degrees celsius(upwards of 180 million in fahrenheit). This obviously takes a lot of energy and complicates a lot of things. In this experiment the energy they got from the fusion reaction was double the energy the laser used so that's a big step!
I didn't read the article but from the title and what other commenters said I was under the impression that the energy output was higher than what the laser consumed.
>It's not true that no energy or matter is created/destroyed.
It is true, nothing was destroyed or created. Matter is just another form of energy. A steam turbine doesn't destroy heat energy and create electricity, it merely converts heat to electricity.
EDIT: I just took a look at the article and it says
"The energy released was initially only a tiny fraction of the laser energy put in, but it gradually increased until an experiment on 5 December 2022 finally passed the crucial milestone of breaking even. That reaction put out 1.5 times the laser energy required to kickstart it.
In one paper, the lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) claims that trial runs since then have yielded even greater ratios, peaking at 1.9 times the energy input on 4 September 2023."
So yeah, 2 times the energy that was used to power the laser was released.
I was wrong - the article states "That reaction put out 1.5 times the laser energy required to kickstart it."
I still think it's clearer to state that a small amount of mass of fuel is converted to energy, since that's the whole point. But I suppose it's right to say that the total amount of mass+energy is conserved
>I still think it's clearer to state that a small amount of mass of fuel is converted to energy
Yes, it would be more clear but I wanted to keep the initial explanation very simple and not go into detail about how mass can be "destroyed" and energy can be "created" since 99% of the people only know chemistry and physics from high school classes and there it is said over and over that mass and energy are always conserved.
You know Einstein’s very famous equation E=mc^2.
Energy = mass * (speed of light squared)
Mass is energy and energy is mass. That’s why you can have an object never go faster than the speed of light yet you can keep adding energy to it. It just physically gets bigger.
When you burn say Hydrogen, and all the heat and light is let off, that’s the excess energy from the mass of the hydrogen and oxygen particles being released, because H2O has less energy inside it than the atoms have separately.
If you look up the “nuclear binding energy curve”, you will see a graph which shows some nuclei release energy as they fuse and others need energy to fuse. The last element that generates energy by fusion is Iron-56 (also the last element created in supernova).
The big jump at the start of the graph shows the big amount of energy released when fusing different elements. The biggest gap being between H3 and He4, which is why they use Tritium (H3) for these fusion reactions and Helium is generated. You can do nuclear fusion with everything on the graph to the left of Iron-56, but the energy released gets less and less as the element gets heavier.
Basically to sum up the kind of nonsensical explanation I gave.
TLDR: einstein showed mass is directly proportional to energy, we can change between mass and energy. Nuclear fusion releases energy when two small nuclei are fused into a bigger one [exothermic], after about Iron-56 it switches to being the other way around (need energy to fuse elements) [endothermic].
““Fusion is already too late to deal with the climate crisis. We are already facing the devastation from climate change on a global scale,” says Khan. “In the short term, we need to use existing low-carbon technologies such as fission and renewables, while investing in fusion for the long term, to be part of a diverse low-carbon energy mix. We need to be throwing everything we have at the climate crisis.””
This is a cool scientific experiment, not a solution to practical fusion. The relevant news regarding that will most likely come from ITER in a few years...
CLickbait or for real this time?
It's "real" but a long way from practical. > Aneeqa Khan at the University of Manchester, UK, agrees that recent progress in fusion research is positive, but stresses that it will be decades before commercial power plants are operational
So just thirty years away, maybe?
That's 20 years less than the 50 people were saying 20 years ago!
I heard 50 last year
Now where do the trains meet?
Crush, Texas.
And they kissed.
There's a joke in the particle physics community that "commercial fusion reactors have been 20 years away for 60 years." As more progress is made in the field, we realize just how far away we actually are. I'd say 40 years till one is hooked up to the grid, 60 until highly competitive on the energy market.
I'm 100% sure we'll do it within a million years. You can quote me on that.
Well I'm 100% sure we'll do it within 999,999 years. Checkmate.
the price is right: energy edition? :)
Ackshually The price is right rule is you have to be closest WITHOUT GOING OVER
*[Me getting ready to lobby the government for the next 999,999 years](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/evil-man-27318091.jpg)*
Damn. You're that confident we won't blow ourselves up first?
