Is This the Fusion Breakthrough We’ve Been Waiting For?

“Yesterday, scientists … confirmed that they had discovered a pathway to the first potentially viable nuclear-fusion power… But is it too good to be true?” - National Review

Related: Nuclear fusion technology passes key milestone - Axios and DOE National Laboratory Makes History by Achieving Fusion Ignition - US Dept of Energy

Discussion

The amount of energy gleaned here, 2.5MJ, is about the same as in a tenth of a pound of coal. To recover the amount of energy spent building and operating the toroid reactor, you’d have to operate it for a few trillion years.

It’s a nice advance, but at this point, fusion is still the energy of the future. Recovering energy from a plasma at several million degrees Celsius is best done at a distance of, say, 93 million miles with a naturally occurring magnetic field and an ozone layer, if you catch my drift.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

[Bert Perry]

The amount of energy gleaned here, 2.5MJ, is about the same as in a tenth of a pound of coal. To recover the amount of energy spent building and operating the toroid reactor, you’d have to operate it for a few trillion years.

It’s a nice advance, but at this point, fusion is still the energy of the future. Recovering energy from a plasma at several million degrees Celsius is best done at a distance of, say, 93 million miles with a naturally occurring magnetic field and an ozone layer, if you catch my drift.

Except too many Republicans, conservatives, and other “Christians” poo-poo that solar energy production too!! If its not coal, oil or gas they somehow think its “liberal”.

[Mark_Smith]

Except too many Republicans, conservatives, and other “Christians” poo-poo that solar energy production too!! If its not coal, oil or gas they somehow think its “liberal”.

Oh, come on. To hear you tell it, we’re pining for the days of whale oil instead of petroleum…

Most people that believe like I do are not against solar energy — we’re just realistic about its downsides, too. It’s not yet able to replace energy produced by hydrocarbons, that’s all. When one or more of the alternate energy forms can replace oil, great! Bring it on! Discovery and use of oil from the earth totally removed the need to hunt animals for their oil. Real progress does that. However governments forcing use of technology that isn’t ready doesn’t solve the issues (even though they think that a deadline will work because scientists and engineers “must be freed from corporate oversight and then they will be able to solve the problems”). And that doesn’t even touch the issues of enough sun, enough space, mining of rare-earth elements, manufacturing process that is pretty dirty, and hazardous material disposal when their end of life arrives, among others I’m probably not even thinking of right now.

I actually sprang for putting solar panels on my home — 32 of them to be precise, and I paid in advance — the company wanted me to “mortgage” them for 25 years, so I could get them at “no cost.” I love how much they lower my power bill, but they don’t bring it to 0 (I do come close about twice a year, once in spring and once in fall), and I live in the south, in a relatively sunny area. I’d have to probably double the number of panels, plus install a few backup batteries to even come close the rest of the time, and that still wouldn’t work during a period like we’re having in our weather now — this past couple weeks has hardly seen much sun where I live, so I’ve been getting nowhere near my peak generation. I would have had to be able to store a couple weeks’ worth of power to get through this. Not likely!

If you want to characterize “republican/conservative/Christian” objections to solar (I’m actually an independent, though the other two apply), at least understand them and try to refute what we are actually saying, not what you think we are saying.

Dave Barnhart

…fossil fuels got their energy originally from the sun, too, no? :^)

Seriously, well said, and my major hangup with wind and solar is that for both, they go down right as we get to peak demand. Solar production goes down in mid-afternoon, and wind is most effective at night. So if we went in a major way to solar and wind, we would need some combination of other power sources (e.g. fossil, nuclear, hydro), power storage ($$$$), and telling people they couldn’t use electricity right as they get home from work and want to turn on the A/C, make supper, do the laundry, and (for many) charge their phones/cars. Engineering wise, I don’t see an easy path forward for it.

Same basic thing for fusion, really. One of the things that scares the snot out of me as an engineer is the degree to which politicians are starting to call the shots in engineering, from electric cars and solar/wind to a whole lot more. It’s not that engineers ought to have the only say (and they never really have), but one would at least hope that engineers would be allowed to say “you can do this, but this will be the cost”. I am not seeing that as much anymore.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

I think as it relates to energy, it is good the government is driving some of this. The investment and incentives needed would not come solely through private development. Government is always needed to assist, but there needs to be a balance and alignment between the government and the private sector.

The amount of energy gleaned here, 2.5MJ, is about the same as in a tenth of a pound of coal. To recover the amount of energy spent building and operating the toroid reactor, you’d have to operate it for a few trillion years.

The amount of energy here isn’t very meaningful. The goal of the test was to generate more than was used to created the reaction.

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. (CNN)

I don’t think they were aiming to produce large quantity. A question would be, how hard is it to scale that up? But they aren’t trying to build a working generator yet. I don’t know how much of the size involved here is specifically for the experiment, but…

The breakthrough was made by a team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California on December 5 – a facility the size of a sports stadium and equipped with 192 lasers.

I don’t think we can assume that a reactor would be limited to the same output.

Returning to the question in the title, the answer is yes. Net gain in power for the first time ever.

Still, 2.05 MJ = 569.444444 Wh. I don’t know how you get 569 watt hours out of a tenth of a pound of coal.

Coal–0.89 kWh/pound…890 watt hours (eia) …89 wh … 8.9 wh per tenth of lb?

Of course, to get the energy out of the coal, you have to build the equipment that gets the energy out of it, just as you do to get energy out of whatever they used in the experiment.

But 2.05mj wasn’t the output anyway. That was the input. Output = 3.15mj, so a net of 1.1mj.

1.1 MJ = 305.555556 Wh … still a good bit more than we get out of 1/10lb of coal. … but not really important.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Without Uranium/Nuclear, people will either freeze or choke on the smoke from fires/coal.

Wally Morris
Huntington, IN

For things like basic research, fusion and all, I’m with David, sort of….the trick is that sometimes those research programs get a life of their own, and they go on far longer than the science really will support. Fusion’s been researched for 40 years or more, gets their annual conferences and large subsidies, and they’re only marginally closer to reality than 40 years ago. The same basic thing applies to electromagnetic propulsion—they’ve had their funding and reviews for as far back as I can remember, but they’re really no closer to reality than 40 years back.

When it comes to things beyond basic research, I don’t think government really ought to be involved at all, because what I’ve seen too often, politicians mandate that the very real tradeoffs be ignored. Solar and wind power is a great example; I’m 100% in favor of more distributed energy production, 100% in favor of using “free” sources where it works, but the politicians are more or less mandating that we ignore the necessity of fossil fuel backup, the wear and tear that cyclical “green” power generation generates for fossil plants, the environmental cost of making windmills and solar panels (rare earth mining and dirty coal plants to power Chinese wafer fabs), and the fact that a lot of the “climate change” research is playing a lot of games with the data.

Even if the alternative energy sources were ready, it’s dangerous to wall off the routes of inquiry, and the history of engineering and science has a LOT of examples of what happens when managers do this—and managers are of course constrained by market forces that politicians are not. A good point of reference is that when the federal government mandated smaller, less robust cars for CAFE standards in 1973, the end result was that 50,000 lives were needlessly lost in the next 20 years, according to a study by the NHTSA. Another is that when Hitler decided the ME-262 would primarily be a bomber, he delayed its entry into the war by years and ironically enabled the “U.S. Army Air Force Urban Renewal Program” for Germany. I’m glad he did that, of course, but it points out again that when politicians decide to make engineering decisions, the end results can be quite literally lethal.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

[dcbii]
Mark_Smith wrote:

Except too many Republicans, conservatives, and other “Christians” poo-poo that solar energy production too!! If its not coal, oil or gas they somehow think its “liberal”.

Oh, come on. To hear you tell it, we’re pining for the days of whale oil instead of petroleum…

Most people that believe like I do are not against solar energy — we’re just realistic about its downsides, too. It’s not yet able to replace energy produced by hydrocarbons, that’s all. When one or more of the alternate energy forms can replace oil, great! Bring it on! Discovery and use of oil from the earth totally removed the need to hunt animals for their oil. Real progress does that. However governments forcing use of technology that isn’t ready doesn’t solve the issues (even though they think that a deadline will work because scientists and engineers “must be freed from corporate oversight and then they will be able to solve the problems”). And that doesn’t even touch the issues of enough sun, enough space, mining of rare-earth elements, manufacturing process that is pretty dirty, and hazardous material disposal when their end of life arrives, among others I’m probably not even thinking of right now.

I actually sprang for putting solar panels on my home — 32 of them to be precise, and I paid in advance — the company wanted me to “mortgage” them for 25 years, so I could get them at “no cost.” I love how much they lower my power bill, but they don’t bring it to 0 (I do come close about twice a year, once in spring and once in fall), and I live in the south, in a relatively sunny area. I’d have to probably double the number of panels, plus install a few backup batteries to even come close the rest of the time, and that still wouldn’t work during a period like we’re having in our weather now — this past couple weeks has hardly seen much sun where I live, so I’ve been getting nowhere near my peak generation. I would have had to be able to store a couple weeks’ worth of power to get through this. Not likely!

If you want to characterize “republican/conservative/Christian” objections to solar (I’m actually an independent, though the other two apply), at least understand them and try to refute what we are actually saying, not what you think we are saying.

You must not get out much. When Trump was president how many crowds chanted “Drill, Drill, Drill”? The time Trump came to my town they did… loud and proud.

[Mark_Smith]

You must not get out much. When Trump was president how many crowds chanted “Drill, Drill, Drill”? The time Trump came to my town they did… loud and proud.

Well, I don’t watch any US news any more (and only a tiny bit of foreign headline news), I only read it, so while I certainly read about “Drill, Drill, Drill,” I didn’t see any crowds chanting it. I also haven’t attended any political rallies in person since George Bush (I) in 1992. So I guess I truly don’t get out much.

