NIF’s goal isn’t to produce fusion power for energy production. It’s to validate nuclear weapons. Nuclear fusion electricity is as far away as it has always been.
That’s not true. 20 years ago the consensus was that fusion was impossible to tame. Now the consensus is that we are possibly 30 years away from commercial use of nuclear fusion. We are in a position unthinkable a couple of decades ago
27 years ago I wrote a research paper about the promising, imminent future of fusion powered electricity generation. Wherever you got that 20 years from, you’re extremely wrong.
Research paper as in published in a physics journal? Good for you. It means you were a visionary person.
What made you change your mind then?
~20 years ago is when I studied fusion at uni
Exactly what I said. NIF isn’t testing fusion ignition for some benign or altruistic purpose. They are testing it so they can model and validate the behavior of nuclear weapons.
But they have made thousands of nuclear weapons, and have the production know-how for more. So why bother model and validate and test?
Eu in shambles
Fusion AND room temperature superconductors?! Damn boys, looks like the future is just 10 years away again.
Very cool, I hope it amounts to something in my lifetime.
Even if it doesn’t, I expect that we’ll need fusion power at some point, interstellar travel or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel
Nuclear fusion rockets
Fusion rocket starships, powered by nuclear fusion reactions, should conceivably be able to reach speeds of the order of 10% of that of light, based on energy considerations alone. In theory, a large number of stages could push a vehicle arbitrarily close to the speed of light.[48] These would “burn” such light element fuels as deuterium, tritium, 3He, 11B, and 7Li. Because fusion yields about 0.3–0.9% of the mass of the nuclear fuel as released energy, it is energetically more favorable than fission, which releases <0.1% of the fuel’s mass-energy. The maximum exhaust velocities potentially energetically available are correspondingly higher than for fission, typically 4–10% of the speed of light. However, the most easily achievable fusion reactions release a large fraction of their energy as high-energy neutrons, which are a significant source of energy loss. Thus, although these concepts seem to offer the best (nearest-term) prospects for travel to the nearest stars within a (long) human lifetime, they still involve massive technological and engineering difficulties, which may turn out to be intractable for decades or centuries.
What does it say? Paywall in the way…
tl;dr: net positive fusion, though only if you count just the laser energy, not the total power used to run the system
I don’t think that that’s necessarily a huge issue, though, because their aim wasn’t to address that.
That experiment briefly achieved what’s known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target, the Energy Department said.
In other words, it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, the department said.
A 2020 article, before the current success or the prior one at the same facility:
https://www.powermag.com/fusion-energy-is-coming-and-maybe-sooner-than-you-think/
No current device has been able to generate more fusion power than the heating energy required to start the reaction. Scientists measure this assessment with a value known as fusion gain (expressed as the symbol Q), which is the ratio of fusion power to the input power required to maintain the reaction. Q = 1 represents the breakeven point, but because of heat losses, burning plasmas are not reached until about Q = 5. Current tokamaks have achieved around Q = 0.6 with DT reactions. Fusion power plants will need to achieve Q values well above 10 to be economic.
So if I understand this aright, on the specific thing they’re working on, they’re at 1.54 as of OP’s article, that is (3.15/2.05), up from 0.6 in 2020. The target is somewhere “well above 10” for a commercially-viable fusion power plant. Still other problems to solve, but for the specific thing they’re working on, that maybe gives some idea of where they are.
Here’s a handy trick that I use on sites such as this one. Between when the article loads and the paywall restricts it, hit a button to display the article in a Reader mode. Safari has this. I believe Firefox does. I think you can get extensions to add such a feature.
When the article loads and then gets paywalled, this works. When the paywall is immediate it doesn’t.
