At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists used 192 lasers to create a brief fusion reaction that put out more energy than it took to create it. This breakthrough — decades in the making — bodes well for future power plants that generate electricity without radioactive waste, or carbon-laden exhaust. President Biden’s vision of a commercial fusion power plant in 10 years, however, faces significant obstacles — not the least of which is the view of the actual scientists that it will take several times that long to achieve.
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24 replies on “Clean-Power Breakthrough: Inertial Confinement Fusion Reaction Changes Everything…Eventually”
I utterly reject the notion that there is anything admirable in stuffing the press conference with diversity hires. I utterly reject the notion that women (or young girls) who pursue degrees or careers in so-called STEM (or any other) subjects have any need to see other females succeeding in their fields in order for themselves to succeed.
I agree with you Laura. I got a BS degree in Computer Science in 1987 because I didn’t know any other women who were doing this and thought there’d be a lot less competition for jobs! Turns out I was right and I’ve been working and making a great income ever since.
I think the biggest reason there are few women in STEM degrees is because it is hard spending four years taking courses in programming, physics, electrical engineering, calculus, etc. Not because we have few role models. Who needs a role model if you’re motivated?
Always glad qualified people in areas where they are underrepresented. I did computer programming for about 22 years. Two of the top ten programmers I met were women. Sadly, one of the bottom ten was a woman. Her main problem was she slow…and entitled. She thought her being a woman mean she could do no wrong and never get called on it.
She lasted 2 years. She should have been gone after a year.
And no, she was not the worst I’ve seen. One man was worse. And in addition, was hitting on every woman around. Gone in six months.
Beautifully said. While I don’t have a degree in STEM myself, I have to say that I have always found being the only (or one of a few) female among men to be stimulating and motivating. When other women were involved in anything, everything got more complicated and less fun. I never experienced any sexism except from women. All-female groups on any basis bore me to tears.
Steven is great but he’s even managed to get Robot Cars wrong. The robot cars have now met all the criteria set for them 5 years ago. They are as safe as a 17-20 year old driver and far safer than a learner driver or drunk driver. So why are they not everywhere? They are not perfectly safe and governments have moved the goal posts to demand perfect safety. An impossibility. In all the fatal accidents with Robot cars the reports show that the human driver would not have had the time or reflexes to stop or react.
All the low speed accidents are two phenomena.
The delay with robot cars is political not technical. There is an additional reason why some politicians and administrators are reluctant to have common robot cars: the robot car bomb problem. It would make it too easy for terrorists.
In this case the politicians are right to slow-walk robot cars. The real problem isn’t just bomb-laden cars, it’s that anything programmable can be hacked. And tracked, along with all that other data you mentioned like fender sensors. Your vehicle will no longer be your vehicle. Your right to privacy within it will be gone.
(Of course, most people have already willingly given up much of that privacy by carrying smart phones with enabled GPS and using devices like Alexa and “Hey, Googe.”)
Robot cars will never be able to be real and on the road for one simple reason, humans.
Humans have a whole lot of evil hairless monkeys who will use them for evil. There is no way they can enigneer them in such a way to truely be safe if people want them to be unsafe.
A terrorist orders a robot taxii and puts a bomb with a gps trigger in it and doesn’t have to risk himself in the crime.
Someone paints lines across intersections ir highways and robot cars are not allowed to cross them. When the environment is hacked against robots which rules do they follow?
Malicious updates get pushed to all the vehicles making them think there is nothing in front of them. Technology is flawed and cannot be secured enough to allow the robots on the road with humans.
I can’t actually see well enough to drive I need those robot cars. Yes they can be misused but so can all technology.
In addition to what you said an Laura said there are technical issues. 1) They could be hacked. 2) You need competent drivers just in case. Why? 1) EMPs They could be shielded, but will they? 2) Uh.. My phone tablet and computer does strange things or abends every so often. If no competent driver exists and this happens (and it will and has) what then? The tech for driverless cars is orders of magnitude more difficult than my phone, tablet or computer. And more than once a month I have to reboot my phone when it locks. And if I blindly obeyed my GPS, once I would have driven off the edge of a bridge. Once into a building and more than once totally off any roads. What if the driverless car computer does something similar? At minimum, a override is vital. Should be fairly easy to use, but hard to do accidentally. Like hit a button 3 times fast.
I love tech as a Chemical engineer, but know its limits. Love the backup camera and the warnings it gives when something is behind (like a pedestrian who doesn’t pay attention to when I am backing up).
Love the warning if I am about to hit something or if I am weaving. These aids are wonderful.
But totally controlled? No. I’ve had to run stoplights and “weave” in order to not get hit!
Is all that going to be programmed? Not yet. If ever.
This is a massive false dawn for several reasons. Firstly Cold Fusion passed this point in 1991 with basic Pons and Fleischman cells. More energy out than in is easy. The real problem is energy conversion. This inertial confinement system uses dozens of Joules to make the tritium deuterium target and that’s assuming the tritium is free. Scott pointed out the laser power is much higher than stated beam power so it’s more like 300 joules in and 3 joules out. We have no means to convert the nanosecond flash of energy into electricity. Steam conversion is 33 to 48% efficient. So even 2 joules in for 3 out is a fail. It needs to be at least 3.1 joules thermal output per joules in. So given the laser wattage, they never mentioned cooling or vacuum pumps, needs to out put 930 thermal to cover the inputs. Lab lights, computers etc could push that to 1000.
A Cold Fusion unit, now called LENR, low energy nuclear reactions, has an input measured as tens of joules in with 500 joules thermal output. Infrared microscopes show that at the nanoscale the temperature is millions of degrees. Its not cold. Calling it cold is invalid. If you put a thermometer in the carpark or control room then you could declare all nuclear reactors cold fission. Same mistake. Pons and Fleischman hated the term. It was coined by another scientist Steven E. Jones now famous for being the major 9/11 conspiracy theorist.
Assuming a lower end heat engine, which I could build if I had the resources, we could extract 500 watt thermal or 100 watt work or electricity. Closing the loop means putting 11 watts into the cells and controller to keep them primed.
The other problem with the Cold Fusion cells is that they would quit randomly. They generally run days or weeks but they stop. The reason for this is known. When you create the nanoscale geometry that allows tunneling between the Deuterons (and a few protons) the distribution is random. When the reaction starts it generates very high temperatures that start some other sites but also thermally destroys others, and the one that’s just gone. Eventually you run out of ammo. The good news is that Dr Edmond Storms has developed a fast way to repair the things in a few minutes. So 6 to 8 units can be set up to run for months with any failed ones reset while the backups are running. There are a few other details. I can’t file a patent, in the US they are not allowed so all research there is very limited. You can file in Australia but it costs more in lawyers that building a power plant.
The problem with Cold Fusion is the same as climate fraud, Covid, etc, The Science is settled. The textbooks say it does not work just because some academics failed to duplicate it while hundreds of others succeeded. Anyone still working in the field, like Dr Storms, is deemed a pseudoscientist. The exact same tactic used to shut down climate sceptics by either denying their qualification or actually trying to take their qualifications away from them. This also happened with Covid. Its starting to happen to people who question sex reassignment processes.
It started a half century before we were born with the science is settled claims of the evolutionists in the creation evolution debate and related geology/ cosmology.
Remember how incredibly dim the first LEDs were and how incredibly bright they are now, not very many years after they were first proven from theory and successfully created!
Elon Musk just launched Open AI, so it is no longer five years away …….. perhaps ?!?!
Gliders had been successfully flying for a long time before the Wright Brothers, so their real success was mating a power source that had a usable power to weight ratio!!!
If you think that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is not hiring based upon equity, diversity and inclusion, then you are completely deluded. I work at LLNL’s predecessor, and those philosophies are prolific in ALL of the corporate and laboratory halls.
There is no “breakthrough”: NIF fusion power still consumes 130 times more energy than it creates (https://bigthink.com/the-future/fusion-power-nif-hype-lose-energy/)Some useful notes from the linked article:
and
All of this hype is politically- and financially-motivated! Let’s not be fooled here. Rather let’s laud the scientific and engineering achievements for what they are … incremental.
Not related to the current topic, but indicated by Bill in his comment on a suburban housewife driving a car, is the fallacy that any system can mirror accurately what any human does at any particular time. Consider why central government planning fails and the message should be clear. No institution, no system, can do other than “average” what 300,000,000 people or more decide in an average day about their economic position and choices. An average cannot define correctly even how a system will function. There are too many variables with varying influences on any decision.
As to fusion: great accomplishment even though 300 megajoules of energy was needed to fire the lasers at 2 megajoules to retrieve 3 in return. The value is in determining the energy content of the hydrogen variants used in the experiment and showing that “it can be done”.
A year old video by Sabine Hossenfelder How close is nuclear fusion power? calls into question the true net energy gain being promoted by the scientific investigators (and other grant seekers):
https://yt3.ggpht.com/rN0sMKGXLGcG-gWIYKnbMyKCgEaIeY62P1vaslUPO_3QObfnwBZNG2hyTmysFYRayXt0LKHJ=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj
A counter argument, or at least a more cautious one, is offered here: https://imikem.medium.com/sabines-low-down-about-fusion-92a6b103da32
Bill @ 15:00: if after 50 years of exploring difficult, game changing, technical projects with little seen in breakthroughs, we might also ask about the 50+ years of Great Society and welfare and head start and “poverty eliminating” type programs, … and just how successful they have been as well.
The poverty reduction programs seem to have largely succeeded. Given the prominence of many blacks in modern life today, plus the recent Heritage report that when you account for government supplied resources for people at the lower end, and taxation for the people at the higher end, the level of “equality” is in fact leveled quite a bit. I believe the figure was something like a typical family obtaining these added (government supplied) resources gave them $63K to $76K in basic income. Rather far from sleeping in doorways and rummaging through dumpsters for food.
What’s really scary is when politicians pass laws and enact government policy on these usually faulty predictions.
BTW, Isaac Asimov once related that when his father was born, man had not left the ground in powered flight. Before his father died, man had walked on the moon!
They have to give timelines to keep interest, especially interest for grant / government money. They all know they don’t know, and we all know they don’t know, and they all know we all know they don’t know. Celebrate progress and don’t place one back order quite yet.
I’m sorry if I said this before but, back in the 90’s I was working with a physicist who was, inarguably, the number expert in fusion in the world – no exaggeration. I can’t to say his name because it would be a breach of trust for what I am about to say.
Anyway, since he had a very broad and deep understanding of all aspects of fusion technology, I asked him the “how long?” question and, without a pause, he said, “Not in our lifetime.”
He went on to say that most scientists are very focused on one aspect of the problem and they have a tendency to think that the problem they are working on is the main or only remaining problem. He said there are SO MANY problems like that, and more arising all the time, that it is very far in the future, if ever. that it will become a reality.
Producing more energy than you put in is just one of MANY equally important problems. I have visited some inertial confinement facilities and know that there are many other serious problems with that technology, alone.
I saw a show on aliens visiting earth recently. Scores of people in western Michigan saw UFOs over their homes. The last view they saw was the craft apparently sucking water up out of the lake. Could UFOs be refueling? Flying powered by cold fusion?
At the risk of being a jaded cynic (again), the optimistic claims on fusion or AI or anything else in which we dump money continue to be made because that pile of money on which these politically-driven stakeholders is smaller than it needs to be. “Fusion is only a decade away! Be a part of it and help move this effort along!”
And the government’s extortion of taxpayers to fund these lunacies is even worse. Remember Solyndra?
You remember the story about the man who wanted to buy some lawn furniture and was quoted $200. Went to another store and they quoted $180 but they didnt have any in stock. Went back to the first store and was told about the difference in price. “Did they have any in stock?” “Well, No.” “Well, when we dont have any in stock, its only $150!!”
Cant wait for fusion. But not in my lifetime, sadly. Now those dilithium crystals……maybe??
Happy Holidays!
Ultimately, we’re still talking about steam engines.
Actually that’s a breakthrough likely coming with this that’s as big as fusion itself. They are actively working on a purportedly feasible way to directly pull energy, vs. the steam route. That would be gigantic.