That said, until other energy sources can replace oil, I’m also in favor of drilling more. The news from Germany makes me laugh right now. They don’t have enough fuel or gas, so they are passing large giveaway packages to help keep the prices of various energy artificially low for consumers (by their standards, low being .40 Euro cents/kWh). They also passed a genius law that says they won’t pay more than $60 per barrel of Russian oil. Clearly they don’t understand how market pricing works. Russia just turned right around and said they’ll get none if they want to pay less than market value. Which means they will purchase very expensive oil (which has to come from somewhere, why not the US?) to meet their needs.

They’ve also finally decided to keep their last two nuclear plants online so they don’t run out of electricity, and even with those online they now get over 40% of their electricity from unclean brown coal, in spite of the fact they’ve invested heavily in alternative energy sources (much more so than the US). You can’t tell me that any of this is better (or in real terms, cleaner in carbon output) than cheaper oil. It’s even better if the US is getting paid for it instead of unfriendly regimes.

Maybe we could keep all natural gas and coal electrical plants offline if we now invested heavily in nuclear, as the French have done, and are still doing. But even if we did, I suspect there would be no way to generate enough energy for vehicles if there were even a 20% penetration of all-electric cars.

So yes, I’m definitely in favor of drilling for oil, in spite of the fact that I both support and use solar energy (and put my money where my mouth is).

Dave Barnhart

I am tired of those that imply that if we are not in favor of all electric cars etc then we are against the environment. It is as if some people think that electricity simply comes from wires and nothing else. It is as if they forget that in order to power an electric car, a lot of coal has to be hauled by trucks and railroads. Further the more that pipelines are shut down or delayed, the more coal and oil and natural gas/propane has to be hauled by trucks and trains (as if they are more environmentally friendly than pipelines). Then we cannot forget how much the environment is impacted by mining for lithium batteries compared to just drilling a small hole in the ground to pump out oil or natural gas. Sure there is an environmental impact from crude oil and natural gas, but there are also impacts from other sources as well. I am not against solar or windmills, but I am also not against petroleum. I just wish there was more honest conversation about these things.

…..but it does seem that the end game is the abolition of fossil fuel use, and in that light, we have to ask ourselves a question; is it fair to demand people in Asia and Africa let their children die so coal doesn’t get burned? I hope we would agree on a quick and emphatic “no” to this.

Regarding electric cars, however, there’s a lot more going on, environmentally speaking, than just the burning of coal (mostly) and natural gas (to a degree) to fuel them. The process of mining the rare earths needed for these is concentrated in China, Russia, and Bolivia, and even beyond the totalitarianism of the first two, it’s generally an environmental disaster requiring the burning of a LOT of bunker fuel (high sulfur heavy diesel, also used for ships) and the desolation of areas where the mining occurs. It’s a big political issue in Bolivia, as the place where you get lithium there is one of the most sensitive ecological areas in the country.

But from the perspective of a northlander, what I see is that the range of electric cars goes down by up to 30% from 70F to 20F, and my home gets to -20F in the winter. What that means for me is that a 300 mile range Tesla (already pretty skimpy compared to my present cars) becomes about 150 miles in the dead of winter, and when that battery gets old, you lose another 30% of range, so that goes to about 100 miles. More or less, I’d be pretty close to the place where I’d have to refuel every hour and a half, a huge hassle.

Plus, the gasoline in the tank produces excess heat, and at -20F, that’s a feature, not a bug. Electric cars thus become not just inconvenient, but a safety hazard if one happens to get stuck—may I remind you have the very lean ground clearance on most electric cars needed to keep their range up? And you can’t just bring a gas can and get them going again; they would be there until towed, presumably by a tow truck with a gas or diesel engine.

And all that when mass power generation is, at about 35% Carnot efficiency, only marginally better than the ~25% Carnot efficiency of internal combustion engines—and a lot of the better efficiency of the power plant gets sucked up with greater rolling resistance of heavier electric cars?

There are great ways to use less fuel and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but most of the ways the environmentalists propose are really not among them.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

Bert said,

There are great ways to use less fuel and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but most of the ways the environmentalists propose are really not among them.

I tend to agree with this statement, but the problem is that I consider myself an environmentalist. The problem is that I actually promote the path that has the most benefit to our environment rather than the path that will give me a pat on the back by the activist community. No doubt pipelines have a level of risk to our envronment with the potential for leaks. The problem is that trains and trucks can also have disastorous spills and those trains and trucks put a lot more pollution into the air than pipelines do. During construction, pipelines definitely disrupt the landscape, but once completed, the environment over the pipeline quickly goes back to the way it was before. That is not the case with a railroad or with a highway or with a wind farm or solar panel farm. I could go on and on. I do care about the environment. I do care about old people. I do care about minorities. I do care about the poor. I do care about children. I just don’t always agree that certain solutions that are supposed to help with all those things will actually accomplish the goal that is being promoted.