The fact that it was repeated and produced a higher yield is what actually makes this compelling. You hear about breakthroughs all the time, but then you never hear about them ever again.
Its hardy a breakthrough. More a hype to get more finance. 100x more energy was used to createc the fusion than the net output from the fusion reaction.
That is because, for most nuclear fusion energy 'breakthrough' announcements, they are filled with sales hype, often in an attempt to attract investment funding to keep the very costly experiments going.
Hope that in 150 years we might actually try to fuse deuterium and tritium in a commercially viable tokamak. Ohhh, keep dreaming about a distant future you'll never live to see; a future that's 95% likely to be impossible, or at the very minimum impractical, at scale.
Imagine if we didn't have to put so much money and resources into military and war effort, but instead into important stuff like this. How far humanity could go.
Well we don't have to put anything into the military, we are just 'trained' to do it. Wars could be prevented or ended by assassinating all warmongers but most people are indoctrinated to value the feelings of warmongers over the lives of millions of other people.
Think of the military industrial complex as a continuous stimulus check. The government uses it to create jobs and spend money domestically, making bombs is just a side effect of that. Corruption is a major issue with it as it is with all government spending of course. The work being done by these people is the same thing, it's a "stimulus check" that might one day product fusion, but more importantly it makes people rich and produces jobs. You might be interested in reading more about how US domestic spending works. Congress' one job is trying to get federal money spent in each representative's home state.
There's another problematic part of this process that Dr. Hosemann failed to mention. When they say more power came out of the reaction than went into it, they're talking about the energy in the laser beams themselves, not the energy required to produce those beams (i.e., to run the laser devices), and the devices are not efficient. In truth, far more energy was used to operate the laser devices than was produced in the reaction. So, there's not only a problem with getting usable energy out of the reaction (which Dr. Hosemann mentioned), there's also a problem with producing the energy that goes into it in the first place (which he didn't).
And??? Do you expect a complex new technology to be perfect the first time it works? I suppose we could have scrapped solar when it was invented because it wasn't efficient to. This is a MAJOR step in a long road.
Misleading. More energy was required overall than was produced when considering the energy required to power the lasers, not the energy coming out of the lssers
@@someguy782 - they need funding, politicians who don't really understand science will throw money at them when they have progress or especially "breakthroughs"
You are right about this being misleading. The previous laser shot to a pellet DID NOT produce more energy than the TOTAL energy consumed. It only produced more energy than in the laser beam that impinged on the pellet. But it doesn’t count the total energy used in generating the laser beam, which is about 100 fold more than in the laser beam itself. Furthermore, the cooling off and recharge period is many hours. There is no pathway to practical fusion by zapping pellets intermittently every few hours. Besides that, the pellets are very difficult to fabricate, have been unreliable and must be stored at cryogenic temperatures. And the pellets must be positioned precisely. All that is absurdly lacking any pathway to practical fusion. This fanfare is probably about funding, but is not a truthful description.
over what time frame? of course you need to pump in more energy at first. the breakthrough is that it produced a net gain for a brief moment,. reproducing an experiment done by another team, and also showing that fussion is viable if we can develop the tech and proper shielding to extend the time of net energy output big things start small. no one thought this would be easy.
@@LorneAlexander my comment was more about media hype and the scientists unwillingness to dispel the hype. The headlines and the press conference was a bit exaggerated and I think it is not entirely factual.
@@grizzyb4149 the thing is...most people are not educated/intelligent/whatever to fully appreciate the real technical explinations that most scientists need to give a trully accurate picture of what has taken place. i imagine many of the people working on these projects dont have the best social skills, so instead of blurting out abstract incomprehensible explinations they gotta hype it by dumbing it down they need funding to keep their projects going and these people really care about what theyre doing. for many of them a few microseconds of power profit may be the result of 10 years of work...they wont downplay their efforts by saying they only achieved a .0001% increase. if they can get it to work in principal, increasing efficiency is only a matter of time and refinement
As per usual the media is skewing what actually matters. Yes the energy output from the fusion reaction was 3.5 megjoules of energy vs the laser output of 2.1 megajoules. BUT the lasers themselves draws 300+ megajoules just to operate. The lasers that are used in tokamaks draw monstrously more energy than they output. Fusion still has a long way to go, these will only ever replace fission based nuclear reactions once we hit about 650 megajoules of output.
"The lasers that are used in tokamaks draw monstrously more energy". What lasers in tokamaks? This isn't a tokamak, this is intertial confinement, not magnetic confinement.
@@ryanthompson3737 @ryanthompson3737 Many fusion reactions have released more energy than the input. The Tsar Bomba test attributes 97% of its energy release to fusion. Also the bomb tests also represent the most conversion of fusion energy into human-directed work.
This is good news not just for the science community but also for fusion startups, there are 21 fusion companies (startups) in US, and 6 in Europe (3 of them in the UK), this helps them to get more investment.
@@Obiterarbiter Differences in how each region views public vs private ventures, ik Europe is building a full scale fusion facility with multiple countries as participants
@@Pos3id0n. - Anyone, who has closely followed the ITER project in France, should know it is in deep problems with many unanticipated delays and massive cost overruns. Almost universally, fusion fans have no interest in looking into critical analysis of such facilities. Readers can search for the following titles. ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) International nuclear fusion project may be delayed by years, its head admits Facility in France still far from being able to show feasibility of generating carbon-free energy despite recent breakthrough in US (TheGuardian)
MASSIVE brake through but it's still 50 years away. It took a 1GW power plant to fire up the experiment and for one millionth of a second they got 1.00000015 GW back out ! It's a "milestone" achievement. Tell me again there was no "carbon" emissions from that GW scale power plant ! You're pulling my pisser, right ?!
Blacksmiths and the horse/carriage market had the same questions/stipulations. It’s called progress. The oil conglomerate doesn’t want change to electric/hydrogen/fusion breakthroughs. Even hemp niw being used to create more efficient batteries
He mentions wind and solar, but I really wish people weren't so afraid of nuclear energy. Especially since recently we made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion that can produce way more energy than it takes to create it. It's the cleanest way to generate power, and not to mention way safer than nuclear fission and generates much less radioactive waste. Plus, it also creates jobs! Nuclear fusion is the future, man!
Today's technology poses an interesting question regarding fusion. Should we do it? Yes, for sure, at least for research purposes, but the question becomes: which is the most economically viable way to generate electricity? On the one hand, we have a modern update on tried-and-true fission reactors. That is to say Small Modular Reactors, some of which are inherently safe. (See Nuscale, Terrestrial Energy, and Holtec International.) Nuscale is already partnering with Entra1 to provide their NRC-approved reactors on a global scale. SMRs are relative cheap, factory-produced, modular, and super easy to deploy (Barely an inconvenience). Whereas fusion is expensive, experimental and always ten years away. SMR could easily be that stepping stone to fusion.
I am happy for their proof of concept. I think that controlling the fusion process on a large scale will be the defining stage as to whether it is a viable alternative to fission. Currently I think that some version of a thorium salt fission reactor is a better alternative even with it's potential downsides.
It's viable, but it isn't easy to come up with how to do it, if that makes sense. We know it is completely possible, but the challenges are difficult. I didn't expect to see it in my lifetime. I have a physics degree and thought it would be hundreds of years down the line.
This isn't a proof of concept, from what I've read that experiment is for nuclear weapons research and not energy production. Also the experiment produced more energy than the laser used, but vastly more energy was used to produce the laser, so in reality it didn't come close to producing more energy than put in, it's just poor reporting. Tokamaks and one or two others are researching energy production but they're not getting anywhere fast, the challenges are immense.
pretty sure the engineers, physicists, and scientists have this down pat way better than you pal. relax and let the pros handle it, your ideas are nothing they haven't thought of.
Yes, the thorium reactor is the best medium-term solution. He speaks of fusion as "clean", but the deuterium-tritium fusion described yields helium /and a neutron/. That neutron will hit an atom, and make it radioactive. Not so clean as they advertise!
@@88Cardey you are abolute right: 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target but the laser needs 16.40 megajoules to get powered it is a big fat lie that this is a breakthrough in fusion.
Q: "How soon will we see commercial fusion?" A: [Hundreds of words detailing all the hard things required to achieve commercialize fusion] Translation: "Oh, about 20 years." #SameAsItEverWas
the wright brothers analogy was a fantastic one. without the wright brothers first flight, we never would progressed into the planes that fly today. this is our wright brothers moment, so in the next 50-60yrs we could see fusion in everyday life.
This newly announced experimental result produced approximately 11% more nuclear fusion energy than during the previously announced experimental result in December of 2022. Both experiments produced about enough nuclear fusion energy to boil a couple of liters of water. There needs to be about a million times improvement in shot frequency and energy production before an economically practical nuclear fusion demonstration power plant can be constructed.
This hides the main story: it is still only 2% efficient when you figure in the ignition energy cost. So it DOESN'T create more power than is put in. 98% of the electricity put in is wasted.
