You need to make a distinction between Q and Q(total). Q is the energy gain factor for the reaction (running laser compared to energy released by fusion) - and the energy based on the energy to sustain the fusion reaction in the fusion reactor. Q(total) is the total energy of the power station , and for comparison, a gas powered station uses 15% of its energy produced to run the power station (excitation of the stator + cooling, control systems) The amount of energy for Q(total) compared to Q in a fusion power station is about 10 times - ie you need 10 times of energy of the laser to run the "power station". So you can see that a fusion powerstation based on this CURRENT technology would use energy to run as the additional containment energy, generation power and just general running is large. This issue with Q and Q(total) has dogged the fusion publicity for years.
I'm watching this after the press conference. It looks like they put 2MJ of light energy in, and got 3MJ of energy as neutrons out, but it took at least 300MJ of electricity to power the lasers. I'm glad the scientists are being clear about the distinction. It's still a huge achievement, though, because the lasers were designed to have precise timing, not to be efficient. As a point of comparison, 300MJ is similar to the power stored in the battery for an electric car, whereas 2-3MJ is closer to the power stored in an electric bike.
💯Is that a research grant application I see in your hand ? We already have a working fusion reactor. It’s called The Sun. All we need is a solar panel to collect its almost infinite energy.
They should have better explained the difference between target gain and total gain. They still had an input of 300 MJ to obtain 3.15 MJ of output at the end.
Actually the 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy and the output was 3.15 megajoules. The lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target. So all in all it was cool however it was not a net gain when you look at energy consumed vs. energy produced.
There are 2 fusion energy milestones. The plasma creating more energy than it took to create the plasma, contain it, heat it and react it JUST DURING THE EXPERIMENT is what they did. Its like starting a fire and having to heat the wood continuously with another source of heat. Like in a hige blast furnace and up until now, burning the wood actually COOLED the bast furnace. And now it slightly gets warmer The other energy milestone is actually creating enough energy output to power something. They currently power the facility with many megawatts of power 24/7 but only run it for fractions of a second to seconds a day. And the trillion dollar facility cant be run for longer.
And How did they beat the first law of thermodynamics ? i think this is another Money grab like most projects => not to free us but to enslave us more ! That's the true agenda while whiping out most of the global population ! Never forget it's money they have from all the working people in this world ! just like the plandemic => it fits there whole agenda 😲
@@kareldegreef3945 no laws were broken. The fusion of 2 hydrogen atoms to make nitrogen results in a slight reduction of mass. That mass conversion to energy is where the "extra" comes from. For different reasons, i agree with you. In today's money the total expenditures on fusion COULD HAVE BEEN used to advance solar cell technology and implementation. With that money, the southwestern states could have been covered with hundreds of miles of solar panels. Roofs across the country could all be panels. And more than enough $ left over to have batteries storing excess for night use.
After listening to the press conference it sounds like they were energy positive for about 5-seconds. And that on a single pellet. Next will be dropping a second pellet in there to keep it going even longer. Heat extraction as I understand it will be in the structure( walls ) of the device. Very exciting.
It is important to put this in perspective. 1. It has not been independently replicated and confirmed yet. A test of basic science. 2. It has yet to be proven scaleable. A bumblebee flies, sure, but that technology doesn't work for aircraft. So let's be cautiously optimistic, and hope this isn't a dead end. And, keep it classified.
It is a milestone. But the figure is for the input power from the proton lasers… the trouble with that figure is that it ignores the fact that that about ten times that energy was used to create the output of the lasers. It’s a bit like saying that you get 200 miles to the gallon as you freewheel down Mount Everest but ignore how much petrol you used to get to the top! But it is a great breakthrough and lasers will get more efficient knowledge will improve but we are still looking at at least 1 order of magnitude to get to a power station!
there was a question later on the podium, how much of the "fuel" got burned. about 4%. not saying this means too much, but just to give an idea how much improvement is still possible in that compartement itself. at the end i believe it's going to be hard work together and in competition of various concepts and teams learning from eachother. in any case, i was excited Q > 1 is fantastic, total or not.