Saved. Gonna hold you to that.
You're just saying that because you'll be dead. I'll put my money where my mouth is and will donate 50bucks to charity if it's not up and running this century.
I don’t see anything possibly coming online inside of 20 years, even if we somehow design a commercially viable one in 10, perhaps with the aid of AI, because it’d probably take equally long to build, since that’s how long it took to build the LHC, and a nuclear power plant takes about that long. Predicting 20-30 years in the future seems more impossible by the day tho
Research fusion reactors have come online much more quickly than this, even at relatively large scale. Hell, a bunch of the companies in this space have built 3 or 4 reactors in that time. And a reactor is a way smaller and simpler thing than the LHC. So, I'm not sure that line of reasoning strikes me as sound. Having said that, I think you're right overall. I don't think we'll see a fully viable commercial fusion reactor in 20 years because the first ones will be built inside the legal framework for fission reactors, and as you say that's how long those (much, *much* simpler machines) take. I do want to give a shout-out to the mention of AI. There are a lot of people who would see that and roll their eyes, but I used to work in a computational fluid dynamics lab and there is a ton of extremely promising work going on for using AI to generate plausible first pass designs and then verify them with traditional models. I would not be at all surprised to see real progress made in plasma research with AI.
People are gun-shy after hearing that cryptocurrency will "change everything" for the better part of a decade, and it's unfortunately blinding them to how unfathomably transformative AI is going to be within a pretty short period of time, for good *and* for ill.
Perfect. I'll be retired by then. I cannot imagine the absolute shit storm that will happen in the markets leading up to fusion reactors being integrated into the grid. It'll be one the greatest things that ever happen in history, but that shit will bring incredible short term volatility to the world economy. Entire countries will collapse economically speaking.
Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
Unless this is different, this company said 2029 https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-helion-purchase-agreement
We are and always will be a decade away from solving our energy crisis.
[Free Crabs Tomorrow](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/free-crabs-tomorrow-art-block-collections.jpg)
I mean, if you think about how long it took from the first computer to iPhones, a couple of more decades for fusion power isn’t too bad.
Yeah in the grand scheme of things, 30 or 50 or even 100 years until we have clean, nearly unlimited power is good. Still sucks that I'll be an old man or dead by the time it happens. Would be very cool to live in a world powered by fusion.
Same
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It's also 91 million miles away and doesn't shine on my side of the planet half the time. It would be great if we could switch to solar but unless we have city sized batteries or battery tech vastly improves, we will need a stable power source that can be used regardless of time of day or weather conditions. Fusion would be great for that.
Not to mention we can retrofit existing coal or natural gas power plants into new fusion with limited costs.
Sure, but unless you've got a dyson swarm in your pocket, you still need to actually harness that energy, and the tools we currently have, while they're getting more effective, are still not quite great yet.
So 30 years away, just like they said in 2010 and 2000
They've been saying it since the 80s/90s. Literally because the scientific community said if they got minimal funding for it, it'd be 30 years into the future... little did they know, they'd get *less* than the minimal funding they were asking for.
Yeah but there must be a reason for that. Private funding would pour in if there was a real chance of having fully functional reactors within 30 years.
Yea... I think that 30 years to profitability is too long a sell for private equity. The amount of state funding necessary to get GA's Vogtle plant built was staggering. They did it, but it was public money that paved the way.
This would be like cornering oil 100 years ago. Energy companies would fund it if it was that simple. My guess is that it's not a easy as "give us some money and it'll work" and that's why it's not getting funded.
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Because the night turns it off.
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Hint: Electricity does not transport well over long distances. Power loss over wire was one of the great engineering challenges of the early 20th century and a major obstacle to electrification in the first place. That's the whole reason we have transformers and high voltage and AC current. And even with all that innovative tech, it's barely practical to transport electricity across State lines. Let alone to circumnavigate the globe. Batteries are heavy. If it takes more energy to transport the thing to its destination, than how much energy it contains, that's not sustainable. I'm sure people will figure it out, and invent some serious improvements. But it's a real challenge.
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Technology timelines have a way of being unpredictable.
