There’s still a long way to go. The fusion reaction will need to release many times more energy than it consumes to be viable on a commercial scale. But this is still worth getting excited about. Figuring out fusion would be a game-changer, and breakthroughs like this one remind us of the dangers of predicting the future based on current technology. The rate of technological change is accelerating, and the only ones who stand to lose are the prophets of doom.
They’ll ignore it.
Perhaps the GOP caucus will support fusion energy, the day it’s powered by coal.
Do you have anything intelligent to say? Because if so, you hide it well.
As amazing and as game-changing as a viable fusion-based economy would be, it’s hard not to fear that politics would muck it up. Either delaying it for many years or killing it altogether.
It’s hard to think of anything that can’t be messed up by politics in general and politicians in particular.
Come now, sir, that was a brilliant slam on the Luddite party, the Democrats. Against Nuclear power, against any sort of human action that might “release carbon”, against “polluting Space”? no one with a brain could think that the Republicans would be the ones to stop Fusion power……..
And if the Dems realized that solar power was nuclear they’d ban it.
Perhaps the Dem Caucus will support it when it runs on Hopey-Changey and Unicorn Farts.
Hardly break-even. Nice writeup on reddit on why they weren’t even close to “break-even” (Link NSFW: Language)
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1nxtxv/nuclear_fusion_milestone_passed_at_us_lab/ccn4h95
Ick, Hard to read and I didn’t see any need to wade through it. He seems pretty irate, I’m not sure why. Pretty long reply; presumably he mentions that lasers are inefficient and that there has been no attempt to recover energy and that the device is not designed to recover energy and that it is not designed to be continuously fired. They’ll need at least a couple orders of magnitude more gain before they’re close to anything practical. So, good news, high five and all that, but they’ve got a long ways to go and it’s still not clear that they can get there.
While his analysis is crude, it’s spot on as far as toning down the hype. There is so much we don’t know about plasma physics, and this research will help us in the quest to understand the intricacies of fusion. But to call what they did a “break-even” event is like saying “we won the Super Bowl” during week one of the football season.
The article Rand linked to calls it positive net energy, which is a quite different beast than breakeven. I didn’t look at the Reddit article to see how they termed it.
“Scientific break even”, the fusion reaction producing more energy than was deposited in the plasma to get it going. In this case a LOOOOOONG way from break-even after you consider driver efficiency.
We can achieve practical fusion power at will, if we are willing to use pulse fission-driven fusion. The p-B reaction has been demonstrated (it’s aneutronic), so we may not be as far off as we think.
On that topic, just yesterday: Two-laser boron fusion lights the way to radiation-free energy. This is very small scale, and nowhere near Q=1. But there’s some interesting stuff in here. The big problem with p-B11 is that electrons in a plasma radiate massive amounts of energy out of the plasma, cooling it, when they collide with heavier nuclei like boron. The story hints that they might have found a way to blow a bunch of the electrons out of the plasma, which could significantly mitigate this problem.
The problem with NIF is that the optical coupling of the lasers is so inefficient that you have to get close to Q=100 (100 times more energy out of the reaction than reaches the pellet) before you’ve actually got net power. The other big problem is that you lose energy with electrons boiling out of the plasma, because there’s no magnetic field to contain them.
The one I’m really excited about is a Sandia experiment on the Z-Machine called MagLIF (magnetized liner intertial fusion). They MHD-freeze a magnetic field into a foil-covered cylinder of fuel by zapping each end of the cylinder with fairly modest lasers to form a low-energy plasma, then use a Z-pinch to collapse the cylinder onto the fuel. Shockwaves from the laser keep the fuel from squirting out the ends. The magnetic field contains the electrons, which help heat the collapsing plasma.
They’ve got simulations hinting that they might be able to get to Q=1000 with a an upgrade of the Z-machine to 70 mega amps (sims being notoriously optimistic in plasma physics, of course), and they’ve got a low power proof-of-concept experiment that went well in 2012. There’s supposed to be an upgraded experiment by the end of 2013.
The other fun one is General Fusion, who are trying to collapse a sphere of spinning molten lead/lithium onto a pair of colliding spheromaks by whacking the outside of the sphere with hundreds of sub-millisecond synchronized pneumatic pistons. All delightfully steampunk.
The sad thing is that ITER and NIF are eating up almost all the funding, leaving the little guys–some of whom are doing things that are promising–with nothing but a trickle of venture money. This is the kind of thing that government R&D funds can actually help, if they’re applied properly. Little chance of that, though.
I am also highly interested in the Z-machine results. But those guys do not get the same level of funding NIF or ITER get so things take a whole lot longer.
I do not know about ITER since it isn’t even in operation, but the JT-60 Tokamak in Japan already achieved theoretical Q=1.25. Had they done the 1998 experiment with D-T rather than D-D fuel they would have passed break-even. The issue is they still cannot do steady state. Not to mention that current material technology is unable to handle D-T fusion for prolonged periods until the structure gets weakened due to neutron exposure. Even if they were able to do it present Tokamaks just don’t have enough fuel density to be able to be compact enough to be cheap.
I would rather keep hanging on to a plain old nuclear fission reactor if I wanted any actual power on the cheap.
What is probably within the realm of possibility today is a fusion rocket. The requirements are different since you can just vent the exhaust to space.
Why do we need fusion for terrestrial power? Fission, especially variants such the LFTR, can supply essentially limitless cheap power if we’ll just allow them to be built, and in the case of the LFTR, finish the engineering work needed for full-scale use. All the money spent on NIF (and ITER) would have paid for the LFTR final engineering work, with some left over…
In a perfect world, you’d be right. But I’m not sure that the public is ever going to stop being scared of fission. Fusion, on the other hand, is vastly cleaner, with the amount of waste caused by neutron activation being tiny. And if we can get to aneutronic fusion, there aren’t any neutrons at all. Then it’s just a really, really, big battery.
The other thing about fusion is that licensing and deployment ought to be almost trivial. If some of the lower-scale schemes finally bear fruit (which, incidentally, is never gonna happen with either ITER or NIF), you might see viable 100 MW power plants, which distributes power much more efficiently and robustly than a small number of 10 GW fission plants.
As a resident of Austin, where our drought is now officially worse than the one in the 50’s, I sure would like to see a bunch of nuke-powered desalination plants on the Gulf coast. If you can do that with fission nukes, cool. But my guess is that it’s a lot easier to site a fusion plant where it’s needed than it is a fission plant.
Rand, shouldn’t the relevant summary statistic be positive net money produced by selling the energy?
Ultimately, yes, but positive net energy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition to achieve that.