@@Leviathis_Krade no you lose 200 times more energy than you did on the first use. The laboratory likely needs more funding, the media needs a story so they are leaving out the part about the massive amount of energy it takes to charge the lasers which gives a large net loss of energy when you take that into account. The only net gain is from the tips of the laser to the fuel which doesn't really count
This is why it's really important that we actually produce more energy than the grid needs, energy production is directly related to how actually advanced we are. Like I would be interested to see what they could do with all the grids power at their disposal to get things rolling.
We know the principles behind a lot of sci-fi technology; e.g., molecular printers. The only thing holding us back is that the energy and power requirements to _run_ these things.
They released more power than went into the laser. The laser took much more power than was released by the fusion. The news media keeps getting this wrong. If I recall right the material fused was tritium far rarer than deuterium.The point of the experiment was to gather data about fusion not demonstrate a practical reaction.The researcher talks about this but could have corrected the researcher..
Yes you need neutrons to make Tritium from Li6 ... big big problem. Ya you could put in a Li6 blanket inside the reactor, but those problems are far from solved. Bottom line lasers are so very inefficient this can only be viewed as a basic research exercise.
Why is it they give us false hope? As I understand it, when considering all of the energy necessary to reach the point where the lasers fire, this process still results in a material energy loss. Please also remember the fusion reaction lasts for a small fraction of a second. I hazard a guess we will not live to see viable fusion generation.
Was the power going into powering the lasers included in the energy sue calculation? This is not a breakthrough unless it can be repeated often enough to power a generator. win in a year is not enough by orders of magnitude.
@@AC11115 The basic theory has already been proven. And that was done last year with the first time they did this. Now all they have to do is to figure out how to ignite many many pellets per second in the center of a reactor designed to produce power.
Only if they use the right fission reactor, the nuclear industry has been fighting against using the right fission reactor for 50 years now. Cancelling the Thorium Molten Salt program. Reclassification Thorium to weapon grade material, even at the cost of rare earth production in the USA, giving china a total Monopoly in rare earth market. Down blending a stockpile material needed to start a fleet of safe and efficient fission reactors, making the nuclear material useless. Forcing any one that wants to build one of these safe and efficient reactors to build it in another country because of red tape. Handing over all information on the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor program to foreign countries including China. Maybe I’m wrong, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to say there might be a pattern forming here.
This is not not break even by normal use of the word. They created a new word called "scientific break even." Only about 1/1000th of the real break even was actually produced. This is at least 100 years away from practical use. You need to look into this more closely. Sabine Hossenfelder does a great job of explaining what was really accomplished.
Science and sobriety go together. But so do science and awe. In todays world 'awe' can go a long way. Maybe because of this breakthrough thousands of students will decide to major in this area of study, other nations will invest public and private money into research, and the powerful start-up ecosystem across the globe has new meat to chew. Also - we have yet to see what AI will do with this research. I have this hunch that all predictions about the pace of change in science need to be revised with AI in mind. Thanks for reading my long response. Sabine is wonderful.
Scientists. He was not alone in this. And it's certain that no god was involved. Or at least, if there is a god, it wasn't any god humankind knows of or worships.
What about the magnetic containment. The field required for containing a thermomuclear reaction requires trillions of electron volts, not to mention the complexity of the field as well as its continuous fluctuation. This sort of energy is probably at least a hundred years away.
Pretty sure this is inertial confinement. Uses lasers to irradiate a gold cylinder, producing x-rays that hit a small pellet full of a hydrogen isotope. What is not said, the lasers use 100x more energy than actually hits the cylinder, the small pellet has to perfectly spherical and I have no idea what that costs, and the energy that comes out has to be captured and used to produce electricity. They are measuring actual energy in and energy out, but there is more to this.
@@diegoharo7943 You mean a fusion bomb? This requires a fission trigger, and creates x-rays that crush a cylinder of plutonium around deuterium/tritium. Only problem is, that fission bomb and rest eventually explodes. Using lasers to trigger x-rays on a smaller scale is safer than trying these experiments next to a nuclear reactor pile.
@@UtkarshMishraplus it is in the process of being peer reviewed and some apparent reproductions have been positive. if lk99 is legit we can make the lasers and magnets used in fusion plants orders of magnitude more efficient.
@@UtkarshMishraplus Its already very weak. A RTSC would be a paradigm shift, I would think the discovery would be a bit clearer than what has been presented. Theres far too many caveats and conditionals, already.
This is a little bit misleading. Although the power output exceeded the amount of energy the lasers put into the reaction, it was far, far less than the amount of energy required to actually prime and fire the lasers. It's a good "next step" though. Proof of concept.
Why? If my car started this morning, I would EXPECT IT TO start 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 morning! Did you notice that he didn’t answer the question of “when it will be ready?” That’s because fusion has been 20 years away since 1960. And in 2043, it will be 20 years away. The most dangerous part of fusion is that people will continue to use fossil fuels until fusion is “ready”! By that point, the world will be ducked!!
If you can produce almost double the energy that is required to start the process, that already is pretty good. The fact that they are steadily getting even better results is amazing.
Totally correct concept, except I thought that the energy required to run all the equipment needed to generate the conditions necessary to fuse the atoms was in the range of 30-50 times the energy of the nuclear fusion itself via a variety of potential nuclear fusion equipment processes (the Laser ignition process that was used for this experiment is far more inefficient than that). I've seen theoretical studies that suggest that you can likely get down to about 20X the energy needed to support the conditions necessary in the future with several different technologies. Going lower than that would be challenging at the theoretical level. Have a great day,
@@mrbaab5932 The test was to produce more energy than was needed to start the process. That has been achieved twice now. This time with better results than the last time.
@@JTMaster He's saying the energy that the lasers output to start the reaction is magnitudes higher to get the lasers to work, so the reaction was still a very large net loss of power.
My favorite part of the interview is when the reporter presses the professor on when we can see nuclear fusion in every-day life. His answer, comparing it to the Wright Brother's first flight was pretty spot on - though, I would equate it more with Da Vinci's helicopter. We may get there in less than 400 years, but I doubt it'll be in our lifetime.
Those, who assume that this technology will save us, tend to be masterful at excluding the following warnings from their consciousness, just like the vast majority of the Earth's 8.0 billion people. I urge readers to search for the following articles. IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian) UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill) * This statement was made 4.5 years ago. The NIF lab management has always been highly deceptive regarding the details of this technology. It stands almost no chance of being developed into a economically viable nuclear fusion power plant within the next 30 years. Vast barriers still stand in the way. Additionally, the management has always obscured the primary purpose of the NIF whenever they present results to the public. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool.
This is proof of concept. With the speeding up of technological progress I’m convinced that within 50 years fusion will be at least America’s largest energy supply.
@@Thatbo2599 Honestly, I'll believe it when I see it, but I doubt I'll be here to see it. Even if I'm off by a century or two, I think we'll tank our species - or at least the planet - before we get there.
@@Thatbo2599 - One has to be a technological dreamer to assume that we have a half-century left to turn this 'Titanic' around. Personal belief is different than historical reality and mountains of scientific evidence regarding Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) effects. During the last 50 years their have been several attempts to bring about a nuclear power Renaissance. The push to replace the present fission reactor fleet with new generations of reactors began at least 20 years ago. There has been little progress since then. The same is true for the push to implement molten salt thorium reactors. True believers tell themselves that that failure history is irrelevant. Some people simply can't accept the concept that there might not be a technological fix for all our problems. I urge you and other readers to search for the following warning articles. Most of the 8.0+ billion people on this planet have cleverly put these warnings out of their consciousness. IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian) UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill) * This statement was made 4.5 years ago.
I agree we might be a long way off, but wright bro's is more accurate. DaVinci never made a helicopter he just drew it. We've had a fusion "helicopter drawing" for over 80 years now.
If I had just one thin dime for every time over the last say four decades a story like this was run by the media I'd be a millionaire several times over. And yet here I am typing this and the freaking miracle of cheap fusion energy is still NOWHERE to be seen.
Wow, really. A millionaire several times over. Let see: a dime a each time for 4 decades. To make just a million means about 700 such hype stories every day. I am impressed. You probably do nothing else but listen to such stories. Or are you just doing the thing you are complaining about: to exaggerate to make a story.
He said that one of the obstacles to overcome is if there is enough fuel .. hmmm yeah that is a very substantial obstacle.... Hopefully a solution is found ..
Sounds great, but there's one problem. Power out doesn't come close to Total Power in, if you look at the total power needed, including to drive the magnets as well as generate the Plasma. Disappointing this was not mentioned. Watch Sabine Hossenfelder explain it.
Yeah, I agree, it's very misleading. The 60 Minutes special in Jan covered this already. 1,2,3 times more just doesn't matter at this point. They need 100x more. I mean, I hope they get there and yes, we need to continue, but I can't really see what the news is here other than they replicated the result which is important obviously.
Maybe we should start using the term practical fusion and impractical fusion. Focus Fusion seems more like practical fusion if the lead scientist could get past telling everybody that he was right about the Big Bang theory, and get back to work on his fusion reactor, it’s funny that photo’s from the JWST can impede the race for fusion.