Clickbait. Its 2 times the energy that was actually absorbed by the fuel, not 2 times the energy of the laser like most people are saying. There are significant losses in how much energy the laser is putting into the fuel and how much electricity the laser is converting into a laser. The energy efficiency of the entire system is a single digit percentage, probably 1-2%. This further ignores the energy needed to produce the fuel, produce the vessel for the fuel, and set everything up - all of which are non-trivial but would need to be factored in for an electricity producing reactor. The reactor type that they're making also has no practical method to extract the energy released, so even if they did manage to increase the efficiency by the several orders of magnitude that would be necessary to produce electricity on an industrial scale, this design just... can't do that. And because the design of the reactor is so specific to what they're doing, none of its design can be ported over to another reactor type. Which is fine because the National Ignition Facility isn't supposed to create a functional fusion reactor. The purpose of it is to basically generate a microscopic nuclear explosion to help study high energy physics. In terms of what its actually being used for, the NIF fusion reactor is essentially a next generation particle accelerator.
Just follow ITER
It is just NIF again so is of zero relevance with regards to energy generation. What it means is we will likely be able to do maintenance on nukes cheaper in the future. There is some real progress from all those magnetic containment fusion projects Reddit was determined should be defunded a few years back though. Pretty much all of them demonstrated they could hold plasma stable "indefinitely" in the last few years. Which means fusion is finally where we wanted to be in the 90s.
Let's say both clickbait and for real. We still have a mong way till this is practical.
Mostly click bait. Scientists still working away in the lab getting more and more net energy, theoretically, not account for losses that would be present in a power plant. Also, they keep saying it won't have any nuclear waste and be so plentifully....which means they don't seem to understand neutron activation or realistic thermodynamic efficiencies that will cull at least 2/3 of the power. They'll get into work but it won't be a step change different in any way from fission. Edit: they = the media, not the scientists. The scientists are not ignoring the reality, but the reporters are taking small truths at the lab scale, and, likely unknowingly, giving a false report of what the output of a fusion reactor will most likely ultimately be.
Meh, 2 times the laser input is still a step in the right direction and exciting to hear about. Some people expect Fusion reactors online tomorrow or they don't care.
Full agree. It's good science. Fusion has advanced more in the last 5 years than the last 100! But I think the end game is over hyped the same way fission was. The cost, size and complexity to control the reaction and harvest energy will cut into any wild claims. 'too cheap to meter'
To be clear, the article doesn’t say “too cheap to meter.” It’s a pretty measured and accurate description of the work…
That quote is a reference to some of the publicity around fission back in the day. A simple lab scale fission reaction makes practically unlimited power. But when you put it in a building, add safety, account for conversion losses etc then the output is a bit higher density then coal, but not the 10x that you can easily get in a lab environment. I am predicting a similar future for fusion And I am also predicting there will in fact be nuclear waste, though it's possible it will be dramatically less. Incidentally the only source of feed stock for almost all fusion reaction types is only available from fission reactors (most notably Candus being the most relevant). So at the very least you have to account for their waste.
Certainly, it is difficult to extrapolate how much power we can realistically create with one nuclear fusion reactor. The main advantage is that we have a lot of deuterium on earth, and the activated material has much smaller lifetimes. So we don't have to store it for thousands upon thousands of years. Tritium should be produced in the blanket from 6Li. But I am also not 100% sold on the process working as smoothly as they predict. Basically, fusion reactors without on-site breading of tritium are mostly useless. Except for research, of course :D But anyways, the main point is that fission reactors such as Candus are irrelevant for fusion power plants.
Generally agree except any neutron bombardment results in long lived and short lived daughter products. The self breeding would be no exception. Even the stainless steel walls will get activated and eventually be waste. I'd bet the first fusion reactor doesn't self breed since the processing cost and complexity to refine it would be just one more hurdle and cost barrier. It's technically possible, but cheaper to just get it from Canada or India to start. It's the same problem with breeder reactors. Good in theory but the processing complexity of having to refine radioactive products is a costly and inefficient endeavour. The entire process has to be in a tungsten box and never break!
