With a powerful laser blast, scientists near a nuclear fusion milestone

[Lightwreather]

Idk if this should be in tech news, but it is somewhat related to tech, so.......

Summary

A laser blast in California creates a miniature sun for a tiny fraction of a second and ignites a self-sustaining chain reaction.

The target chamber at the National Ignition Facility.

Quotes

Quote

For an almost imperceptible fraction of a second on Aug. 8, massive lasers at a government facility in Northern California re-created the power of the sun in a tiny hot spot no wider than a human hair. The result is a significant step forward in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for many energy and environmental challenges.

The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility, which takes up the space of three football fields at the campus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay metroplex. Powerful lasers there were focused onto a target the size of a BB, resulting in a reaction that threw off over 10 quadrillion watts of power.

Remarkably, that's about 6% of the total energy of all the sunshine striking Earth's surface at any given moment, although the powerful burst only lasted for 100 trillionths of a second. Even in that minuscule timeframe, though, scientists observed a big breakthrough: The hotspot was able to ignite a self-sustaining chain reaction, fusing more hydrogen atoms together and continuing the process of energy generation, like an internal combustion engine burning through one molecule of fuel after another to keep going.

Achieving this ignition point is a key milestone in the roadmap to fusion power.

"This phenomenal breakthrough brings us tantalizingly close to a demonstration of 'net energy gain' from fusion reactions -- just when the planet needs it," said Arthur Turrell, physicist and author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet, in a statement.

For decades now, dozens of facilities have been experimenting with different methods. The challenge isn't just to achieve fusion, but to do so in a way that doesn't require more energy to create the reaction than is produced as a result.

This month's experiment was still a net negative in terms of energy in versus energy out, but it puts the science on the threshold of breaking even.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reports that while a final analysis still needs to be peer reviewed, the initial data showed that the results yielded eight times the energy output of experiments done earlier this year and 25 times that seen in 2018. 

"For reference this [is] about 1000x more energy output than we were getting when I joined the project 10 years ago," project physicist Jayson Luc Peterson added on Twitter.

Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Center for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said in a statement that improvement in fusion energy output has accelerated over the past year, "suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process."

Interestingly, the National Ignition Facility is not primarily meant as a tool for fusion energy development, but rather for nuclear weapons research. Chittenden says the result should spur on other efforts focused on creating clean power.

"We have now proven it is possible to reach ignition, giving inspiration to other laboratories and start-ups around the world working on fusion energy production to try to realize the same conditions using a simpler, more robust and above all cheaper method."

 

My thoughts

Okay, so I'm not very sure that this should be in tech news, but it is still somewhat tech related (in more ways than one), but this is huge. This is pretty amazing, were now closer that ever to commercial Nuclear Fusion energy. For the uninitiated, Nuclear Fusion involves the fusion of atoms to create heavier elements, this process releases energy that can then be used. It is a completely clean and safe source of energy, for incase of something like a meltdown, the plasma used to create the energy will cool off, and since this is just Hydrogen being converted to helium, there won't be any Nuclear radiation. If we break even, and subsequently reacha  net positive amount of energy, then we could very well have virtually infinite amounts of clean energy (Tho ofcourse it'll take some time to get there). All-in-all I am very excited about this.

Sources

Cnet

National Ignition Facility

[flo_306]

yooo this is so cool!!! cant wait for this to become an actual thing for energy generation

[StDragon]

...or puncture the fabric of spacetime via an artificial singularity (blackhole)  

The more impressive scientific discoveries always start with "oops", followed by "that was interesting". Not sure I'd want to stick around when that happens.

[WolframaticAlpha]

3 minutes ago, StDragon said:

...or puncture the fabric of spacetime via an artificial singularity (blackhole)  

The more impressive scientific discoveries always start with "oops", followed by "that was interesting". Not sure I'd want to stick around when that happens.

Can't wait for real life half life.


(Maybe this is how we will get Half life 3)

[Stahlmann]

3 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Can't wait for real life half life.


(Maybe this is how we will get Half life 3)

No don't call it that! Now Valve will do everything in it's power to stop it!

[hollyh88]

 

memes asside... cool technology though. really going to help with advancing us into a new era of actual clean and efficient energy. 