@@FloresTrumpet well the military has always had lot of funding and the knowledge from the h bomb is classified so civilian scientists have had to recreate it pretty much.
@@FloresTrumpet "Mastered fusion power"? There's a big difference between uncontrolled, explosive fusion, and controlled, sustained fusion. We've been able to blow sh!t up in a big fireball for 70 years. This is about making that fireball ins a safe and controlled fashion and keeping that fireball going and generating energy indefinitely, producing more energy than we put in. We are still a LONG way from "mastering fusion"
Now I’m interested. At first it looked like a scam but the speed of advancement points to a realistic project and potential for viability increases along with hope. We will see.
It is good to know that nuclear fusion has finally caught your interest. We look forward to your great contributions to this field now that you think it is not a scam.
They did not give any number details whatsoever, which means that they do not actually add up. For example, the so called breakthrough before in California did not account for the massive energy needed to produce the laser. If this was added in, they only got 10th the power out, as they put in. There would need to be a 10 x improvement in laser efficiency before breaking even. Even then, you will only harness a fraction of the power getting the energy out. Then, the loss over transmission lines... A legit breakthrough would mention these numbers, bragging about them. What we are likely talking about is some technical obstacle, among many, was finally overcome, which has allowed a positive press release, likely to the boost stock price for some fusion start up company that some college board member or professor is part of. Fission on the other hand, is held back by regulators and ideological people who are willfully ignorant about safe gen 3, walk away safe, reactors. The pipe dream of fusion is the way of not regarding themselves as ludites.
@@dennisgarber that’s true. From the very start it was suspect and it was up there in my personal opinion with one scam of the trump administration “ space force “ what was a little diffrent was the speed of the announcement that more advances seem to be made, now I’m going to lean towards scam if what they produce as evidence appears like regurgitate information from the last briefing or since this isn’t really new technologies subject they just repeat something said decades ago they think the general public know nothing about to which responses will point the “ they’re a scam finger” directly at them.
Lies. This brings us as close to nuclear fusion as me climbing up a tree and saying im closer to getting into space as compared to the guy on the geound.
Real breakthroughs and advancements are encouraging, but the thing that surprises me is the amount of language related to nuclear physics that has been injected into the normal language pool. I am so excited to be able to "nerd out" in public unlike the 90's when even talking about this remotely was considered pseudo-taboo in my area of the US due to lack of general knowledge or desire on the subject. I believe we are making so much progress, its close, whatever this research will provide. IDK if the sun has enough fusion potential per size in it to be worth the hype - I hope we move on to simulating bigger fusion devices with higher actual yields but we gotta start with what we can see I guess. Also, last time there was a "breakthough" if you read the fine print they isolated the amount of energy generated in such a way that the numbers did not reflect industry desires for energy, it still took way more than it got out all things considered (was progress but eh). Here's to hoping that this means we are much closer!
On one hand, it is great news. On the other hand, there are still far away. However, it isn't like one day, scientists say "Let's make fusion energy!" and then the next day: "Look! We have fusion energy!" We might get there one day. I hope it is in time before we have exhausted other fuel resources.
@@someguy782 lol. "They". We literally have multinational collaborative projects pouring resources into researching the fusion problem, but a magical "they" is stopping it? I bet you think "they" are preventing us from developing perpetual motion machines too, eh?
@@someguy782 There's been dozens of experiments for decades, both public and private. This isn't an easy challenge, if we didn't succeed yet, it's not for lack of trying.
Not even close to more energy than was used in entire system; it's supposedly more energy than used in the reaction. But even this is suspicious because it's such a small amount of energy that an electrical disturbance from the system could trigger a false result.
This is very honest answer from him that this is like Wright brothers' moment and it will take long to make it commercial. What scientists have achieved is only for split seconds. This can take decades. No one can know for sure as of now. But none the less it's a very very big achievement
Fans of nuclear fusion power generation tend to immerse themselves in promotional articles and in echo-chambers that reinforce what they prefer to believe in. They tend to ignore the critical assessments. The NIF lab management is highly skilled in misleading the public regarding details of the experiment and the primary purpose of NIF. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. Perhaps you were not aware that the input energy reference is a cherry-picked value that is taken where the laser beams compress the fuel capsule. The energy, used to create the massive laser pulse, is over 100 times greater. The laser efficiency can't be increased to much greater values because it requires two wavelength shifts. The lab's use of the term 'ignition' is deceptive. There is no significant propagation of the fusion reaction. The fuel compression takes approximately 3 nanoseconds which compresses the fuel film in the diamond shell capsule down to a microscopic point then a tiny fraction of the atoms begin to fuse. That generates an enormous repulsive force that blasts away the remaining fuel from the reaction center. In the 5 December shot only 4% of the fuel fused while the rest was blown away before it had a chance to react. The reaction lasted approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second. It took about a week to set up the experiment. After the shot the radioactive tritium had to be removed from the target chamber as radioactive waste and the blast damaged target chamber optical windows had to be replaced. Consistently, the news media is showed when presented with the story that the lab wants distributed.
We have a PRESENT of clean energy. Solar is now the cheapest energy source in the world, and growing logarithmically. The output is extremely predictable over the long term (both the year, and the lifetime of a solar panel), and maintenance costs are near-zero. And manufacturing costs have benefitted from economies of scale, dropping costs nearly 90% in just a decade. And installations scale from grid size to wristwatch size. It’s amazing. Even on the happiest of happy paths, it’ll be two decades before we see fusion at any sort of scale, much less the scale needed to free ourselves from fossil fuel. Two decades more carbon in the atmosphere. But that won’t happen, because in two decades, solar will largely have displaced coal, and be powering the EVs displacing gasoline. And the new fusion, assuming it actually happens (big if), won’t be competing with dirty coal… it’ll be competing with clean, cheap, finance-friendly solar.
@@camofrog Perfect? How come you trolls don't also point out that oil wells and tankers are expensive to make and use lots of minerals? Are you under the impression that fossil fuel infrastructure is made from free and clean unicorn rainbows?
> This is just environmentalist propaganda. The two biggest areas where climate hysteria rules are Germany and California. The more solar they build, the higher the electric rates. That's what happens for several reasons. Unlike legacy power plants, solar power plants have to be built NEW, at today's high costs. Secondly, they require building transmission lines hither and yon, which are a substantial expense environmentalists don't like to count. Solar and wind are UNRELIABLE, so you are either going to have periodic blackouts or you are going to need to build backup power generators ----natural gas commonly. This is an additional expense which environmentalists also don';t like to count. And lastly, environmentalists dont want to wait for coal and hydroelectric plants to wear out. They want to TEAR THEM OUT ---NOW! So the immense amounts invested in building such plants is wasted, and since they are usually paid for on a pay as you go basis, that adds substantially to power costs. In Washington State, there are huge hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers that were built in the 1930s-1950s. Rather than using these dams to generate electric power when solar and wind poop out, which they certainly could do, environmentalists are hot to tear out those dams. For all these reasons, the claim that solar is cheap is a bad joke and a lie environmentalists hope to sell by repeating it often. But it just isn't so.
You need many orders of magnitude greater output than is currently being reported for it to be 'useful energy'. Creating more energy out than went in is over simplifying it. At the end of the day the heat produced will have to be turned into mechanical energy e.g. a turbine or dynamo of some kind. This in itself creates energy losses, usually around 30 to 70% depending on mechanism. it is no different than getting mechanical energy out of a lump of coal.
It's a proof of concept... not the final product. More energy output over more energy input is insane. Don't know what "waste" you're talking about. If I burn 1 lb of coal and get .5 watts of energy and .5 is lost to heat in a conventional sense of making energy, that's waste. If I burn 1 lb of coal and get 1.1 watts of energy, nothinig was wasted.
@@Harrison.DuRant - when they are talking about energy output they are most likely talking about heat energy. At the end of the day that heat energy has to be converted into electricity - that is where the losses occur.
Until the point that this actually works we need to massively scale up Wind / Solar / Hydro / Nuclear power sources. We need to reduce emissions ASAP. The recent AMOC paper in nature showing part of the gulf stream collapse is pure nightmare fuel. If that happens life in europe would END. A 10C drop in temperature would mean no farming and an ice age in this part of the globe. Parts of India would no longer receive rain etc... Just in india alone 1 billion+ people would face starvation.
Scary part is who will eventually control the production of such an energy? If fewer and fewer people control it, the more vulnerable everyone else is to them.
Governments should be the only people controlling nuclear power. Perhaps governments can mismanage it? But we know individuals would be much more pernicious should they be allowed to delve into it.
@@no-barknoonan1335No sir, the government should never be the one who controls it. Look what happened to 2 cities of Japan when the US gov dropped 2 nuc on them.