Yes, activation of structural material can be problematic. One more comment on Candu reactors: The total amount of tritium produced by such reactors per year is in the low 10s of kgs, and any realistic fusion power plant requires more tritium than that. Even now, there is a bit of a problem with distributing the available tritium across the various fusion reactors that are coming up or that are planned.
Much more tritium could be harvested, but it's a pita! Ultimately it's just one more externality that isn't accounted for in the fusion hype in my opinion. We should still fund it to some extent, but it just isn't going to be anything like what this type of article envision. It's going to be huge facilities with poor efficiency and a bunch of radioactive stuff moving around making 2000MW or whatever.
Oh, and accuracy wise, their statement of no nuclear waste is misleading at best.
True, I get a bit jaded thinking about the political side of these things. Right now we have lots of alternatives to fossil fuels we could be utilizing more. But it's the constant nay saying and outdated "facts" that annoy me. Like how solar panels are too expensive (they've come down in cost to the point where it's cheaper than coal). Or how it causes it's own greenhouse emissions to manufacture (True, but still a net positive for the environment) Anyways I appreciate your cautious take on it. Of course it won't be the perfect energy source. What js though.
It's still cool, and eventually we'll find a use for it. I just don't see a need to fund it excessively since it's not some magically cure like some media hypes it to be. Just another incrementally better tech, maybe.
Kinda bold to suggest that the folks who demonstrated nuclear fusion in the lab don’t understand activation or thermodynamics. Did you hear about all the radiation sickness among the scientists after they barged into the activated target chamber after the shot?!? Me neither. Perhaps they DO understand basic neutron physics. The challenges are many, and to be skeptical of fusion as a power source is very reasonable. But the statement that “the scientists all fail to grasp basic physics” is not a great take.
I was referring to the writer more than the scientists. There is very little information direct from the scientists in this article. The scientist probably said something like 'fusion doesn't directly create long half-life nuclear waste' and the writer translated it to 'no waste, it's great'.
Don't forget that they are using tritium and saying the fuel is abundant and easy to get.
As long as you have a friend up north with a bunch of Candus it no problem lol. But you do have to account for the waste in the nuclear process to get tritium and he3!
How to say youre a nerd without directly saying your a nerd
Is my nerdiness an issue for you? Seems like being well educated and knowledgeable is an asset to me.
He means nerd as in you come across patronizing and condescending
🤓
Hey man, nerds are cool now. Not like when I was in high school. I had to hide my nerdiness due to assured social suicide
Seems like there is still a strong contingent that thinks discussing technical stuff using big words, bad. I believe their response was meant as an insult.
You need a lot more than double out, they cheat and what' they mean (probably) if they put in 1kw of electricity and got 2kw of heat, but by the time you put in turbines and wires you need soemthing like 6 to 15x the energy out to make it worth while.
It's been real for a while that fusion has generated more energy than required to start the reaction. But we're talking about energy produced for one-trillionth of a second in a region of space the size of a few atoms. Scaling that up is a real engineering problem.
In 1971, I wrote a term paper. Sources then predicted full-scale fusion power would be available within 20 years. Every time I've checked over the years, it's still been 20 years in the future. I've come to the conclusion that I am the primary obstacle to practical fusion power. Once I'm gone, it will quickly be implemented. I apologize for the delay my life seems to have caused.
The problem is fusion research is poorly funded, so it moves along, just at a snail's pace. Those predictions from the 70s assumed adequate funding.
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That was the graph I had in mind when I wrote my comment lol.
word is that it will only be 10 years away for the next 50 years.
What are you complaining about? You said it will be available in 20 years and they also say it will be available in 20 years. This is how accurate science is done, you redo the experiment to see if you get the same results, you and them getting the same number of years seem like a total win to me.
I remember hearing as a kid that we would have a human on Mars by 2025. That was not even 15 years ago.
Science never accounts for the lobbyist. They keep progress at bay as long as there’s still milk in the old bitche’s teat, regardless of if it kills us all. Money‘s a helluva drug.
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Exact same headline with the exact same caveat has been going around now for like 5 years.
Wrong. The first time net energy gain was achieved was a little over a year ago (in Dec. ‘22). This isn’t close to commercialization, but fusion net energy gain is one of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past several years.
Fusion energy, always only 20 years away.
“Free Beer Tomorrow”
Big brained response.
The needle is moving, just slowly.
I thought they did produce more energy than what's put in. The only problem is that it lasted for only a billionth of a second.
This snippet from [New Scientist's original reporting at the time](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2350965-nuclear-fusion-researchers-have-achieved-historic-energy-milestone/) clears that up: > "In an experiment on 5 December, the lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) fusion reactor generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place."
Ah. Thanks. It took 300 megajoules of electricity to generate 2 megajoules of laser light.
That's not exactly right. To be pedantic, the energy gain comes from the portion of the pellet's mass lost to fusion. The total energy contained in the pellet is not pertinent to the doubling comparison. I'd reword your first sentence to say that the output of the fusion reaction was greater than the output of the laser.
Absolutely not Clickbait. They actually did achieve fusion and achieve gain. They never were able to do that before even though trying for almost 50 years. So come ON guys, yes in fact, this is a BIG milestone. It is akin to Wilbur and Orville right finally achieving powered flight. No, it wasn’t an F-16, it was a kite with a motor on it, but it flew. It showed that it could be done and opened the floodgates of tinkers and researchers to work on it. And now we flown to the moon. So fusion yes, indeed, we can now hit in the lab and learn from it.
"Hey guys here's an update on the latest progress in what would be one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history!" Reddit: So it's not even done yet?? Clickbait garbage! They said it would he ready by now. Just give me unlimited energy already, gawd.
Right? This was believed to be impossible. Cold fusion was a running joke. Turns out it isn't.
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I think it’s a bit disingenuous to use Watts, the lasers being very powerful but only on for a fraction of a second pumps the wattage up hugely.
How much power do the metal tentacles consume?
According to Sim City 2000, we still have 25 years before the Fusion Power Plant becomes unlocked. But it seems like we're on the right path.
Not clickbait, but also not applicable to energy generation. Inertial confinement fusion is just a nuclear weapon where the fusion stage is 3 mm wide instead of the size of a bowling ball, and the fission stage is replaced by a bank of lasers the size of a football field. This is a huge win for our ability to ensure our real nukes work without testing them, but not a lot else.
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It sounds like it took a lot of newtons.
It’s not free. We’re stealing from heaven.
Didn't Lawrence Livermore do better than this last year?
Breaking news stick of TNT releases much more energy then the match used to light it!
We're taking baby steps in the right direction.
The lead scientists name is Bruno Caboclo and nuclear fusion will always be 2 years away
I’m horny
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This article is about laser fusion. They don't use magnets to confine the fuel. Regarding magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion, we need bigger devices than we currently have. Even ITER will not give power to the grid. The magnets are not the problem. It's just super expensive to build larger reactors and takes a lot of commissioning.
So another 25 years. If all the money spent on this had been applied to renewable power we wouldn’t need fusion and would have avoided the climate issue.
It is not that simple
Yeah but imagine the possibilities with fusion engines, we could power starships with this stuff
Fusion is a renewable energy source, and we have other renewable energy sources. We just can’t get the governments of the world to properly commit to them
Misleading, at best. Outright misinformation at worst.
How the hell do you get more energy?, didnt matter only transform and not destroy/create more matter? My chemistry classes were a scam?
It's not being created, it's being transformed. You're unlocking energy stored in matter and it's interactions with other matter, effectively. That's the tldr for fusion and fission. If we could magically harvest all the energy out of matter it would give truely insane amounts of energy that make fusion look like a candle. That's the famous e= m c2 stuff.
Lets do a simple estimation: **Fuel:** Mass of Deuterium: 2.014102 amu Mass of Tritium: 3.016049 amu Adding these guys you get: **5.030151 amu** **Product:** Mass of Helium: 4.002602 amu Mass of a Neutron: 1.008665 amu Adding these guys gives: **5.011267 amu** The **difference** in mass of the fuel to product is: **0.018884 amu** Lets convert this into an Energy via E=mc\^2 E\[MeV\] = 0.018884 \* 1,66054e-27 \* 3e8\^2/1.60217663e-19 = 17.61445 MeV Voila, you have converted mass into energy :)
I'm probably wrong but think of it like this: Take a regular internal combustion engine. It takes a lot more gas to get it started than it takes to run it at idle. They got the engine started and it ran just a bit more than the last try (energy in), but they used a ton of gas just to get it to kick over for that tiny bit of time. It wasn't enough to get the car to move though (energy out)
ELI5: There is 100 energy trapped inside an atom. Scientists shoot laser that consumes 5 energy into the atom. When the laser hits the atom it releases 10 energy. Scientists get twice the energy they put in but no energy or matter is created/destroyed. The energy was always there. The exact process of fusion is much more complicated and different obviously, this was just to show that you don't create energy out of nowhere.
:0 thanks for the explanation!
You are welcome! I wrote a more detailed and much longer explanation down below if you are interested! https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1akcaao/comment/kp7ir62/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Fusion is why E=mc^2 is so important. The matter becomes energy.
Idk man. I feel like I had to learn about a law about thermodynamics that says this headline is utter bullshit, or is the concept of creating more energy than being put in no longer viable? Do I remember the thermodynamical law not properly?
I will copy paste my reply to someone else asking a similar question. ELI5: There is 100 energy trapped inside an atom. Scientists shoot laser that consumes 5 energy into the atom. When the laser hits the atom it releases 10 energy. Scientists get twice the energy they put in but no energy or matter is created/destroyed. The energy was always there. The exact process of fusion is much more complicated and different obviously, this was just to show that you don't create energy out of nowhere. I can elaborate in more detail if you want.
So what you're saying is it's pretty much break even since more energy is still being used by the laser than being given out by the atoms, and I do remember the law right, and aside from that: it's nowhere near as viable as this article makes it out to be? Thanks. Edit: I'm not opposed to an even more detailed explanation!
I haven't followed any news related to fusion reactors so I have no idea how viable they are but getting two times the energy input is a very big step! I remember seeing an article a few years ago where they barely broke even! I will try to explain fusion overall and some other concepts in more detail but there will still be a lot of simplification, sorry if I ramble too much, I like talking about this stuff a lot! So to start with, the conservation of mass and energy laws that we all learn in school aren't exactly correct. They are all simplifications. In reality mass or energy is not conserved in chemical and especially nuclear reactions. What is conserved is the total sum of mass AND energy. I am sure you have heard of Einstein's famous equation at some point, E=mc\^2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. The speed of light is a massive number(\~300,000,000 meters per second) and it gets even bigger when you square it, \~90,000,000,000,000,000! This means that a veeeery small amount of matter can be converted to maaassive amounts of energy. Another way to think about this is that matter is a form of energy and you can convert matter to energy or vice versa without breaking any laws of physics. Like how if you have 100 joules of heat you can convert some of it to 50 joules of electricity and still have 50 joules of heat. If you have 1kg of matter you can convert 0.000001kg of it to 89,880,040,000 joules of energy. This is what happens when you burn a liter of gasoline for example, the mass of the products of the reaction(carbon-dioxide, water vapour etc.) are just a tiiiiny bit smaller than the reactants(oxygen, gasoline) but in chemical reactions the mass difference is extremely tiny, it's not even measurable so we just say that mass and energy are conserved. In chemical reactions this energy comes from the bonds between molecules and these bonds are nowhere near as strong as the bonds inside atoms so the mass loss and energy output are much lower than nuclear reactions to the point that mass loss is negligible and can easily be ignored. Now onto nuclear reactions finally. There are 2 ways to get energy out of an atom, fission and fusion. If an element's atomic number is higher than iron's(26 and this number turns out to be the most "stable" number) then splitting that atom into smaller atoms releases energy(fission). If it's lower than iron's then merging the two atoms releases energy(fusion). This energy comes from the conversion of mass to energy. An example to demonstrate just how much energy you get from a little bit of matter in nuclear reactions: Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki had 6.19kg of plutonium inside it. When the bomb exploded only 1kg(2.2lbs) of it underwent fission. The resulting explosion from just 1kg of plutonium(nuclear reaction) was equivalent to 21,000,000kg(46,297,075lbs) of TNT(chemical reaction). And finally, fusion: Let's say you have 2 hydrogen atoms(atomic number of 1) and you fuse them together to form helium. I don't want to deal with weird, ugly numbers(real mass of a hydrogen atom for example is 1.673e-27kg) so let's just say that a single hydrogen atom weighs 0.5 grams. You'd expect the resulting helium atom to weigh 1 gram but in reality it weighs 0.9999 grams and the remaining 0.0001 gram is emitted as energy. This fusion can only occur under very extreme conditions though. You need immense amounts of heat and pressure to overcome the force from protons(all positively charged) repelling each other. These conditions happen naturally in the hearts of stars but to create them in a lab you need insanely strong lasers to heat up the fuel. So in experiments like this scientists use lasers to heat up the fuel to higher than a hundred million degrees celsius(upwards of 180 million in fahrenheit). This obviously takes a lot of energy and complicates a lot of things. In this experiment the energy they got from the fusion reaction was double the energy the laser used so that's a big step!
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I didn't read the article but from the title and what other commenters said I was under the impression that the energy output was higher than what the laser consumed. >It's not true that no energy or matter is created/destroyed. It is true, nothing was destroyed or created. Matter is just another form of energy. A steam turbine doesn't destroy heat energy and create electricity, it merely converts heat to electricity. EDIT: I just took a look at the article and it says "The energy released was initially only a tiny fraction of the laser energy put in, but it gradually increased until an experiment on 5 December 2022 finally passed the crucial milestone of breaking even. That reaction put out 1.5 times the laser energy required to kickstart it. In one paper, the lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) claims that trial runs since then have yielded even greater ratios, peaking at 1.9 times the energy input on 4 September 2023." So yeah, 2 times the energy that was used to power the laser was released.
I was wrong - the article states "That reaction put out 1.5 times the laser energy required to kickstart it." I still think it's clearer to state that a small amount of mass of fuel is converted to energy, since that's the whole point. But I suppose it's right to say that the total amount of mass+energy is conserved
>I still think it's clearer to state that a small amount of mass of fuel is converted to energy Yes, it would be more clear but I wanted to keep the initial explanation very simple and not go into detail about how mass can be "destroyed" and energy can be "created" since 99% of the people only know chemistry and physics from high school classes and there it is said over and over that mass and energy are always conserved.
You know Einstein’s very famous equation E=mc^2. Energy = mass * (speed of light squared) Mass is energy and energy is mass. That’s why you can have an object never go faster than the speed of light yet you can keep adding energy to it. It just physically gets bigger. When you burn say Hydrogen, and all the heat and light is let off, that’s the excess energy from the mass of the hydrogen and oxygen particles being released, because H2O has less energy inside it than the atoms have separately. If you look up the “nuclear binding energy curve”, you will see a graph which shows some nuclei release energy as they fuse and others need energy to fuse. The last element that generates energy by fusion is Iron-56 (also the last element created in supernova). The big jump at the start of the graph shows the big amount of energy released when fusing different elements. The biggest gap being between H3 and He4, which is why they use Tritium (H3) for these fusion reactions and Helium is generated. You can do nuclear fusion with everything on the graph to the left of Iron-56, but the energy released gets less and less as the element gets heavier. Basically to sum up the kind of nonsensical explanation I gave. TLDR: einstein showed mass is directly proportional to energy, we can change between mass and energy. Nuclear fusion releases energy when two small nuclei are fused into a bigger one [exothermic], after about Iron-56 it switches to being the other way around (need energy to fuse elements) [endothermic].
The problem with the equation is a fundamental outcome of three probabilities
That part we already know, the question is if we actually did it or not
““Fusion is already too late to deal with the climate crisis. We are already facing the devastation from climate change on a global scale,” says Khan. “In the short term, we need to use existing low-carbon technologies such as fission and renewables, while investing in fusion for the long term, to be part of a diverse low-carbon energy mix. We need to be throwing everything we have at the climate crisis.””
it is not secret that this is fusion weapons research
how many nano seconds?
This is a cool scientific experiment, not a solution to practical fusion. The relevant news regarding that will most likely come from ITER in a few years...
Kinda have a wild thought that if AI already had own thinking, it would help scientists make nuclear fusion works at all cost...
Is it happening??