Hot stuff: Lab hits milestone on long road to fusion power

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By SETH BORENSTEIN

With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit — at least for a fraction of a second — a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy.

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California were able to spark a fusion reaction that briefly sustained itself — a major feat because fusion requires such high temperatures and pressures that it easily fizzles out.

The ultimate goal, still years away, is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by smooshing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.

A team of more than 100 scientists published the results of four experiments that achieved what is known as a burning plasma in Wednesday’s journal Nature. With those results, along with preliminary results announced last August from follow-up experiments, scientists say they are on the threshold of an even bigger advance: ignition. That’s when the fuel can continue to “burn” on its own and produce more energy than what’s needed to spark the initial reaction.



This illustration provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory depicts a target pellet inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/science-fusion-energy-lawrence-livermore-a3c1ecbb738640b0a2e384dc80b8dd07

[AllaN01Bear]

1. ohm my. so, when are we going to get our first intersteller star ship?

i love the name . national ignition facility.

[Shermann]

4. They are either doing serious research in there, or smoking weed

I guess they could be doing a little bit of both.

[3Hotdogs]

13. After I get mine installed in my Sonata hybrid.

[3Hotdogs]

14. After I get mine installed in my Sonata hybrid.

No cop ever gonna catch my ass on Rt 78.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Nice to know they plan to cool the planet down by releasing torrents of energy

Is their cure for global warming worse than the disease?

[smb]

3. No

The actual energy generated by a power plant (of whatever type) is a trivial effect compared to the long-term effect on the planet's thermal balance caused by CO2 emissions (which are obviously not an issue here).

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Well it's not obvious to me

More heat, more energy. Thermodynamics. And can they regulate a process that releases torrents of energy?

[smb]

6. If It Worked That Way...

...a megawatt of power generation from windmills or solar arrays would affect the climate just as much as a megawatt of power generation from burning coal or oil.

That would mean that Trump is actually right about something, which is obviously absurd.

[OneCrazyDiamond]

7. 81 Million degrees F is pretty hot though. n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. To keep it going, some of the energy has to be directed back into it

in a very precise way (which is why it's so hard to start it in the first place), so it can't get out of control.

The geothermal heat flow from the Earth's interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts (TW)[12] and split approximately equally between radiogenic heat and heat left over from the Earth's formation. This corresponds to an average flux of 0.087 W/m2 and represents only 0.027% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, being dwarfed by the 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation.[13]

Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019. This corresponds to an average continuous heat flow of about 18 TW.[14]
...
Over 90 percent of the heat that has accumulated on Earth from ongoing global warming since 1970 has been stored in the ocean.[20] About one-third of this energy has propagated to depths below 700 meters. The overall rate of growth has also risen during recent decades, reaching close to 500 TW (1 W/m2) as of 2020.[2][7] That led to about 14 zettajoules (ZJ) of heat gain for the year, exceeding the 570 exajoules (=160,000 TW-hr[14]) of total primary energy consumed by humans by a factor of at least 20.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget

So if we converted the whole human energy usage (ie oil, gas, electricity generation etc.) to fusion, we'd be adding heat to the atmosphere at under 5% of the rate we are now. But that wouldn't build up, the way greenhouse gases do; it'd heat the atmosphere a tiny amount, which, since it would be a little hotter, would then radiate the extra into space at the same ration the fusion reactors produced it.

[Slammer]

10. fusion

The fusion might have been momentarily self-sustaining. But it's not infinitely self-sustaining.

Yeah, they can regulate it by controlling how much fuel is put into the reactor.

They're fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms.

Not hydrogen atoms bonded to oxygen atoms (aka water) or atoms from the air. They're fusing pure hydrogen, which isn't readily available in the surrounding environment.

Fusion will stop as soon as the available fuel is reduced. That's as solidly-reliable of a fact as the law of gravity.

====

Now turning that fusion energy into usable electricity is probably going to be done just like fission energy, they're planning on boiling water with it to turn steam turbines.

It's a hell of a lot more energy efficient to boil water with some form of nuclear energy than it is to burn some fossil fuel to turn that into electricity. The number usually mentioned is that it is 8000 times more energy efficient to do fission than fossil fuel.

So if we switched over fusion at some point, we'd be releasing a hell of a lot less waste heat into the surrounding environment in order to get the same amount of usable power.

[Crazyleftie]

8. oh my what foolishness....

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/

[Tommymac]

12. Not foolish at all. Another tool in the belt for future energy requirements. Progress baby.

Your article postulates problems with PROPOSED technologies.

Of coarse every scientific advance has problems that have to be overcome. That is science. That is technology. Find better ways and move on.

Fusion is still decades away. I have no doubt the issues your article postulates with just one type of technology can be solved. In fact a lot of what this article says are problems are as theoretical as fusion power itself.

I believe in the scientific method and engineering the future.

Galileo was imprisoned in his home for telling scientific truth.

According to folks in the 1890's heavier then air flying was impossible and against God's will.

According to some scientists in 1945 the Atom Bomb was going to ignite the atmosphere in a fiery spontaneous combustion event and kill all life on earth.

Appreciate the viewpoint, but to spin fusion as foolish before the technology is even implemented is just as foolish as some of those points of view above.

[Duppers]

25. 👍

[cstanleytech]

11. I have my doubts that fusion power will be viable anytime within the next 100 years if ever.

Not saying of course that research should stop simply that I do not believe it will be bearing fruit within the lifetime of most of the people currently alive on the planet at this time.

[ZZenith]

15. What makes you think that?

Technological progress has been exponential our entire lifetimes, no reason to think it won’t continue.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

16. No reason? Nothing continues exponentially forever. However, I'm optimistic but not forecasting time

[ZZenith]

17. Were you responding for cstanleytech or do you have two accounts here?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. I have only this account. I was agreeing with your optimism & pointing out that all growth has limit

[ZZenith]

19. Thanks for the clarification!

My grandmother went from horse and buggy to flying on the Concord. Fusion power is not that far out of reach. I posit that we are one or two scientific developments away from solving a great deal of mankind’s power problems. Then we just gotta fix man’s desire for power over others and, voilà - paradise on Earth.

[cstanleytech]

24. A number of things but the main one is the current power requirements and inability to get it to

output power rather than consume it.
I am not sure if they will be able to solve that anytime soon as that's a pretty big hurdle to overcome.

[hunter]

20. It's interesting science but fusion is not going to displace fossil fuels anytime soon.

We need to quit fossil fuels now.

[rolypolychloe]

21. Check out lppfusion.com

They have achieved 2.5 billion degrees C. Their device is pulsed, (Dense Plasma Fusion), and captures the energy from the reaction by the reaction alpha particles passing through a coil, and x-rays going through a really weird coil. They are currently researching why they don't get consistent results. They believe it is contamination from oxides coming off the anodes and cathode. Later this year, they plan to burn a hydrogen/boron mix which is much more energetic than deuterium, and doesn't produce radioactive particles. They are much closer than the tokamak will ever be. The whole device including research equipment fits inside a building the size of a car service station.

[LudwigPastorius]

22. 10 quadrillion watts of power released in 100 trillionths of a second...

These guys and gals aren't fucking around.


But seriously, while they haven't "broken even" with power input to output yet, these experiments should provide a lot of good data for when the ITER reactor gets up and running.

[GoneOffShore]

23. So that's why there was the sound of Champagne corks popping up the road!

Now I'll have to talk to my friends who work at ITER - https://www.iter.org/ - because I'm sure that they are very pleased about this.