Can't you elaborate? As I understood it the put 1x energy into the lasers and calculated 1.5x energy released by the reaction. Do you mean they actually put 10x energy into the lasers and had extremely bad lasers with an efficiency of 0.1? Those lasers sound extremely bad in that case because that's like 1/3 the efficiency of a petrol engine.
@@simonpettersson6788 I don’t know the exact setup… but imagine, , a series of transformers raising the voltage… loss on each step… then feed that energy into capacitors to store and release… loss on input and release, then the lasers are again in series raising the potential energy loss on each step. Then you have to cool the lot! So for the sake of argument all steps are 70% efficient if you take 200 as your starting figure and run it at 70% 7 times you get 31 as your output. And you can add switching, computing, lenses and accuracy to the list as well. Many small holes in the bucket!
@@simonpettersson6788 i had to research a bit too. Lasers in general have pretty low efficency. in this breakthrough, they only talk about the output energy of the laser. there are some real physical/quantum constraints with (current) lasers, 40%-ish efficency max. in the case of the NIF setup, in order to shoot the 2 Mj, they had to pump the laser up with 300 Mj. so, all-in-all, we are looking more at like 1% output... anyway, it's a nice step, it's more important than many other clickbaity science news, but it's just a step. one to build upon. Here the quote from an article i found: "Producing those beams at NIF involves a space nearly the size of a football field, filled with flashing lamps that excite the laser rods and propagate the beams. That alone takes 300 megajoules of energy, most of which is lost. Add to that layers of cooling systems and computers, and you quickly get an energy input that’s multiple orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced by fusion. So, step one for practical fusion, according to Cappelli, is using much more efficient lasers."
What is the cost of fusion energy? Will it be able to compete with the low cost (and getting lower) of wind energy or solar power? Will fusion energy leave a bunch of hazardous waste material behind like nuclear power does? My current belief is that fusion energy will be too expensive to compete with cheaper alternatives.
Clean, abundant, reliable, cost competitive. That describes geothermal. By the time fusion is available, geothermal and wind, solar and batteries will have met our needs, IMO.
I’ve followed fusion for years and understand your enthusiasm, but I think this Is more very important evolution as opposed to a breakthrough. I think we will get there but as old hands say fusion is always 30 years away. Still, it is really good to hear you realistically appreciate the current limitations of renewables and how fusion is very probably is the best clean and limitless energy source.
Économic production will take more than that Imo. But there is a lot of company with différent itération and système, break even is at touching distance, différent serious système race for the 2030's just Hope one get there. This wasn't ever true. Now it is. Things change this adage may not be accurate anymore.
@@N1rOx I think that is correct. It can be both. Net energy gain from fusion is a huge breakthrough but it could still be decades or centuries to make it practical, if ever.
I agree. If it only used hydrogen it would be awesome. But it doesn't. The world doesn't have enough tritium and dyptherium to run 1 reactor for a week. It will require many fission plants to make what's needed. This isn't as it's being sold
@@kennedy6971 Interesting. That's way beyond my knowledge of fusion tech. I did work with tritium though in a genetics lab. Short half life and low energy, but bioavailable...not good. ;^)
@Morgan Angel Indeed. ITER is an experiment, a former laser nuclear testing facility being used for fusion. The entire plant required 300 mega joules, 2 mega joules were put into the laser, and three came out. The target was a BB sized diamond sphere with a miniscule straw attached to it, through which tritium fuel is injected. A working laser confinement reactor would require thousands of these, hard to engineer, diamond shells to be injected and blasted with an ultra powerful laser every day. Quite how you would manufacture, in a cost-effective way, untold thousands of these microenginnering marvels that require highly expensive tritium is something I would ponder. Deuterium doesn't work for laser confinement fusion, so you are stuck with tritium, which is immensely expensive. Tritium is also in short supply. Something like General Fusions concept seems more viable to me.
I've heard that fusion will be economically viable if it generates a 10% net energy gain. This achieved 25% (ish). That's an incredible breakthrough which could finally make fusion energy generation a reality. Really exciting news.
Sort of. The lasers are currently less than 1% efficient, so they'd need to improve the efficiency there and/or make a much higher net energy gain. But this is still a tremendous achievement--the lasers are super precise and powerful, even if they weren't designed to be efficient. I'm looking forward to ITER having a net energy gain!
you read wrong, it's 10x the energy gain, not 10%. because there are tons of auxiliary systems that takes an awful lot of energy. even if you can extract a bit of heat from the plasma, you need to convert that to electricity.
It is still news because we now know that ignition with laser fusion is possible. We've solved half the problem by squashing some hydrogen so it fuses producing more energy than the energy squashing it. If we get a more efficient laser, we can solve the other half of the problem. Then maybe we can make it economical. The scientists were pretty clear about this at the press conference, but the media rarely broadcasts that part.
@@nathanbanks2354 Well, good luck getting a 100 fold increase in efficiency. What I did notice about the press conference was the amount of time dedicated to the (very thinly) veiled threat of nuclear readiness. Keep in mind this announcement came on the same day as news about weapons secrets and equipment leaked to a foreign entity. Problem is, if you want to "Speak softly and carry a big stick" it helps to actually have the stick. It's non news re: 'green energy'. Still decades away from anything practical (even if possible) and as others have pointed out, humanity has been capable of nuclear fusion since the 50's. Also connected to this is LLNL's ATS-2 supercomputer (aka 'Sierra') which has been running nuclear stockpile simulations since 2018. My guess would be high yield weapons, and winnable first strike scenarios.
The laser ignition facility is about H bomb testing and validation. It is largely irrelevant as a power source as the device (worlds largest laser) is impractical.
@@enadegheeghaghe6369 NIF is about maintaining the nuclear bomb stockpile. The laser itself is the size of three football fields and produces an explosion similar in size to a commercial fire work from a piece of material the size of a pin head. It is needed because H bombs deteriorate in storage and need periodic testing maintenance and upgrades. Full scale testing to check their performance was banned under the nuclear test ban treaty. Therefore the ignition facility allows tiny bits of H bombs to be blown up in fusion explosions to check performance. Additionally, there is a holy grail for H bomb designers, fusion without the nuclear fission component (ie no plutonium). It is on boundary of possibility that such weapons could be designed. This would allow H bombs to be made smaller and lighter without the expense and complications associated with a plutonium trigger. NIF helps in this research by exploring the compression and heating needed to ignite tritium and other fusion precursor materials in a fusion reaction. To quote Lawrence Livermore Laboratory website: "NIF is a key element of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the reliability, security, and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without full-scale testing." Check it out for yourself: lasers.llnl.gov/about/what-is-nif In summary, the NIF method of generating fusion while of interest, has no credible application to peaceful commercial fusion based power generation. It's not designed for that purpose. This announcement (like similar previous similar announcements from LLL) is about securing on going funding from Congress to keep this very expensive facility operational.
Embodied energy of the facility wasn’t taken in to account. Nor was the energy of creating the fuel. All the deuterium in the world at any one time would sit easily in 10 litres of water. All the heavy water manufactured for medicine at any one time amounts to 1.5 litres and it has a half life
Hype aside, one thing the NIF did definitely improve on, is how much more power they’re getting vs. in 2021, when they first had “ignition”. They’ve gone from 1.3 mega joules output to 3.45 mega joules … almost triple. Whatever can be said about milestones, that’s a lot of progress right there.
That's great for science, but this design is not even build to create electricity, that's not even the goal of this type of fusion But still a major breakthrough
Yup. It sounds like their measurements were more precise this time, so they're sure they had ignition, and the lasers were tuned better but the target wasn't quite as round.
Yes, 2 megajoules of impacting lasers created 3+ megajoules output. But the total system energy input was actually over 400 mega joules. For Q of 0.0085. And add in the total annual energy input of the facility vs the aggregated annualized output, Q is too small to discuss. And they dont even have concepts for the equipment needed for a continuous sustained reaction. 102¹⁸ joules or 102¹² megajoules. Thats the energy consumption in the USA (2021). So to meet that with fusion they only need a 12 order of magnitude increase. Progress? Yes. But after 60 years of research, still showing the mega waste of resources that it has been, is and will be for the foreseeable future.
@@johnb7430 The energy input for the lasers is irrelevant as it's just an experiment. Commercial reactors will obviously use much more efficient lasers, especially as the ones NIF uses are really old.
They have a breakthrough every few years to keep the funding fresh. The less experience the suckers have with the scam, the more enthusiasm each breakthrough can engender. This is only possible because there's one born every minute. The Electric Viking is relatively young and enthusiastic. To the young, all things are new.
That net gain is deceptive to say the least. They spent 2.1 MJ of high order (low entropy therefore costly) laser energy to produce 2.5 MJ of thermal (low order- high entropy) energy. If you put it back, 2.5 MJ thermal produces about 1 MJ electricity which can be turned into maximum 0.5 MJ (probably a lot less for that high performance laser) of laser energy to put back into reaction.
Sam, kudos for your overall work on batteries, BEV's, etc, but if you're going to discuss this you should be CLEAR that this is INCREMENTAL progress, and using Q(scientific), NOT Q(practical) -- so it's ONLY measuring the DIRECT energy into the lasers for the experiment -- not all the overhead for things like fusion containment. But obviously any practical power plant using fusion has to be solidly into Q(practical) to be economically viable. As you said, we're still (at least) decades away. The popular press is WOEFULLY bad about not pointing this out and just regurgitating the Q(scientific) as though it were Q(practical), apparently not knowing any different, which is why I point this out. (It's about misleading to draw more funding, which I DON'T like). Sabine Hossenfelder, a very respectable physicist and teacher, does a good job explaining this here. ruclips.net/video/LJ4W1g-6JiY/видео.html
i agree. he's overhyping. it's exciting news, just from a science standpoint alone. but it's just another puzzlepiece of knowledge and capabilities, one of thousands.
At Kill Devil Hill, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - the Wright Brothers achieved flight. The flight was 1m in altitude and the Wright Flyer only flew down the beach for a few hundred meters. The flight changed the world. Consider this fact - the net energy gain collects up the energy used from buildings that cross three football fields to direct energy into getting fusion to occur across the electrostrong barrier - if you're going to shrug away the event - just remember. This is the first test.
I think that is a good view of situation. It may not result in practical fusion power, ever, but it is a "proof of concept." It's like going Mach 1, for the first time. In a wind, solar, battery world, it is likely way too expensive and dangerous, but a huge scientific achievement, none the less.
Correction, the real first flight was Whitehead’s one, ending in a crash. It was using a self made steam engine. The Wright brothers did their best to suppress this historical event by blackmailing the Smithsonian to delete Whitehead’s flight in order to get the kitty hawk for the museum.
It’s a promising result, but it lasted 5-seconds and was enough energy to heat about 10 gallons of water. It’s at least one decade, if not two decades away from powering a single house for one day. Could be wrong. Hope I’m wrong.
@@JohnBreezy22 It's more important for science than anything that will ever be practical. Wind - solar - batteries will be way more cost effective. I prefer the free fusion reactor in the sky.
The proibleem is that it still doesn't produce useful amounts of energy, and required a massive and expensive set of lasers. Every step towards producing useful amounts of fusion energy has required ever larger and more expensive reactors. Moreover, this laser method requires precisiion manufacture of tiny fuel pellets, making the fuel expensive. It will be too expensive to be competitive with renewables, or even fission reactors. It may find some use in "cost is no objection" applications, but it won't solve our energy needs.
Im still extremely skeptical of this method of fusion EVER being commercially afordable. That laser bank will be ridiculously expensive to build and operate at the shot frequency a commercial reactor requires. Ok for testing nuclear weapons as military doesn't care about cost, but otherwise ... This sort of presser just enables the military to charge the cost of their test facility to energy research instead of weapons.
While this accomplishment is the milestone that they have been working toward for over 25 years, where the energy produced is greater than the laser energy used to produce it. However to produce that laser energy takes about 10 times the electrical power. I have visited the NIF (National Iginition Facility) several years ago, an interesting fact about it is that they have to store up energy in huge capaction banks and then release it all at once in an extreemly short pluse, to power the lasers, during this pluse the energy going to these lasers exceeds the entire electrial energy being used in the USA at the same time.
The 2.05 input is just an estimate, or recalculation based on how inefficient they’re claiming the lasers were. They’re ignoring nearly 300 megajoules of the energy cost “lost” due to inefficiencies they’re explaining away. It’s most likely that calculation that’s wrong. When they’re trying to rationalize away around 300 megajoules of the input though, it’d be easy to lose track of 0.95 of a single megajoule. Until they’re no longer pumping in (and losing) 100 times the energy they’re getting out of this, there’s no way to prove there’s any net energy gain, at all.
@@aalvarez2914 Yes, NIF says the lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to target and got 3.15 megajoules out; however, the lasers consumed 322 megajoules in the process...so overall it was a net loss...if you read the fine print. 😂
Two things seems to make this fusion shot especially interesting. One is that the holram was less peefectly shaped than previously created and they were able to compensate by changing the relative intensity between the 192 different beams. If true, lower tolerances means cheaper fuel assemblies, which means more experiments, total. The other thing, which is in all.the hype, is ignition. But I've yet to have anyone express what ignition means, and it's important. It means that initial fusion reactions put out enough energy to create more fusion reaction, which created further reactions, etc. In other words, more fuel was fused than can be accounted for by the laser-energy input. The reactions were self-sustaining... for a few trillionths.of a second. Regardless, ignition is ignition and if the NIF can reproduce this shot it means we genuinely are closer to a fusion future bc it would mean loads of studies of actual fusion in a bottle. If they can't reproduce the shot.... they made a mark in the history book, but that's about it. .... Fingers crossed.
@Dyne's Lair It took me a bit of thinking on this one. Assuming I understand correctly, there are generally two reasons a fusion power plant is large. In the case of magnetic confinement, like ITER or W9, larger more powerful magnetic fields constrain the movement of changed particles (the nuclear fuel) is constrained to smaller "gyro-radii" and so have less value to move through. This makes them easier targets. But bigger fields need higher electrical power, needing larger coils for any given material. Even so, an ion will jump from one Flux line to another and slowly "walk" away from the middle, and eventually being lost to the chamber walls. This means the reaction chamber has to have a certain volume, dependant on field strength, to allow enough walking steps before being lost to give them enough time to fuse instead. So now you *really* need a big reaction chamber and a *really* big electro magnet. In the case of enertial confinement, like NIF or HIF (not made yet but designed) you need a large enough facility to create enough Flux (photons for the first, ions for the second) to compress the material hard and fast enough to make the fuel fuse. In neither case is it about accuracy or precision. If you can make a very high magnetic field in a very small space without blowing things up, you could make a tokamok that would fit in your arms. In a way, that what focus fusors and z-pinch machines are trying to do with their collapsing electric fields. In the same way, if you could fit an election accelerator on a microchip, you might be able to make an inertial confinement fusor (like the NIF but with electrons) small enough to fit in a car. Indeed, I believe that is one reason there's an international committee that has been trying to make just such an electronic accelerator and succeeded just last year... or was it the year before? I forget. Regardless, attempts continue to make fusion small bc everyone understands the ideal fusion reactor is the size of a refrigerator or smaller.
NIF delivered 3.15 megajoules from about 2 megajoules of input energy (so Q=1.5, roughly) in a single pulse. No mention of pulse repetition rate or damage/repairs necessary to fire again. By comparison, the Culham Fusion Lab JET experiment in the UK produced 59 megajoule of continuous power for a five second test (so almost 11 megawatts) - although its Q ratio is at best only 0.67 (less than the 1.0 break even point). Its successor, ITER (in France), is more likely to produce a working fusion reactor than the Livermore NIF, in my opinion, and some as yet unseen, dark horse may beat both. Interesting news, though.
I agree completely....we already have fusion bombs that achieve a Q greater than 1... The actual breakthrough will be when we achieve a long term Q greater than 1 and the energy needed to contain, recover AND convert to electricity the energy of the output of the reactor is put into the equation. I don't see this as anything more that a Federally funded lab putting out headlines in an effort to keep their funding.
When you discuss Q ratios and don't SPECIFY if it's scientific or practical (or experimental vs. total), it's MEANINGLESS and it can be VERY misleading. This is ONLY the DIRECT energy into the lasers. So what? All the overhead like containment, etc. still takes a LOT of energy. This is creeping forward, but still LIGHT YEARS away. The arm waving is all about trying to attract funding, and the media is mostly too stupid to point out that it's NOT Q(practical) they're talking about in such announcements.
@@rogergeyer9851 There is NO NEED TO SHOUT. Anyone interested can easily look up the relevant information (Livermore isn't holding back and nor is Culham) so please try not to make (mostly) pointless remarks in the future.
@@rogergeyer9851 They were very clear that this was scientific--it took over 300MJ of electrical energy to power the laser. (The lasers were designed to be precisely timed & powerful, not efficient.) However without this test, it would be difficult to know if it's even possible to have inertial confinement using lasers. They were also saying that JET/ITER was further ahead even though they got ignition first.
Super job to the Ignition Lab and kudos to Sam for presenting this video. Unfortunately any technology of this type is totally unacceptable to the public. I have direct experience in this. As a kid engineer I worked for a World Class energy company who made a proposal to the San Diego CA community to site a completely safe, produce nearly free electricity and no hazardous components or after effects. The project would be funded without public funds and was to be located just South of Del Mar California. San Diego County would have become a net exporter of electricity. As these things go before the first shovel into the ground the project had to be presented to the voters. The result was an overwhelming NO!!. California has not opened a new power station of any kind since 1979 regardless of technology used. The voting public is terrified of these things because there is always a radical response and predictions of nuclear fallout, nuclear bombs, widespread cancer and Armageddon. Ignorance will prevail. Nuclear power in Australia has been a complete bust. There is one station, Lucas Heights, Sydney, but is not used to produce electrical power, but instead is used to produce medical radioisotopes. So the same situation exists there. I suggest that if a credible organization offered to build Nuclear Fusion power plants in Australia, for free, it would get an overwhelming NO!!!! vote. And wide resistance. Thanks to everyone here for the nice comments about Nuclear ( Fusion ) Power. Think hard would you, or your Community, vote to allow one to be sited near you? I suggest NO! www.ga.com/
Lots of clean, and hopefully not abandoned energy. Seriously, thou, I'm super excited too that someone reached fusion Q>1 in my lifetime! Some faith in humanity restored
Hi, if you look closely they are talking about the power gain of the plasma alone, and that for a fraction of a second. What a power station needs to do is generate more power than it receives, and do it 24/7. The power losses due to steam generation and then electricity generation are 40% at best. The power used by all the other kit it significant. So in reality they have made a good step forward, but are way, way short of making a useful power station. Strangely, the scientist know this well, but insist on reporting the plasma efficiency alone, which is at the least misleading.
Not just a gamechanger, but a worldchanger. In this case, it's true, but not quite yet. It's a huge step forward, through a barrier that has frustrated nuclear fusion scientists and engineers for about 40 years. Now, we have at least one approach that could be generating clean electricity 24/7/365, like our sun does, within 10 or 20 years. In the meantime, the best way to tap this inexhaustible source of clean energy is using and further improving the converters we already have, namely solar panels and wind turbines, along with battery banks that will also be needed along with the future baseload fusion powerplants.
This was interesting...2.05 megajoules delivered to the target and 3.15 megajoules produced. However, one thing missing from the story...the 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy ...so all in all there was still a net loss.
@@mrthegrievous i hope that's an overly pessimistic estimate. my hope is for a governments as well as capitalist markets race to start, then all bets are off.
Sounds great, but even if you achieve a 20% gain in energy out, how long will the equipment stand up before needing replacement? Will the replacement and maintenance costs keep it from being practical?
only one way to find out :-) i for one am pretty certain, all of those steps can be solved. but it's even possible, that at the end it's "just" another means of producing energy, along other hopefully clean sources.
It's cool to see my old hometown making the news. Livermore is a really cool place and has about 40 wineries plus a bunch of science geeks running around. It's in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay area and very close to Silicon Valley. The national ignition facility at LLNL is a very cool science experiment. However, I think TAE, Commonwealth fusion, first light fusion, or general fusion will be the people that achieve engineering break even estimated to be around q equal to or greater than 5. The cool thing about TAE is that they do not rely on tritium and have a direct way of capturing the resulting energy. I think it is less of a science experiment and more of a practical solution.
They used the typical Deuterium/Tritium blend. It's not the only fuel they use for experiments, but it's the one used when they're trying to get ignition. The Tritium would have to be produced from a lithium blanket that captures the excess neutrons from the fusion reaction. Currently, Tritium is most often produced in heavy water reactors like the CANDU. Deuterium can be harvested from water, which has been done for decades for how heavy water reactors.
Wow! I think this is one of those 0 vs 1 moments that Peter Thiel talks about. As long as we have more energy out than in from the process, even a scrap, it proves it's possible, and we just hit the '1' case. Mental and financial capital will flow towards this technology rapidly, because all of human civilisation is predicated on our ability to harness energy - indeed.. all of life is. This not the essence of the hand-off between science and engineering. Once a process goes from being scientifically possible to understood well enough to be demonstrated reliably in the real world, it becomes an engineering problem. And engineers (I speak as one in an unrelated field) have pride in the fact that once something is a 'mere' engineering problem... then success will come quickly. The minds of engineers are tuned to find and optimise pragmatic solutions in a way that never stops surprising those outside of the field.
exactly, it could be a tipping point. i'm well aware of all the caveats. but the potential price is enormous. each failed startup will inch us closer. in addition, there's tremendeous national interest in this.
Every decade there is a "breakthrough" in fusion. Then nothing happens. This time it's slightly more promising but the road from theoretical to commercial is still decades away.
You'll pardon me, Sam, if I temper my excitement somewhat. I hope you're right and that this signals a truly major breakthrough. It's just that I've seen countless "breakthrough" videos on fusion energy, each one glacially creeping towards the goal of sustained net positive energy, and beyond that, of being able to mass produce a significant number of such reactors which will work as advertised.
It’s an interesting energy source. First, Let’s focus (pun intended) on the fusion taking place 150,000,000 kilometers away. That will give us all the energy we can use at the lowest price to both pocketbook and the environment. It’s difficult to name anything useful to humankind coming out of the Lawrence Livermore Labs in the past 70 years. Most of their work has been to improve the USA’s capacity for death and destruction. Whatever they achieve regarding fusion reactions they will try to make into a weapon. Depend on it. It’s in their mission statement.
I don't know how this technology really works, they say it use the most powerful lasers but how are they containing the reaction. I know that the problem with ITER and other Tokamak reactors is the configuration of magnetic fields to contain the generated plasma, only one of the magnets takes more than 5 years to manufacture and its costs are very high, which is why I think the reaction using magnetic fields to create plasma is far from commercial implementation. The technology is different and that is the point of such an announcement, or are we at the same juncture.
Buddy that's like saying "yes we can make a nuclear bomb but it's very small, so let's just abandon it." . Of course if you can't replicate this then that's a problem
I was wondering too... if they are simply measuring the electrical energy in and out? If so, can be misleading. I read that power plants have about 10% loss for transmission lines to the customer. Plus, maintenance/operating costs could require the input/output ratio to be even higher to truly 'break even'.
@@Mako2401 Yes, nuclear fusion with an overall energy gain will happen, it is merely of time. There is however, the cost of these fusion generators to be taken into account, and that may be far more important.
once the first large scale fusion plant comes online, i expect a lot of fission plants being developed as well. just because of the huge lack of tritium on earth. i think theres only about 20kg worth. the fuel used in this net gain fusion reactor was deuterium and tritium. thankfully, a waste by product of fission reactors is Tritium. the fusion reactor will be dependent on fission just for fuel. luckily we also have safer gen iv uranium reactors and msr thorium reactors to replace the worlds old fission reactors, that relies on incredibly high pressure water cooled reactors.
Neutron producing fusion cycles like deuterium-tritium can be used to breed further tritium from lithium-6. This is infact how it is made in fission reactors and thermonuclear weapons. I believe ITER will be testing a molten lithium neutron absorption blanket for shielding and tritium breeding. Dunno if they have plans to harvest the tritium yet. If we ever make D-T fusion practical enough to commercialize, the tritium supply won't be an issue.
A Science magazine story says that tritium is as expensive as gem diamonds. "At $30,000 per gram, it’s almost as precious as a diamond." - Science magazine
This breakthrough whilst significant does not produce net usable energy as although the energy produced is greater than the energy used to produce that output it does not take into account the energy to run the actual plant eg. The cooling systems, Super computing, ancillary devices etc. ITER in France is aiming to produce 500MW from 50MW will not produce enough to run the plant that makes it. Sabine Hossenfelder on her channel has a good explanation for this
While net energy gain is an important hurdle to overcome, it is not a key metric for being economic viable. Not to talk about being comparable to other energy sources. I guess that could quite take some time if ever achieved.
That's just it, you have to sell it. Nuclear FISSION isn't cost competitive with renewables plus storage now. Fusion might be cleaner, but would it be cheaper?
@@jamesvandamme7786 if it cost billions to build the reactor and the bet gain is about the same as a solar farm that cost millions... not very profitable.
@@morganangel340 Don't forget that if it takes 20 years to build - and a few more to get the bugs out of it - your billions in loans will be accruing interest and you're producing no income.
@@morganangel340 Looking how much most modern fission reactors cost i'd imagine that fusion reactor is a lot more expensive... we're talking about tens of billions if not hundreds.
Even if there had been a net energy gain it's still only a technology for boiling water to run a steam engine. So you still need to convert that into electricity where 60% of the primary energy is lost, as in all thermal power plants. But LLNL is mainly a weapons lab where the energy research is a side hustle.
There's a term, EROEI, energy returned on energy invested. There's a great lecture by Charles Hall about it. 20% return for something as complex as fusion reactors is not scalable. To give you an idea the supergiant oilfields in east Texas of the 1900's returned 100-200 barrels of oil for 1 barrel of input. That made the US industrialization take off in the 20th century
Appreciate your enthusiasm, but I've heard about "breakthroughs" since the 1990s. So color me skeptical. I believe in the first fusion reactors once they actually connect to the power grid.
Yep, yep. Taking all the wasted energy into count also I just guess that we are still clearly on the negative side when talking about total energy. We are coming closer but we aren't there yet. IMO
it's legit. but it's not like a completely unexpected event from this lab. and it's not something that changes everything. it's just a nice step, again showing us a glimpse of what might be possible in the future. it's mostly good for "we can do it, let's go!!". still 1-x decades away from productive.
@Bert Rich 2 concerns ...us the energy production sustainable? Seems like maybe the best near term use case would be to boost efficiency of a standard nuclear plant. Also concerning that during the announcement they talked more about defense than energy.
Fusion will never be cheaper than Molten Salt Reactors. Don't believe what they're telling you about net energy gain, because they don't include all of the energy used for the whole system, they only look at the amount of energy in the Lasers. However it's done, it's going to be massively more complex than a similar MSR which is as efficient and actually burns waste fuel from existing reactors. Don't assume it's going to be certain that it will ever be economic proposition. MSRs are very simple and much easier to build. How is Fusion ever going to compete?
Sounds like a foothold that promises exponential growth in the right direction, exponentially quickening what we have come to know of the work in this field up to now.
It will all come down to economic math. Cost of an actual facility weighed with how much energy produced. The theoretical benefits are promising. It is engineering it at good cost.
You have to be kidding! :O According to Wikipedia and other source, we just beat science with a current estimated Q=1,39 THIS IS A BREAKTHROUGH BOYS, YA YEET!!! Now the only thing that remain is to get that efficiency higher as we make new improvement on the subject
positive result means the chain reaction could continue relying on the heat created by itself . in other word it may not need external heat or laser beams. lasser beam would only ignite it . once ignited the chain reaction will continue for as long as you need. I think we are extremely close
They haven't proven in physical evidence if no hazard waste build up or breakdown/meltdown won't happen, but in less chambers in secure places, could *AMP UP many other natural electric* conducters. As Solar, Wind, Aqua motion, Thermal etc.+helium use.
Inertial Containment is not a practical approach for a Fusion reactor. A Tokamak or Stelarator approach is needed for a constant reaction. Also the seawater bit is not quite right either . The current process requires both deuterium and tritium as far as I know and trituim is not so easily obtained. So they used Hundreds of Lasers bigger than 4 football fields to get Fusion in a tiny pellet . As much as I want this to work this seems like a side show.
Yeah. It's sure nice to have a side-show to watch while we wait for ITER to fire up! I also think it's possible to design a fusion reactor based on this technique, but the Tokamak is more likely to be economical.
A net energy gain is great but it is only the first step. