fusion

[hubcapsc]

A controlled fusion reaction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., produced more energy than it consumed

-Mike

[Robert]

Yup saw that pretty interesting for the first time

[Serk]

Yah been reading about that.

If confirmed, BIG BIG news.

Won't be soon, likely decades away, but gives hope of a future with unlimited truly clean energy...

It's always been a "Would be nice if..." thing, is now much closer to a "Will be nice when..." thing...

[0leman]

We have been promised fusion since I was a young person.  Many decades ago.  I probably be in the ground a long time before it is ready for the grid.  Still would be great to see it happen.

[carolinarider09]

We have been promised fusion since I was a young person.  Many decades ago.  I probably be in the ground a long time before it is ready for the grid.  Still would be great to see it happen.

 

[RP#62]

Seems like we've been really close for the last 20 years.  Hope we're really really close this time.


-RP

[Grandpot]

I wonder what Jane Fonda and the rest of the anti-nuclear-power environmentalists are thinking about it as they drive around in their electric cars, looking for a charging station?

[hubcapsc]

I wonder what Jane Fonda and the rest of the anti-nuclear-power environmentalists are thinking about it as they drive around in their electric cars, looking for a charging station?

I don't keep up with Jane and the antis, but Jay Leno apparently knows where
to charge his.

The new electric Ford F-150 is unbelievable. I drove it as a work vehicle.
It is eminently practical. You can you go 240 miles on it, and you can power
your house for three days with it if you lose power.

"But I don't want to power my house!" "It can't go across the country without a recharge!"

True, in both cases. Some people (the ones who don't have them) seem to care a lot about that.

I thought a car that was just brilliant was the Chevy Volt. I had one for
seven years. It’s a hybrid and you got 40 miles electric free without using
any gas. It didn’t seem like much, but I put 90,000 miles on that car, only
3,800 of it was gasoline-powered

I think it makes perfect sense that you use your electric car during the
week. To sit in traffic on the 405 freeway in bumper to bumper, in something
that gets 7 to 9 miles a gallon, really doesn’t make a lot of sense. I used to
have a Jaguar; it had a big V-8 engine that was supercharged, and that
was $125 a week in gas. And I didn’t feel like I was going anywhere. I switched
to the Tesla, and now it costs about the same as a cooking a turkey.

-Mike

[Valkorado]

Saw this, I was going to post it up the other day and got sidetracked.  This is potentially one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history.  Unlimited, safe energy. 

Like Forrest Gump said, one less thing (to worry about).

[carolinarider09]

The articles about this event are somewhat misleading but that is not unexpected.   Hear is more information from a different source. 

Getting atoms to fuse requires a combination of high pressure and temperature to squeeze the atoms tightly together. Intense gravity does much of the work in the sun.

At the National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers directed at a small pellet of fuel provided a blast of energy that did the trick instead. The result was a burst of fusion energy that, though brief, was more than the laser energy that instigated the reaction, says physicist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the research. While the total energy released by the experiment has not been made public yet, it exceeded the 1.3 million joules of energy produced by an earlier NIF experiment that marked the first time the team managed to ignite nuclear fusion (SN: 8/18/21).

But this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment.

“The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”

Now granted, the two scientists quoted above were not directly involved with the experiment.  But, that should not make us do anything but really question the results.    

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-energy

[Valkorado]

From above article:

"This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”

"Despite that, it’s a potential turning point in the technology comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight", says Collins. “We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly,” he says.

So, some if us may not see the applied use of nuclear fusion for energy in our lifetimes.  It sounds to me like it's very worthy of human pursuit nonetheless, and this is a major advancement toward that end.

[f6john]

Listening to Jennifer Granholm one would think that she and the Biden administration developed this at the Department of Energy.

[Serk]

Listening to Jennifer Granholm one would think that she and the Biden administration developed this at the Department of Energy.

I got the same impression, had to turn that garbage off after a few minutes of sycophancy and just read the news releases instead...

[carolinarider09]

So, some if us may not see the applied use of nuclear fusion for energy in our lifetimes.  It sounds to me like it's very worthy of human pursuit nonetheless, and this is a major advancement toward that end.

Oh I am all for continued purist.  It will happen.  My major concern is that this will be used as a "hammer" to stop new nuclear construction of fission plants.  Plants that are safe and efficient and don't use fossil fuels. 

[hubcapsc]

I like the nuke plant in my backyard. The ginormous amounts of waste that will be radioactive
for thousands of years is far from "safe", though Duke Power assures us that "Used nuclear fuel is not
green or oozy", so there's that.  And even if they keep throwing spent fuel out behind
the plants instead of implementing a long term storage solution, Duke says that the government
assures us that  it will be OK for hundreds of years if necessary.  Including at the plants
that have already been decommissioned, plus all the other plants that will be decommissioned
in the next few decades.

I said "ginormous" above, but Duke says that all the waste from all the plants in the US would
only cover a football field 10 yards deep, so I may have exaggerated.

-Mike

[Robert]

That was one of the most interesting things about this new technology, supposedly no nuclear waste.

[Skinhead]

Not a nuclear physicist, but from what I understand, the amount of energy produced by the brief fusion reaction was greater than the amount of energy in the laser light that was used to start the fusion reaction.  I'd like to know the amount of energy that was required to create the laser light compared to the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction. 

Not a fan of Grandholm, I'm glad I didn't see her comments.

[hubcapsc]

Not a nuclear physicist, but from what I understand, the amount of energy produced by the brief fusion reaction was greater than the amount of energy in the laser light that was used to start the fusion reaction.  I'd like to know the amount of energy that was required to create the laser light compared to the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction. 

The lasers at the National Ignition Facility are less than 1% efficient, according to Jonathan Davies,
a senior scientist at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. The facility used
hundreds of megajoules of electricity to produce the laser light needed to produce about 3 megajoules
of fusion energy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-reported-by-scientists-at-u-s-lab-11670944595?st=o5oyareb0c00mq5&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

So, the way I understand the above, this proof-of-concept experiment took a lot of energy
to get the  lasers going. But once the lasers were shining on the hydrogen fuel,
more energy came out of that reaction than was in the lasers.

Maybe they can exploit this by running the inefficient lasers with inefficient solar panels
and storing the fusion energy in batteries  ...

-Mike

[Skinhead]

Thanks Mike.

[F6Dave]

Jay Leno apparently knows where to charge his.

The new electric Ford F-150 is unbelievable. I drove it as a work vehicle.
It is eminently practical. You can you go 240 miles on it, and you can power
your house for three days with it if you lose power.

If ‘work vehicle’ means something to pick up bulky items at Home Depot or NAPA, the F150 Lightning should work fine. But for many people, ‘work’ means towing a trailer, and for that the Lightning is nearly useless.

The internet is full of tests that show the Lightning’s range dropping to about 100 miles or less when towing, even with the extended range battery, a $20,000 option! Here’s one at Motor Trend:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-electric-truck-towing-test/

This article details an inconvenient fact that’s rarely discussed: the extremely low energy density of EV batteries. The Lightning’s standard battery pack weighs nearly a ton, while the extended range pack is even heaver. Yet these massive batteries store less energy than four gallons of gasoline. Electric motors have minimal heat loss and use that energy efficiently, but still can’t make up for the energy deficit. So as vehicle size and travel distance increases, EVs make less and less sense. Maybe that’s why the average EV only gets driven about 5,000 miles a year.

[Moonshot_1]

Yeah, we'll get to the point where we can do nuclear fusion on a large scale, lose control of the reaction, it will consume the earth turning it into a secondary star making Mars habitable.

I get the movie rights.

As to the EVs, they do have their place. Local urban transport is their saving grace. You can invest in concentrated infrastructure for charging, reduce emissions in heavy urban areas, and have relatively short to medium length commutes.

Major issue with the EVs is winter driving as you would require heat which would require that energy come directly from the battery and drain it as opposed to a gas powered vehicle which the heat is a by-product of the combustion process. Kinda like free energy.

[hubcapsc]

[gas]... Kinda like free energy.

sun... Kinda like perpetual energy.

-Mike

[carolinarider09]

[
If ‘work vehicle’ means something to pick up bulky items at Home Depot or NAPA, the F150 Lightning should work fine. But for many people, ‘work’ means towing a trailer, and for that the Lightning is nearly useless.

The internet is full of tests that show the Lightning’s range dropping to about 100 miles or less when towing, even with the extended range battery, a $20,000 option! Here’s one at Motor Trend:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-electric-truck-towing-test/

This article details an inconvenient fact that’s rarely discussed: the extremely low energy density of EV batteries. The Lightning’s standard battery pack weighs nearly a ton, while the extended range pack is even heaver. Yet these massive batteries store less energy than four gallons of gasoline. Electric motors have minimal heat loss and use that energy efficiently, but still can’t make up for the energy deficit. So as vehicle size and travel distance increases, EVs make less and less sense. Maybe that’s why the average EV only gets driven about 5,000 miles a year.

 
Facts.  Facts.

[carolinarider09]

As to the EVs, they do have their place. Local urban transport is their saving grace. You can invest in concentrated infrastructure for charging, reduce emissions in heavy urban areas, and have relatively short to medium length commutes.

Major issue with the EVs is winter driving as you would require heat which would require that energy come directly from the battery and drain it as opposed to a gas powered vehicle which the heat is a by-product of the combustion process. Kinda like free energy.

Again Facts!  And I agree. 

[carolinarider09]

Interesting.   This thread is titled "Fusion" and it shifts to EVs.  UMMMMM. Wonder why.

Reliable fusion is 50 - 60 years out for replacing current technologies.   Thats a long way.

So, the notion is obvious.  We had a "breakthrough" in fusion (not really just one very small step down a long, long road) and that means that cheap electricity is just around the corner. And that means EVs are the way to go.

I fully understand.   

[Grandpot]

I'm usually not a negative guy, but for some reason I'm just not feeling warm and fuzzy about this.  I remember back when President Eisenhower was promoting our first nuclear power plants.  He said that electricity would now be so inexpensive that we no longer will need Electric Meters on the side of our homes.  Well, that didn't quite go according to plan.

[hubcapsc]

Reliable fusion is 50 - 60 years out for replacing current technologies. 

Nope, four days.

-Mike

[The emperor has no clothes]

Reliable fusion is 50 - 60 years out for replacing current technologies. 

Nope, four days.

-Mike

I heard it will be ready day after tomorrow. 


It’s odd how some have such a vehement opposition to renewable energy.

[carolinarider09]

Reliable fusion is 50 - 60 years out for replacing current technologies. 

Nope, four days.

-Mike

 

[carolinarider09]

The thread is titled "fusion".  The article in the first post suggests that we reached a milestone but they were careful to word it in a way that met the "requirements".  When, in fact, they did not. Energy needed to make the lasers that powerful was not included in the calculation. 

But that aside, other posts have noted that fusion produces less  or no nuclear waste. 

This "notion" has always made me say "really".  So.....

In nuclear fission, we have atoms of uranium and/or plutonium that absorb a neutron, get energized and break up into two or more other atoms (the word nuclides can be used).   These nuclides have KE from the breakup and impact other atoms in the fuel pellet cause a transfer of energy and increase the temperature of the fuel pellet.

Water flows by the rod holding the fuel pellets and is warmed and that warmer water is used to make steam in a steam generator.   Same as fossil fuel plants but using energized particles/atoms/nuclides to heat the water instead of a fire from coal, oil, or natural gas. 

So, how is the energy released in a fusion reaction converted into electricity?   

Well it turns out there are two ways.  One is just like the fission reactor/power plant.   But instead of fission products (i.e. the two nuclides from the U235 or PU239 atoms that were broken up) we have, it appears, neutrons causing something to get warm. 

And that is interesting.   Neutron bombardment of a material generally results in radioactive materials.   If that is true then why is fusion considered a "clean" way to produce electricity?

https://radiation.thesocialselect.com/why-is-neutron-radiation-dangerous/

[Avanti]

We my have created Fusion = cause people to believe the new green deal and zero emissions will arrive soon. Soon is an ambiguous time frame.

[Valkorado]

We my have created Fusion = cause people to believe the new green deal and zero emissions will arrive soon. Soon is an ambiguous time frame.

We need affordable, reliable energy right now.  I still say drill, baby drill!  Reopen the shuttered fission plants as well.  That shouldn't stop America from pursuing fusion energy, and becoming the world's forerunner in its development.

Most of us here realize carbon energy is limited, and we have earned enough wrinkles and gray hairs to know the decades fly by pretty fast. 

Forward ever, backward never.

[F6Dave]

The IEA just announced that in 2022, global coal consumption will exceed 8 billion tons for the first time in history. Another breakthrough.

[Serk]

The IEA just announced that in 2022, global coal consumption will exceed 8 billion tons for the first time in history. Another breakthrough.

Heh, roughly one ton per person...

[F6Dave]

The IEA just announced that in 2022, global coal consumption will exceed 8 billion tons for the first time in history. Another breakthrough.

Heh, roughly one ton per person...

Then there's oil. Current consumption is about 100 million barrels per DAY (or 4.2 billion gallons), but that's expected to increase by 2-3% when China's economy returns to normal.

[carolinarider09]

We need affordable, reliable energy right now.  I still say drill, baby drill!  Reopen the shuttered fission plants as well.  That shouldn't stop America from pursuing fusion energy, and becoming the world's forerunner in its development.

Forward ever, backward never.

And build more (fission plants that is).   Just in case you missed it, here are the current plans for the construction of fission power plants (AKA Nuclear) for the world.  

As of May 2022:  China  Fifteen (15), India eight( 8 ), South Korea four (4), and others. Only one in the USA.  Only one.  

[url=https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/]https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/[/url]

[Serk]

Fusion will be a panacea when it's ready for prime time.

And as I stated earlier, this latest breakthrough shows it's when, not if.....

But until then.....

Fission. Build. More. Fission. Plants!

[carolinarider09]

Now that is an excellent post Serk.

[hubcapsc]

Fission. Build. More. Fission. Plants!

Keep everyone's waste in Texas 

-Mike

[carolinarider09]

My apologies - could not resist after Serk's post.

Me keeping Tave in the "green" band at 200 feet (more or less) doing 3 knots.