I think the more dangerous thing is our society not being educated enough to essentially understand the possibilities of this vs being uneducated and having it all fear-based. Humans get scared of things because they cannot quantity possibly of the immense good it brings towards humanity.
yahh well in the 90's the Co Areotech had a working Prototype of an aircraft that was driven by Photon's. Trust me that is light years ahead of Nuclear Fusion. sorry to see that you are so slow. s@@Beau136
The announcement was very brief with almost no technical specifics. The vast majority of reporting was little more than a re-hash of the official lab press release with no attempt at critical analysis. See the more detailed comment I left about 13 hours prior to this one.
I saw the 60-minute special on the first ignition, but it was invalid to say more energy was released than consumed because they didn't count the energy used by the lazers to ignite. Apparently, it takes more power than the entire US grid generates in a day to fire this thing once. So, they have a long, long way to go. They said they would have to increase the output by a factor of 100 to make it feasible. It's not clear to me what they are saying with this latest announcement because 1 or 2 times more energy won't cut it. Could be another 50 years or more before this could be commercialized. ruclips.net/video/7ZejZxjvFng/видео.html
@@jeanbaptisteemmanuelzorg5911 You ain't kidding. The video linked says it uses 1000x more power than the US energy grid, but he went ahead and added "in a day" to that statement for no apparent reason. His claim falls apart with even the slightest amount of thought, because if it were to draw even slight more than the entire US energy grid in an entire day, where on earth are they getting their power from? And where are they storing an entire day's worth of the entire country's power? In reality they're only storing and using as much as the energy grid generates in a millionth of a second.
The improvements need to be closer to a million times greater. In the 5 December 2022 shot it took the NIF lab about a week to prepare the experiment. The nuclear fusion reaction lasted for only about 0.000,000,000,08 second. The output energy of that reaction was approximately enough to boil two liters of water. The input energy to the NIF building, during the week, was far greater than 100 times the shot output energy. There was no significant 'ignition' of the supplied fuel. Only about 4% of it reacted before the remaining 96% was blasted away from the microscopic reaction center. That then had to be removed from the interior of the target chamber as radioactive waste. The NIF lab management has claimed that the laser efficiency can be improved by creating a new facility that uses newer diode pumped lasers. Such lasers don't exist at power levels anywhere near that of the current NIF lasers. Additionally, if new laser system requires two stages of wavelength multiplication, as in NIF, then a poor laser efficiency will remain. It is now 7 August 2023. Since the 5 December 2022 shot the NIF lab staff has had 243 days to reproduce experiment that they announced last year. They failed to mention that that 'break-even' shot was supposed to be achieved by 2012. Those, who have allowed the following warnings into their consciousness, realize that we don't have 50 years left to come up with an economically practical nuclear fusion demonstration power plant. Search for the following article titles. IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian) UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill) * This statement was made 4.5 years ago.
D+T fusion is not aneutronic. (D + T → He-4 (helium-4) + n (neutron)). Neutron bombardment of the reactor walls will make them radioactive over time through a process called neutron activation. For example, after ITER is decommissioned, it will have to be cut up and buried. If there is a silver lining to neutron activation, it is that a lithium blanket will serve to protect the chamber walls to a large extent, while at the same time, breeding Tritium, which can be separated and cycled back in for use as fuel. (Li-6 + n → He-4 + T)
The fact this isn't all over the news explains why fusion is still 50 years away😂. No way the elites will endorse this. Its a money loser on all fronts.
How much more energy including the energy needed to mine the scarce resource and energy to construct the power plant and energy to construct thousands of power plants needed?
Megawatts to run the facility, and the shot explosion couldn't heat a cup of coffee. They greatly exaggerate the results by only counting the picoseconds worth of laser energy put into the shot.
It's been a long-running joke since the 1950's that nuclear fusion was just 30 years away. In the 60's it was just... 30 years away. Same in the 70, 80s, 90s and onwards. Fusion has always been "just 30 years away". With this latest breakthrough, I'm predicting that we'll probably see nuclear fusion within... you guessed it... 30 years. LOL
Based on the comments, Americans' level of science literacy needs improvement. As the guest points out, there's a long way to go to turn this into an operational power plant.
The fact that it was repeated and produced a higher yield is what actually makes this compelling. You hear about breakthroughs all the time, but then you never hear about them ever again.
Its hardy a breakthrough. More a hype to get more finance. 100x more energy was used to createc the fusion than the net output from the fusion reaction.
read the real story it is not net positive
@@sassa82< liar
That is because, for most nuclear fusion energy 'breakthrough' announcements, they are filled with sales hype, often in an attempt to attract investment funding to keep the very costly experiments going.
it takes time, but the idea of the future is mind-blowing
Progress on fusion has been the only news that truly gives me hope.
Hope that in 150 years we might actually try to fuse deuterium and tritium in a commercially viable tokamak. Ohhh, keep dreaming about a distant future you'll never live to see; a future that's 95% likely to be impossible, or at the very minimum impractical, at scale.
Self-driving cars, quantum computing?
@@westonh4900well that went…..dark
Same. Seems almost impossible to have high hopes for humanity these day, but this is definitely much needed good news!
They've had Lattice Confinement Nuclear Fusion for a while now - 9/11 anyone??
Imagine if we didn't have to put so much money and resources into military and war effort, but instead into important stuff like this. How far humanity could go.
Well we don't have to put anything into the military, we are just 'trained' to do it. Wars could be prevented or ended by assassinating all warmongers but most people are indoctrinated to value the feelings of warmongers over the lives of millions of other people.
Humanity doomed.
War is is just about a bunch of powerful people fighting to preserve their ideologies...
Well, the problem with humanity is that it has gone too far.
Think of the military industrial complex as a continuous stimulus check. The government uses it to create jobs and spend money domestically, making bombs is just a side effect of that. Corruption is a major issue with it as it is with all government spending of course. The work being done by these people is the same thing, it's a "stimulus check" that might one day product fusion, but more importantly it makes people rich and produces jobs. You might be interested in reading more about how US domestic spending works. Congress' one job is trying to get federal money spent in each representative's home state.
There's another problematic part of this process that Dr. Hosemann failed to mention. When they say more power came out of the reaction than went into it, they're talking about the energy in the laser beams themselves, not the energy required to produce those beams (i.e., to run the laser devices), and the devices are not efficient. In truth, far more energy was used to operate the laser devices than was produced in the reaction. So, there's not only a problem with getting usable energy out of the reaction (which Dr. Hosemann mentioned), there's also a problem with producing the energy that goes into it in the first place (which he didn't).
I imagine an oil plant produces a lot less energy it took to produce during the first 5 minutes😂
@@clairemercer3099- False analogy. Those lasers have to fire at every single tiny pellet.
And??? Do you expect a complex new technology to be perfect the first time it works? I suppose we could have scrapped solar when it was invented because it wasn't efficient to. This is a MAJOR step in a long road.
omg why aren't you explaining this to them? you are some crazy mad genius. get over yourself.
Imagine that. The news proving misinformation and disinformation. 😂
Misleading. More energy was required overall than was produced when considering the energy required to power the lasers, not the energy coming out of the lssers
@@someguy782 - they need funding, politicians who don't really understand science will throw money at them when they have progress or especially "breakthroughs"
You are right about this being misleading. The previous laser shot to a pellet DID NOT produce more energy than the TOTAL energy consumed. It only produced more energy than in the laser beam that impinged on the pellet. But it doesn’t count the total energy used in generating the laser beam, which is about 100 fold more than in the laser beam itself. Furthermore, the cooling off and recharge period is many hours. There is no pathway to practical fusion by zapping pellets intermittently every few hours. Besides that, the pellets are very difficult to fabricate, have been unreliable and must be stored at cryogenic temperatures. And the pellets must be positioned precisely. All that is absurdly lacking any pathway to practical fusion. This fanfare is probably about funding, but is not a truthful description.
They’re still pumping in way more energy than they are getting out. There seems to be obfuscation in how they communicate these ‘breakthroughs ‘.
Most 'science reporters' have arts/humanities degrees and know close to zero about what they're attempting to report on.
@@nickmiller76True - Some don’t have any degree. But gossip mongering is more of a vocation.
over what time frame?
of course you need to pump in more energy at first.
the breakthrough is that it produced a net gain for a brief moment,.
reproducing an experiment done by another team, and also showing that fussion is viable if we can develop the tech and proper shielding to extend the time of net energy output
big things start small. no one thought this would be easy.
@@LorneAlexander my comment was more about media hype and the scientists unwillingness to dispel the hype. The headlines and the press conference was a bit exaggerated and I think it is not entirely factual.
@@grizzyb4149 the thing is...most people are not educated/intelligent/whatever to fully appreciate the real technical explinations that most scientists need to give a trully accurate picture of what has taken place.
i imagine many of the people working on these projects dont have the best social skills, so instead of blurting out abstract incomprehensible explinations they gotta hype it by dumbing it down
they need funding to keep their projects going and these people really care about what theyre doing.
for many of them a few microseconds of power profit may be the result of 10 years of work...they wont downplay their efforts by saying they only achieved a .0001% increase.
if they can get it to work in principal, increasing efficiency is only a matter of time and refinement
As per usual the media is skewing what actually matters. Yes the energy output from the fusion reaction was 3.5 megjoules of energy vs the laser output of 2.1 megajoules.
BUT the lasers themselves draws 300+ megajoules just to operate. The lasers that are used in tokamaks draw monstrously more energy than they output. Fusion still has a long way to go, these will only ever replace fission based nuclear reactions once we hit about 650 megajoules of output.
Thanks i was looking for this. Not sure why they keep glazing over this at every single fusion site. We’re not even remotely close.
RIght - or the lasers become vastly more efficient
"The lasers that are used in tokamaks draw monstrously more energy". What lasers in tokamaks? This isn't a tokamak, this is intertial confinement, not magnetic confinement.
@@JohnHughesChampignyYou can literally replace it with ANY project because NOBODY has actually produced more energy than they put into the system.
@@ryanthompson3737 @ryanthompson3737 Many fusion reactions have released more energy than the input. The Tsar Bomba test attributes 97% of its energy release to fusion. Also the bomb tests also represent the most conversion of fusion energy into human-directed work.
I'm a researcher who works with fusion tech, i'm confident that in 10 years or so, we can have fusion reactors powering our homes.
Let’s see ITER’s results first, shall we? Then we can talk about fusion for everyday use.
This is good news not just for the science community but also for fusion startups, there are 21 fusion companies (startups) in US, and 6 in Europe (3 of them in the UK), this helps them to get more investment.
why does europe have comparatively fewer fusion companies given it's large economy?
@@Obiterarbiter Differences in how each region views public vs private ventures, ik Europe is building a full scale fusion facility with multiple countries as participants
One in New Zealand - OpenStar.
@@Pos3id0n. - Anyone, who has closely followed the ITER project in France, should know it is in deep problems with many unanticipated delays and massive cost overruns. Almost universally, fusion fans have no interest in looking into critical analysis of such facilities. Readers can search for the following titles.
ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
International nuclear fusion project may be delayed by years, its head admits
Facility in France still far from being able to show feasibility of generating carbon-free energy despite recent breakthrough in US (TheGuardian)
Nope. Sadly … The opposite it closer to the truth. My field for 25 years.
MASSIVE brake through but it's still 50 years away. It took a 1GW power plant to fire up the experiment and for one millionth of a second they got 1.00000015 GW back out ! It's a "milestone" achievement. Tell me again there was no "carbon" emissions from that GW scale power plant ! You're pulling my pisser, right ?!
The future has arrived.
We’re getting there, by dribs and drabs
Blacksmiths and the horse/carriage market had the same questions/stipulations. It’s called progress. The oil conglomerate doesn’t want change to electric/hydrogen/fusion breakthroughs. Even hemp niw being used to create more efficient batteries
He mentions wind and solar, but I really wish people weren't so afraid of nuclear energy. Especially since recently we made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion that can produce way more energy than it takes to create it. It's the cleanest way to generate power, and not to mention way safer than nuclear fission and generates much less radioactive waste. Plus, it also creates jobs!
Nuclear fusion is the future, man!
The answer is, its 50 years into the future, ALWAYS
the breakthrough means it is now only 20 years in the future always tho
You’re too cynical. 30 years to go. This time, for sure.
People thought that about the internet for the public.
So we are now only 10 years away perpetually instead of 20 perpetually
Today's technology poses an interesting question regarding fusion. Should we do it? Yes, for sure, at least for research purposes, but the question becomes: which is the most economically viable way to generate electricity? On the one hand, we have a modern update on tried-and-true fission reactors. That is to say Small Modular Reactors, some of which are inherently safe. (See Nuscale, Terrestrial Energy, and Holtec International.) Nuscale is already partnering with Entra1 to provide their NRC-approved reactors on a global scale. SMRs are relative cheap, factory-produced, modular, and super easy to deploy (Barely an inconvenience). Whereas fusion is expensive, experimental and always ten years away. SMR could easily be that stepping stone to fusion.
I am happy for their proof of concept. I think that controlling the fusion process on a large scale will be the defining stage as to whether it is a viable alternative to fission. Currently I think that some version of a thorium salt fission reactor is a better alternative even with it's potential downsides.
It's viable, but it isn't easy to come up with how to do it, if that makes sense. We know it is completely possible, but the challenges are difficult. I didn't expect to see it in my lifetime. I have a physics degree and thought it would be hundreds of years down the line.
This isn't a proof of concept, from what I've read that experiment is for nuclear weapons research and not energy production. Also the experiment produced more energy than the laser used, but vastly more energy was used to produce the laser, so in reality it didn't come close to producing more energy than put in, it's just poor reporting.
Tokamaks and one or two others are researching energy production but they're not getting anywhere fast, the challenges are immense.
pretty sure the engineers, physicists, and scientists have this down pat way better than you pal. relax and let the pros handle it, your ideas are nothing they haven't thought of.
Yes, the thorium reactor is the best medium-term solution. He speaks of fusion as "clean", but the deuterium-tritium fusion described yields helium /and a neutron/. That neutron will hit an atom, and make it radioactive. Not so clean as they advertise!
@@88Cardey you are abolute right:
3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target but the laser needs 16.40 megajoules to get powered it is a big fat lie that this is a breakthrough in fusion.
Significant enough to merit additional funding...
Q: "How soon will we see commercial fusion?"
A: [Hundreds of words detailing all the hard things required to achieve commercialize fusion]
Translation: "Oh, about 20 years."
#SameAsItEverWas
Translation of 20 years: "When we make the final breakthrough, it'll take about 20 years to turn on the first real powerplant."
the wright brothers analogy was a fantastic one. without the wright brothers first flight, we never would progressed into the planes that fly today. this is our wright brothers moment, so in the next 50-60yrs we could see fusion in everyday life.
Fission is still the safest scalable energy we have and we should be focusing our efforts on that to meet baseline energy needs.
Exactly. People are not researching the topic and therefore do not know the truth. There is something rotten about this merger story.
This is a major breakthrough for humanity
This newly announced experimental result produced approximately 11% more nuclear fusion energy than during the previously announced experimental result in December of 2022. Both experiments produced about enough nuclear fusion energy to boil a couple of liters of water. There needs to be about a million times improvement in shot frequency and energy production before an economically practical nuclear fusion demonstration power plant can be constructed.
This hides the main story: it is still only 2% efficient when you figure in the ignition energy cost. So it DOESN'T create more power than is put in. 98% of the electricity put in is wasted.
so after 200 uses it has paid for it's first use? thats not bad. coal, gas, & diesel fueled sources can't do that.
@@Leviathis_Krade How are you that bad at logical problems?
@@Leviathis_Krade no you lose 200 times more energy than you did on the first use. The laboratory likely needs more funding, the media needs a story so they are leaving out the part about the massive amount of energy it takes to charge the lasers which gives a large net loss of energy when you take that into account. The only net gain is from the tips of the laser to the fuel which doesn't really count
We’ve never, ever, ever, never heard someone make claims like this before.
This is why it's really important that we actually produce more energy than the grid needs, energy production is directly related to how actually advanced we are. Like I would be interested to see what they could do with all the grids power at their disposal to get things rolling.
How about mitigation of energy waste, that in and ofitself is a huge problem.
@@casval-pj5tbyou still need to produce more than you need. He's point is still valid.
One thing does not exclude the other.
Stellaris showing
We know the principles behind a lot of sci-fi technology; e.g., molecular printers.
The only thing holding us back is that the energy and power requirements to _run_ these things.
They released more power than went into the laser. The laser took much more power than was released by the fusion. The news media keeps getting this wrong. If I recall right the material fused was tritium far rarer than deuterium.The point of the experiment was to
gather data about fusion not demonstrate a practical reaction.The researcher talks about this but could have corrected the researcher..
Yes you need neutrons to make Tritium from Li6 ... big big problem. Ya you could put in a Li6 blanket inside the reactor, but those problems are far from solved. Bottom line lasers are so very inefficient this can only be viewed as a basic research exercise.
This is good. But we are a LONG way from sustaining the reaction and harvesting the energy.
Less than 10 years away.
@@slowanddeliberate6893 Id say less than 10 years for it to be started. But full implementation will take longer.
Well we'd better speed it up!
Why is it they give us false hope? As I understand it, when considering all of the energy necessary to reach the point where the lasers fire, this process still results in a material energy loss. Please also remember the fusion reaction lasts for a small fraction of a second. I hazard a guess we will not live to see viable fusion generation.
They are lying for money And others for dumb ideology..
Was the power going into powering the lasers included in the energy sue calculation? This is not a breakthrough unless it can be repeated often enough to power a generator. win in a year is not enough by orders of magnitude.
No, this is to test the theory. It takes time.
Its a hype to get more finance
@@sassa82 Possibly.
@@AC11115 The basic theory has already been proven. And that was done last year with the first time they did this. Now all they have to do is to figure out how to ignite many many pellets per second in the center of a reactor designed to produce power.
@@keithrosenberg5486 it needs to be tested multiple times not just once.
Check back in 15 years.
Make that 50. Lol
Just use fission while we wait for fusion! It is literally the safest form of power production we have.
Only if they use the right fission reactor, the nuclear industry has been fighting against using the right fission reactor for 50 years now.
Cancelling the Thorium Molten Salt program.
Reclassification Thorium to weapon grade material, even at the cost of rare earth production in the USA, giving china a total Monopoly in rare earth market.
Down blending a stockpile material needed to start a fleet of safe and efficient fission reactors, making the nuclear material useless.
Forcing any one that wants to build one of these safe and efficient reactors to build it in another country because of red tape.
Handing over all information on the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor program to foreign countries including China.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to say there might be a pattern forming here.
I'll not hold my breath. At 77 years old, I have heard this many times. The media can't help overstating.
Imagine being so jaded that achieving ignition is unimpressive
@@jeanbaptisteemmanuelzorg5911imagine being so naive that you believe there’s a “breakthrough “ in fusion.
@@jeanbaptisteemmanuelzorg5911 When you look at the data, you'll realize this is a con for now.
Fascinating and remarkable.
This is not not break even by normal use of the word. They created a new word called "scientific break even." Only about 1/1000th of the real break even was actually produced. This is at least 100 years away from practical use. You need to look into this more closely. Sabine Hossenfelder does a great job of explaining what was really accomplished.
Science and sobriety go together. But so do science and awe. In todays world 'awe' can go a long way. Maybe because of this breakthrough thousands of students will decide to major in this area of study, other nations will invest public and private money into research, and the powerful start-up ecosystem across the globe has new meat to chew. Also - we have yet to see what AI will do with this research. I have this hunch that all predictions about the pace of change in science need to be revised with AI in mind.
Thanks for reading my long response. Sabine is wonderful.
Sabine is a buzzkill
If the room temperature superconductor is a thing we are 10 years away
You can be certain that the gop will be opposed to any development of fusion energy.
Is there anything useful they arnt opposed to.
God bless these scientist
This is the future
Scientists. He was not alone in this. And it's certain that no god was involved. Or at least, if there is a god, it wasn't any god humankind knows of or worships.
@@Thor.JorgensenI bet you're fun at parties
It was aliens
No, they will weaponize it. Look what happened to nuclear.
All praise Apollo God of the Sun, more believable than a sky daddy 🤡
Don't hold your breath.
What about the magnetic containment. The field required for containing a thermomuclear reaction requires trillions of electron volts, not to mention the complexity of the field as well as its continuous fluctuation. This sort of energy is probably at least a hundred years away.
I think the timeframe will change as more people start investing into it. More minds = more potential solutions
Pretty sure this is inertial confinement. Uses lasers to irradiate a gold cylinder, producing x-rays that hit a small pellet full of a hydrogen isotope. What is not said, the lasers use 100x more energy than actually hits the cylinder, the small pellet has to perfectly spherical and I have no idea what that costs, and the energy that comes out has to be captured and used to produce electricity. They are measuring actual energy in and energy out, but there is more to this.
I dont think its a money thing. Its materials science.@@Edgar-and-Wrench
Can’t they do it like they did to create the atomic bomb?
@@diegoharo7943 You mean a fusion bomb? This requires a fission trigger, and creates x-rays that crush a cylinder of plutonium around deuterium/tritium. Only problem is, that fission bomb and rest eventually explodes. Using lasers to trigger x-rays on a smaller scale is safer than trying these experiments next to a nuclear reactor pile.
It is perpetually 30 years away from being 30 years away.
Exactly what I was going to say. Well, actually I was going to say
Fusion has been 20 years away since 1960, and in 2043 it will be 20 years away!
Wow! First room temperature superconductors, now fusion. What a time to be alive 😅!
The LK-99 superconductor is still not peer-reviewed and could be just a hype.
@@UtkarshMishraplus it is in the process of being peer reviewed and some apparent reproductions have been positive. if lk99 is legit we can make the lasers and magnets used in fusion plants orders of magnitude more efficient.
Neither of those things exist
@@UtkarshMishraplus
Its already very weak. A RTSC would be a paradigm shift, I would think the discovery would be a bit clearer than what has been presented. Theres far too many caveats and conditionals, already.
LK99 material is a diamagnetic semiconductor, not superconducting.
❤❤❤❤ good work 💪
This is a little bit misleading. Although the power output exceeded the amount of energy the lasers put into the reaction, it was far, far less than the amount of energy required to actually prime and fire the lasers. It's a good "next step" though. Proof of concept.
The fact it was recreated is HUGE news!
Why? If my car started this morning, I would EXPECT IT TO start 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 morning!
Did you notice that he didn’t answer the question of “when it will be ready?” That’s because fusion has been 20 years away since 1960. And in 2043, it will be 20 years away.
The most dangerous part of fusion is that people will continue to use fossil fuels until fusion is “ready”! By that point, the world will be ducked!!
I think unless they can produce >200x more plasma energy it cannot practically produce electricity. We are at 1.6x? Still a way to go. All the best.
If you can produce almost double the energy that is required to start the process, that already is pretty good. The fact that they are steadily getting even better results is amazing.
Correct, because the total energy to run the test is 150x the laser output power t they are quoting.
Totally correct concept, except I thought that the energy required to run all the equipment needed to generate the conditions necessary to fuse the atoms was in the range of 30-50 times the energy of the nuclear fusion itself via a variety of potential nuclear fusion equipment processes (the Laser ignition process that was used for this experiment is far more inefficient than that).
I've seen theoretical studies that suggest that you can likely get down to about 20X the energy needed to support the conditions necessary in the future with several different technologies. Going lower than that would be challenging at the theoretical level.
Have a great day,
@@mrbaab5932 The test was to produce more energy than was needed to start the process. That has been achieved twice now. This time with better results than the last time.
@@JTMaster He's saying the energy that the lasers output to start the reaction is magnitudes higher to get the lasers to work, so the reaction was still a very large net loss of power.
More than was needed to initially start the process or more than the facility needed for the startup procedure?
My favorite part of the interview is when the reporter presses the professor on when we can see nuclear fusion in every-day life. His answer, comparing it to the Wright Brother's first flight was pretty spot on - though, I would equate it more with Da Vinci's helicopter. We may get there in less than 400 years, but I doubt it'll be in our lifetime.
Those, who assume that this technology will save us, tend to be masterful at excluding the following warnings from their consciousness, just like the vast majority of the Earth's 8.0 billion people. I urge readers to search for the following articles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 4.5 years ago.
The NIF lab management has always been highly deceptive regarding the details of this technology. It stands almost no chance of being developed into a economically viable nuclear fusion power plant within the next 30 years. Vast barriers still stand in the way. Additionally, the management has always obscured the primary purpose of the NIF whenever they present results to the public. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool.
This is proof of concept. With the speeding up of technological progress I’m convinced that within 50 years fusion will be at least America’s largest energy supply.
@@Thatbo2599 Honestly, I'll believe it when I see it, but I doubt I'll be here to see it. Even if I'm off by a century or two, I think we'll tank our species - or at least the planet - before we get there.
@@Thatbo2599 - One has to be a technological dreamer to assume that we have a half-century left to turn this 'Titanic' around. Personal belief is different than historical reality and mountains of scientific evidence regarding Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) effects. During the last 50 years their have been several attempts to bring about a nuclear power Renaissance. The push to replace the present fission reactor fleet with new generations of reactors began at least 20 years ago. There has been little progress since then. The same is true for the push to implement molten salt thorium reactors. True believers tell themselves that that failure history is irrelevant.
Some people simply can't accept the concept that there might not be a technological fix for all our problems. I urge you and other readers to search for the following warning articles. Most of the 8.0+ billion people on this planet have cleverly put these warnings out of their consciousness.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 4.5 years ago.
I agree we might be a long way off, but wright bro's is more accurate. DaVinci never made a helicopter he just drew it. We've had a fusion "helicopter drawing" for over 80 years now.
One day our phones will be powered by nuclear fusion.
If I had just one thin dime for every time over the last say four decades a story like this was run by the media I'd be a millionaire several times over. And yet here I am typing this and the freaking miracle of cheap fusion energy is still NOWHERE to be seen.
Agreed. Media needs to stop the hype. However, the hard work research must continue. If it takes a hundred years it will still be worth it.
Wow, really. A millionaire several times over. Let see: a dime a each time for 4 decades. To make just a million means about 700 such hype stories every day. I am impressed. You probably do nothing else but listen to such stories. Or are you just doing the thing you are complaining about: to exaggerate to make a story.
The breakthrough was only reported twice, both was last year. Are you mixing things up.
He said that one of the obstacles to overcome is if there is enough fuel .. hmmm yeah that is a very substantial obstacle.... Hopefully a solution is found ..
Sounds great, but there's one problem. Power out doesn't come close to Total Power in, if you look at the total power needed, including to drive the magnets as well as generate the Plasma. Disappointing this was not mentioned. Watch Sabine Hossenfelder explain it.
These guys are doing fusion in a different way. They are using lasers that all collide into and compact a fuel pellet.
I think it's the livermore lab
Yeah, I agree, it's very misleading. The 60 Minutes special in Jan covered this already. 1,2,3 times more just doesn't matter at this point. They need 100x more. I mean, I hope they get there and yes, we need to continue, but I can't really see what the news is here other than they replicated the result which is important obviously.
VERY cool! 👏👏
Still so centralized that it's likely we'll all be paying the same bills with PGE et al
Maybe we should start using the term practical fusion and impractical fusion.
Focus Fusion seems more like practical fusion if the lead scientist could get past telling everybody that he was right about the Big Bang theory, and get back to work on his fusion reactor, it’s funny that photo’s from the JWST can impede the race for fusion.
New technology wow! How can we figure out how to destroy ourselves with it?
We already have it with hydrogen bombs
@@FloresTrumpet well the military has always had lot of funding and the knowledge from the h bomb is classified so civilian scientists have had to recreate it pretty much.
@@FloresTrumpet "Mastered fusion power"? There's a big difference between uncontrolled, explosive fusion, and controlled, sustained fusion. We've been able to blow sh!t up in a big fireball for 70 years. This is about making that fireball ins a safe and controlled fashion and keeping that fireball going and generating energy indefinitely, producing more energy than we put in. We are still a LONG way from "mastering fusion"
Both fusion and battery research fields are full of breakthroughs, but void of technology demonstrators.
"The power of the sun, in the palm of my hands"
FANTASTIC
Now I’m interested. At first it looked like a scam but the speed of advancement points to a realistic project and potential for viability increases along with hope. We will see.
It is good to know that nuclear fusion has finally caught your interest. We look forward to your great contributions to this field now that you think it is not a scam.
Look up the total energy input not just the optical input of the lasers.
They did not give any number details whatsoever, which means that they do not actually add up. For example, the so called breakthrough before in California did not account for the massive energy needed to produce the laser. If this was added in, they only got 10th the power out, as they put in. There would need to be a 10 x improvement in laser efficiency before breaking even. Even then, you will only harness a fraction of the power getting the energy out. Then, the loss over transmission lines...
A legit breakthrough would mention these numbers, bragging about them. What we are likely talking about is some technical obstacle, among many, was finally overcome, which has allowed a positive press release, likely to the boost stock price for some fusion start up company that some college board member or professor is part of.
Fission on the other hand, is held back by regulators and ideological people who are willfully ignorant about safe gen 3, walk away safe, reactors. The pipe dream of fusion is the way of not regarding themselves as ludites.
@@dennisgarber that’s true. From the very start it was suspect and it was up there in my personal opinion with one scam of the trump administration “ space force “ what was a little diffrent was the speed of the announcement that more advances seem to be made, now I’m going to lean towards scam if what they produce as evidence appears like regurgitate information from the last briefing or since this isn’t really new technologies subject they just repeat something said decades ago they think the general public know nothing about to which responses will point the “ they’re a scam finger” directly at them.
Far more energy was needed to set up the attempt than was produced. That's the reality
We are 20 years away from fusion power, and always will be.
It used to be 15 years. We getting further away from fusion.
Lies. This brings us as close to nuclear fusion as me climbing up a tree and saying im closer to getting into space as compared to the guy on the geound.
Real breakthroughs and advancements are encouraging, but the thing that surprises me is the amount of language related to nuclear physics that has been injected into the normal language pool. I am so excited to be able to "nerd out" in public unlike the 90's when even talking about this remotely was considered pseudo-taboo in my area of the US due to lack of general knowledge or desire on the subject. I believe we are making so much progress, its close, whatever this research will provide. IDK if the sun has enough fusion potential per size in it to be worth the hype - I hope we move on to simulating bigger fusion devices with higher actual yields but we gotta start with what we can see I guess. Also, last time there was a "breakthough" if you read the fine print they isolated the amount of energy generated in such a way that the numbers did not reflect industry desires for energy, it still took way more than it got out all things considered (was progress but eh). Here's to hoping that this means we are much closer!
Big oil CANNOT be allowed to stop this under any circumstances.
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hands
@h2s142wrong
“Produces more energy than was used to create it” should be a qualified statement
It's needs such a huge asterisk that it covers that whole claim from view.
On one hand, it is great news. On the other hand, there are still far away. However, it isn't like one day, scientists say "Let's make fusion energy!" and then the next day: "Look! We have fusion energy!"
We might get there one day. I hope it is in time before we have exhausted other fuel resources.
@@someguy782 lol. "They". We literally have multinational collaborative projects pouring resources into researching the fusion problem, but a magical "they" is stopping it? I bet you think "they" are preventing us from developing perpetual motion machines too, eh?
@@someguy782 There's been dozens of experiments for decades, both public and private. This isn't an easy challenge, if we didn't succeed yet, it's not for lack of trying.
´We have climate change. We would be dead *_before we have exhausted other fuel resources_*
you know that there are energy sources which do not require fuel since they convert energy taken from the environment
We will cook in the weather we created long before we could exhaust the fossil fuel resources.
Another fusion breakthrough (YAWN)... but just like 30 years ago, the advent of fusion technology is still 30 years away.
Not even close to more energy than was used in entire system; it's supposedly more energy than used in the reaction. But even this is suspicious because it's such a small amount of energy that an electrical disturbance from the system could trigger a false result.
This is very honest answer from him that this is like Wright brothers' moment and it will take long to make it commercial. What scientists have achieved is only for split seconds. This can take decades. No one can know for sure as of now. But none the less it's a very very big achievement
Fans of nuclear fusion power generation tend to immerse themselves in promotional articles and in echo-chambers that reinforce what they prefer to believe in. They tend to ignore the critical assessments.
The NIF lab management is highly skilled in misleading the public regarding details of the experiment and the primary purpose of NIF. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. Perhaps you were not aware that the input energy reference is a cherry-picked value that is taken where the laser beams compress the fuel capsule. The energy, used to create the massive laser pulse, is over 100 times greater. The laser efficiency can't be increased to much greater values because it requires two wavelength shifts. The lab's use of the term 'ignition' is deceptive. There is no significant propagation of the fusion reaction. The fuel compression takes approximately 3 nanoseconds which compresses the fuel film in the diamond shell capsule down to a microscopic point then a tiny fraction of the atoms begin to fuse. That generates an enormous repulsive force that blasts away the remaining fuel from the reaction center. In the 5 December shot only 4% of the fuel fused while the rest was blown away before it had a chance to react. The reaction lasted approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second. It took about a week to set up the experiment. After the shot the radioactive tritium had to be removed from the target chamber as radioactive waste and the blast damaged target chamber optical windows had to be replaced.
Consistently, the news media is showed when presented with the story that the lab wants distributed.
The plan is coming along right on schedule. Eggcellent!
Yep, it has only taken 45 years to get this far.
@@mrbaab5932 Only 45 years seems pretty short when in comparison with say, how long it took our ancestors to figure out how to throw a rock.
My chicken universe is saved!
@@nonegone7170 Indubitably!
@@mrbaab5932considering we have less time than that to start producing clean energy, we should have a more optimistic attitude.
Great, so the general public will have access to this tech or are you going to have us pay senseless amounts monthly so we are dependent on a system?
We have a PRESENT of clean energy. Solar is now the cheapest energy source in the world, and growing logarithmically. The output is extremely predictable over the long term (both the year, and the lifetime of a solar panel), and maintenance costs are near-zero. And manufacturing costs have benefitted from economies of scale, dropping costs nearly 90% in just a decade. And installations scale from grid size to wristwatch size. It’s amazing.
Even on the happiest of happy paths, it’ll be two decades before we see fusion at any sort of scale, much less the scale needed to free ourselves from fossil fuel. Two decades more carbon in the atmosphere. But that won’t happen, because in two decades, solar will largely have displaced coal, and be powering the EVs displacing gasoline. And the new fusion, assuming it actually happens (big if), won’t be competing with dirty coal… it’ll be competing with clean, cheap, finance-friendly solar.
You do realize that solar panels use a lot of minerals and energy to make and are not easily recyclable? Solar is amazing, but it’s not perfect.
@@camofrog Perfect? How come you trolls don't also point out that oil wells and tankers are expensive to make and use lots of minerals? Are you under the impression that fossil fuel infrastructure is made from free and clean unicorn rainbows?
> This is just environmentalist propaganda. The two biggest areas where climate hysteria rules are Germany and California. The more solar they build, the higher the electric rates.
That's what happens for several reasons. Unlike legacy power plants, solar power plants have to be built NEW, at today's high costs.
Secondly, they require building transmission lines hither and yon, which are a substantial expense environmentalists don't like to count.
Solar and wind are UNRELIABLE, so you are either going to have periodic blackouts or you are going to need to build backup power generators ----natural gas commonly. This is an additional expense which environmentalists also don';t like to count.
And lastly, environmentalists dont want to wait for coal and hydroelectric plants to wear out. They want to TEAR THEM OUT ---NOW! So the immense amounts invested in building such plants is wasted, and since they are usually paid for on a pay as you go basis, that adds substantially to power costs.
In Washington State, there are huge hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers that were built in the 1930s-1950s. Rather than using these dams to generate electric power when solar and wind poop out, which they certainly could do, environmentalists are hot to tear out those dams.
For all these reasons, the claim that solar is cheap is a bad joke and a lie environmentalists hope to sell by repeating it often. But it just isn't so.
@@DemPilafian😂😅
@@DemPilafian Well its better, but fusion is an even better option, while lasting a lot longer.
Why wasn’t this covered more in the news outlets?!
You need many orders of magnitude greater output than is currently being reported for it to be 'useful energy'. Creating more energy out than went in is over simplifying it. At the end of the day the heat produced will have to be turned into mechanical energy e.g. a turbine or dynamo of some kind. This in itself creates energy losses, usually around 30 to 70% depending on mechanism. it is no different than getting mechanical energy out of a lump of coal.
It's a proof of concept... not the final product. More energy output over more energy input is insane. Don't know what "waste" you're talking about. If I burn 1 lb of coal and get .5 watts of energy and .5 is lost to heat in a conventional sense of making energy, that's waste. If I burn 1 lb of coal and get 1.1 watts of energy, nothinig was wasted.
@@Harrison.DuRant - when they are talking about energy output they are most likely talking about heat energy. At the end of the day that heat energy has to be converted into electricity - that is where the losses occur.
*This could be beneficial for society and doesn't sound profitable, therefore it will be stopped.*
how much energy is made when two magnets come together, can we use magnetic energy to simulate fusion?
Yes in a tokamak. Like the one being built by ITER and another by commonwealth energy which is an MIT spinoff
You cannot make atoms fuse together by using magnets. The Sun is a fusion reactor. Our Sun is fusing hydrogen into helium.
Until the point that this actually works we need to massively scale up Wind / Solar / Hydro / Nuclear power sources. We need to reduce emissions ASAP. The recent AMOC paper in nature showing part of the gulf stream collapse is pure nightmare fuel. If that happens life in europe would END. A 10C drop in temperature would mean no farming and an ice age in this part of the globe. Parts of India would no longer receive rain etc... Just in india alone 1 billion+ people would face starvation.
Scary part is who will eventually control the production of such an energy? If fewer and fewer people control it, the more vulnerable everyone else is to them.
Governments should be the only people controlling nuclear power. Perhaps governments can mismanage it? But we know individuals would be much more pernicious should they be allowed to delve into it.
They will weaponize it for sure. The history of gun, nuclear weapons speak for its self. Someday this earth will explode.
@@no-barknoonan1335No sir, the government should never be the one who controls it. Look what happened to 2 cities of Japan when the US gov dropped 2 nuc on them.
I think the more dangerous thing is our society not being educated enough to essentially understand the possibilities of this vs being uneducated and having it all fear-based.
Humans get scared of things because they cannot quantity possibly of the immense good it brings towards humanity.
@@rorykinahanyes, endless and powerful if you can't control it, this planet will explode.
If they can perfect this over the next 25 years, no telling how far we could travel in space.
They will figure out a way to make it not free (affordable living for everyone). 😂
yep. human greed always finds a way.
I would imagine it wouldn't save people money at all unfortunately. Just be "greener".
It will never be free, there are production, maintenance and distribution costs as well as the ever present taxes.
Those uap stories are definitely real.
Thank you ET
OMG its like they are just reruns from the news we got in the 90's. they don't even change the script, it is literally word for word.
Rinse and repeat. Aliens were the rage in the 90s too, and they're talking about that again.
How very optimistic of you
yahh well in the 90's the Co Areotech had a working Prototype of an aircraft that was driven by Photon's. Trust me that is light years ahead of Nuclear Fusion. sorry to see that you are so slow.
s@@Beau136
Finally! We have some real tangible advancements towards future technology. This is exciting!
The announcement was very brief with almost no technical specifics. The vast majority of reporting was little more than a re-hash of the official lab press release with no attempt at critical analysis. See the more detailed comment I left about 13 hours prior to this one.
I saw the 60-minute special on the first ignition, but it was invalid to say more energy was released than consumed because they didn't count the energy used by the lazers to ignite. Apparently, it takes more power than the entire US grid generates in a day to fire this thing once. So, they have a long, long way to go. They said they would have to increase the output by a factor of 100 to make it feasible. It's not clear to me what they are saying with this latest announcement because 1 or 2 times more energy won't cut it. Could be another 50 years or more before this could be commercialized. ruclips.net/video/7ZejZxjvFng/видео.html
That’s not even close to true. The net energy consumption is many orders of magnitude smaller than you say
@@jeanbaptisteemmanuelzorg5911 You ain't kidding. The video linked says it uses 1000x more power than the US energy grid, but he went ahead and added "in a day" to that statement for no apparent reason. His claim falls apart with even the slightest amount of thought, because if it were to draw even slight more than the entire US energy grid in an entire day, where on earth are they getting their power from? And where are they storing an entire day's worth of the entire country's power? In reality they're only storing and using as much as the energy grid generates in a millionth of a second.
The improvements need to be closer to a million times greater. In the 5 December 2022 shot it took the NIF lab about a week to prepare the experiment. The nuclear fusion reaction lasted for only about 0.000,000,000,08 second. The output energy of that reaction was approximately enough to boil two liters of water. The input energy to the NIF building, during the week, was far greater than 100 times the shot output energy. There was no significant 'ignition' of the supplied fuel. Only about 4% of it reacted before the remaining 96% was blasted away from the microscopic reaction center. That then had to be removed from the interior of the target chamber as radioactive waste. The NIF lab management has claimed that the laser efficiency can be improved by creating a new facility that uses newer diode pumped lasers. Such lasers don't exist at power levels anywhere near that of the current NIF lasers. Additionally, if new laser system requires two stages of wavelength multiplication, as in NIF, then a poor laser efficiency will remain.
It is now 7 August 2023. Since the 5 December 2022 shot the NIF lab staff has had 243 days to reproduce experiment that they announced last year. They failed to mention that that 'break-even' shot was supposed to be achieved by 2012.
Those, who have allowed the following warnings into their consciousness, realize that we don't have 50 years left to come up with an economically practical nuclear fusion demonstration power plant. Search for the following article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 4.5 years ago.
Correct, but there is no 'z' in laser. Look up what laser is an abbreviation for.
@@MichaelCappiello Capacitors can store energy and release it all at once.
D+T fusion is not aneutronic. (D + T → He-4 (helium-4) + n (neutron)). Neutron bombardment of the reactor walls will make them radioactive over time through a process called neutron activation. For example, after ITER is decommissioned, it will have to be cut up and buried. If there is a silver lining to neutron activation, it is that a lithium blanket will serve to protect the chamber walls to a large extent, while at the same time, breeding Tritium, which can be separated and cycled back in for use as fuel. (Li-6 + n → He-4 + T)
Clean power already exists. Let it come to light and stop letting greed get in the way.
The fact this isn't all over the news explains why fusion is still 50 years away😂. No way the elites will endorse this. Its a money loser on all fronts.
How much more energy including the energy needed to mine the scarce resource and energy to construct the power plant and energy to construct thousands of power plants needed?
It would be nice to hear some actual data - how many Gvolts in and how many out.
No mention of the costs of generating the current for the lasers.
Megawatts to run the facility, and the shot explosion couldn't heat a cup of coffee. They greatly exaggerate the results by only counting the picoseconds worth of laser energy put into the shot.
They call this vaporware. A Elizabeth Holmes moment. This thing is no where near economically feasible.
How much does the refurbishment cost between each shot ?
This is great. Little by little, will we get there in time?
It has taken 45 years to get this far.
Yeah we will be so overpopulated there won't be enough basics like water to survive. Who gives AF about power..
0:03
A part of the experiment produced more energy than was consumed,
in that part. This is not a Kitty Hawk - moment. The NIF does not fly.
Fusion couldn't get here soon enough. We can't keep altering our atmosphere like this.
They need to hurry up with this tech and get it implemented ASAP. We only have 10-20 years left before this is too late.
I wish that were true, but I think it's already too latr
@@keepitreal2902 i think so...we should have scaled up nuclear power 50 years ago. We could have had an entire planet off of fossil fuels decades ago.
Looks like very far in future 🔮
It's been a long-running joke since the 1950's that nuclear fusion was just 30 years away. In the 60's it was just... 30 years away. Same in the 70, 80s, 90s and onwards. Fusion has always been "just 30 years away". With this latest breakthrough, I'm predicting that we'll probably see nuclear fusion within... you guessed it... 30 years. LOL
They still need to figure out a safety protocol for slowing down the plasma cycles but it looks promising.
I plan to power the world on sunshine and smiles.
Don't forget fairy dust and unicorn rainbows.
1:11 Did the news anchor just claim that nuclear fusion is safer than nuclear fission? Wow ...
Based on the comments, Americans' level of science literacy needs improvement. As the guest points out, there's a long way to go to turn this into an operational power plant.
It's not just the science literacy that needs improvement.