[suicidalfranco]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

or puncture the fabric of spacetime via an artificial singularity (blackhole)  

The weapon that will spawn out of this

[Arika]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

...or puncture the fabric of spacetime via an artificial singularity (blackhole)  
 

People said the same thing about the large hadron collider and that gets fired constantly 

[BuckGup]

6 minutes ago, Arika S said:

People said the same thing about the large hadron collider and that gets fired constantly 

People are usually scared of things they don't understand 

[da na]

6 minutes ago, Arika S said:

People said the same thing about the large hadron collider and that gets fired constantly 

I guess if you stood right where the atoms collide that would suck but I can’t even think of a way that could work as a weapon…

[FakeATF]

This is cool and all, but i'm still waiting on an update on the MARAUDER project.

 

Fusion energy is not the same as a black hole, nor is smashing atoms together at a significant portion of the speed of light.

 

Fusion is when you get something so hot that the atoms themselves break apart, and then combine together to make new atoms. It's how everything apart from hydrogen and helium is made.

 

Fusion power will be the answer to lots of our energy problems, once we figure out how to implement it, though because it has the word "nuclear" in it, people tend to think it's very dangerous.

[StDragon]

40 minutes ago, Arika S said:

People said the same thing about the large hadron collider and that gets fired constantly 

 

33 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

People are usually scared of things they don't understand 

Oppenheimer and Teller shared a concern about lighting the atmosphere on fire via a chain reaction as to what would occur where the first atomic bomb goes off. However later those fears were put to rest when the calculations came back that it was a near impossibility.

But just think; brightest minds in physics had a fear. If they fear it could happen, why wouldn't I? In the end though, math says otherwise.

But just so you know, human error occurs, and sometimes you don't get a 2nd chance. So yes, the fear is misplaced...until it isn't! 

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

It is a completely clean and safe source of energy, for incase of something like a meltdown, the plasma used to create the energy will cool off, and since this is just Hydrogen being converted to helium, there won't be any Nuclear radiation

Fusion creates a lot of neutrons which need to be caught (and converted to energy).  As a result the vessel containing the nuclear reaction becomes radio-active overtime.  Although, the half life of those are a lot shorter...but I don't think it's right to say that fusion is completely safe and clean.  It is a lot safer and likely a lot cleaner than fission...with that said though, until we actually build a working fusion power plant (or devise a method of creating more energy than is consumed) we actually won't know the entire effects of fusion [because we won't know the process]. (although it is most likely safer than fission)

 

4 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

If we break even, and subsequently reacha  net positive amount of energy, then we could very well have virtually infinite amounts of clean energy (Tho ofcourse it'll take some time to get there). All-in-all I am very excited about this.

I fear we are a long long way away.  From my, admittedly very weak, understanding even when we figure out a method to get a net positive energy the capturing is going to take a while to figure out (because you will have to have a lot higher efficiency, and you will need to do it in a way that humans will never need to access the room for maintenance).  It really feels like we are always told that fusion is another 20 years out.

 

With all this said, I am looking forward to seeing what the ITER becomes, and seeing whether it is a net positive plant.

[WolframaticAlpha]

2 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

I guess if you stood right where the atoms collide that would suck but I can’t even think of a way that could work as a weapon…

fusion doesn't work very well as a bomb or any other weapon. It is too expensive, and you could achieve better results with fission, if destruction is your primary motive.

[pipnina]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

...or puncture the fabric of spacetime via an artificial singularity (blackhole)  

The more impressive scientific discoveries always start with "oops", followed by "that was interesting". Not sure I'd want to stick around when that happens.

Even if it was able to produce a black hole (objects that, as far as we know so far, are only created when a star explodes, crushing the core, way beyond human attainment) it would be so small, that it would fizzle out of existence very rapidly. Remember: Black holes are not infinite vacuums but the infinite bending on space time *at the event horizon*, outside of the event horizon they still have their starting mass, and standing 2 meters away from a black hole that weighs 500'000kg would be exactly the same as standing next to a lump of iron of the same weight. It simply won't collect enough extra mass to counter the rate at which it would decay, and it would be gone pretty much instantly.

[tikker]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I fear we are a long long way away.  From my, admittedly very weak, understanding even when we figure out a method to get a net positive energy the capturing is going to take a while to figure out (because you will have to have a lot higher efficiency, and you will need to do it in a way that humans will never need to access the room for maintenance).  It really feels like we are always told that fusion is another 20 years out.

Because fusion is literally always 20 or 50 years out   Even the particle/plasma physics professors and physicists at our institute constantly told us that. Every new step will claim "soon". Not that the steps aren't magnificent, but soon is always conveniently unspecified.

6 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

If we break even, and subsequently reacha  net positive amount of energy, then we could very well have virtually infinite amounts of clean energy (Tho ofcourse it'll take some time to get there). All-in-all I am very excited about this.

Don't forget this was a fraction of a second. What they did is great of course. Getting sustainable fusion is awesome, but sustaining it for a 100 trillionth of a second is still a far cry from 24/7 operation. I'm curious to see when we'll actually have fusion running. Sometimes results like this can lead to very quick subsequent development, so fingers crossed.

7 minutes ago, pipnina said:

and standing 2 meters away from a black hole that weighs 500'000kg would be exactly the same as standing next to a lump of iron of the same weight.

Not completely correct. The relevant quantitiy for a black hole is density not mass. A 500,000 kg black hole would be tiny though, so yeah you wouldn't be sucked in irreversibly at 2 metres away. Even the Earth needs to be squeezed into the size of a grape before it turns into a black hole.

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

This is great, nuclear power is nice but uranium is expensive and, well, there's radiation.

That is kinda the point of fusion. It produces very little waste in front of our current fission reactors

[pipnina]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

California: we've made a miniature sun, this can led to safer and more efficient nuclear energy

My city's power plant: haha coal conveyor goes brrr

 

This is great, nuclear power is nice but uranium is expensive and, well, there's radiation.

The problems with nuclear are not so severe as people make out. Of the most prominent nuclear disasters, only one can be, I think, fairly considered as evidence against nuclear safety.

For Chernobyl, it is evidence that carbon-moderated reactors are unsafe, and that containment buildings are useful.

For three-mile-island, it is another example of the need for containment buildings, and also the reason more modern reactors tend to have hydrogen absorbers. This was also a very minor incident in terms of real impact, yet remains one of the most famous.

For the Windscale fire, well, look at the reactor design yourself and you can see why it was going to go wrong lol. Carbon moderated, air cooled, and made by a Britian desperate to make enough heavy water to make a hydrogen bomb before the international ban on weapons tests. Not a useful example against modern nuclear power.

 

Fukushima may be the best example of modern limits of nuclear safety, but even then it would have been fine if the generators had been above the flood line. And the reactor would have been safe except for the 9.0 earthquake and record setting tsunami.

It's a safe technology by-and-large. I'd only concede that there *is* expense in producing it.

[schwellmo92]

ITER should be the first real implementation of an energy net-positive fusion reactor but I'm not sure how far off that is. It has been in planning for over a decade IIRC and they are still early in the building phase right now.

[Lightwreather]

3 minutes ago, pipnina said:

The problems with nuclear are not so severe as people make out. Of the most prominent nuclear disasters, only one can be, I think, fairly considered as evidence against nuclear safety.

For Chernobyl, it is evidence that carbon-moderated reactors are unsafe, and that containment buildings are useful.

For three-mile-island, it is another example of the need for containment buildings, and also the reason more modern reactors tend to have hydrogen absorbers. This was also a very minor incident in terms of real impact, yet remains one of the most famous.

For the Windscale fire, well, look at the reactor design yourself and you can see why it was going to go wrong lol. Carbon moderated, air cooled, and made by a Britian desperate to make enough heavy water to make a hydrogen bomb before the international ban on weapons tests. Not a useful example against modern nuclear power.

 

Fukushima may be the best example of modern limits of nuclear safety, but even then it would have been fine if the generators had been above the flood line. And the reactor would have been safe except for the 9.0 earthquake and record setting tsunami.

It's a safe technology by-and-large. I'd only concede that there *is* expense in producing it.

Can you believe that Sloar energy has been directly responsible for more deaths than Nuclear?
Atleast according to Kurzgesagt's sources

[wanderingfool2]

20 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

fusion doesn't work very well as a bomb or any other weapon. It is too expensive, and you could achieve better results with fission, if destruction is your primary motive.

Uhm, fusion works very well with bombs.  It's literally called a hydrogen bomb (or thermonuclear weapon).

 

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/public/2019-10/Development%20of%20the%20Hydrogen%20Bomb-%20Document%20Set.pdf?VersionId=TIums5XoxSxXDVHA.MGW8aqOO6IZItZ2

Quote

Hydrogen bombs cause a bigger explosion, which means the shock waves, blast,
heat and radiation all have larger reach than an atomic bomb, according to
Edward Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at University of California,
Berkeley.

 

The power plant itself might not be creating the fuels, but realistically they could be sourcing the deuterium and tritium from other places anyways.  Actually, from the sounds of it though, a large scale fusion plant could make plutonium as well which could be used to make atomic bombs as well.

 

22 minutes ago, Caroline said:

This is great, nuclear power is nice but uranium is expensive and, well, there's radiation.

There is still radiation with fusion, just not nearly as much bad stuff as fission.  The vessels holding the reaction become highly irradiated and are more radio active than fission reactors (but a shorter half life).  So it would be safer after 50 years, and from what I read in 500 years equal to about coal.

 

16 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

ITER should be the first real implementation of an energy net-positive fusion reactor but I'm not sure how far off that is. It has been in planning for over a decade IIRC and they are still early in the building phase right now.

From what I've seen, it's scheduled to be completed by 2025 for plasma generation...it will be an exciting day to see what results come from it.  With that said, it is not going to be able to produce any power (and by the sounds of it, when accounting for all the other equipment needed to heat the plasma the net-positive fusion instead of being 10x energy in vs out is actually closer to 1.6x...still a great step forward).

 

20 minutes ago, pipnina said:

Fukushima may be the best example of modern limits of nuclear safety, but even then it would have been fine if the generators had been above the flood line. And the reactor would have been safe except for the 9.0 earthquake and record setting tsunami.

Ultimately it's human failure that causes things.  Fukushima could have maybe been prevented had they followed the up with the reports that they needed to protect the generators and that their defenses against such a tsunami were inadequate (there were reports of this something like 10 years prior to the tsunami that pointed out the issues that eventually came to fruition).

 

Same with Chernobyl, albeit the tips of the control rods is a failure in design but at the same time human error of operating it in a way that it wasn't designed for was the significant reason for it exploding (and the control rod issue just made it so once they crossed a certain point it was bound to fail)

 

I am willing to bet the next nuclear disaster we have as well will come down to human error as well (where safety procedures/cost of doing thing properly are ignored and a plant is put into a position that it could no longer recover from).

 

32 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

That is kinda the point of fusion. It produces very little waste in front of our current fission reactors

I will only concede to this point once an experiment reactor is created that is producing energy and things can be analyzed.  The vessel itself becomes really irradiated and it makes me wonder in a full scale energy producing system will it cause a lot of wear on the vessel (and thus parts of the vessel need switching out more).  Sure the radioactive material is "less" from the fusion itself, but the question becomes will you be creating more waste from the vessel

[Doobeedoo]

Very interesting, looking forward to see about it more.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

ITER should be the first real implementation of an energy net-positive fusion reactor but I'm not sure how far off that is. It has been in planning for over a decade IIRC and they are still early in the building phase right now.

It's only a test Reactor and it wasn't expected to be Net Energy Positive (it's hoped the reaction itself will be but the full cycle won't). At least when they started the designs. Note, I'm pretty sure the project is a solid decade behind schedule, too, though it appears they're getting close to at least having everything built.

 

I really wish more money had gone towards the Polywell. That had promise and looked a lot cheaper to at least scale in a testing program. 

[StDragon]

36 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It's only a test Reactor and it wasn't expected to be Net Energy Positive (it's hoped the reaction itself will be but the full cycle won't). At least when they started the designs. Note, I'm pretty sure the project is a solid decade behind schedule, too, though it appears they're getting close to at least having everything built.

 

I really wish more money had gone towards the Polywell. That had promise and looked a lot cheaper to at least scale in a testing program. 

I remember Linus visited General Fusion with a video about it. Either it was luck or him and his staff did their homework, but I'm thinking too Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) is the way to go. It's a cheaper hybrid approach that combines magnetic confinement fusion with inertial. It also solves the issue of fueling, removing spent fuel while capturing heat to run steam turbines.

In many ways, MTF is like a nuclear internal combustion engine in that it has cycles to it.

[Brooksie359]

6 hours ago, FakeATF said:

This is cool and all, but i'm still waiting on an update on the MARAUDER project.

 

Fusion energy is not the same as a black hole, nor is smashing atoms together at a significant portion of the speed of light.

 

Fusion is when you get something so hot that the atoms themselves break apart, and then combine together to make new atoms. It's how everything apart from hydrogen and helium is made.

 

Fusion power will be the answer to lots of our energy problems, once we figure out how to implement it, though because it has the word "nuclear" in it, people tend to think it's very dangerous.

Tbh most of our energy concerns can be addressed today with our current nuclear power plant technology. The only issues is that people are scared by misinformation about nuclear power plants thinking that they are super dangerous when they really aren't. The ironic part being that fossil fuels cause alot more radioactive material to enter the environment than a running nuclear power plant simply because nuclear power plants actually take care of radioactive bioproducts safely.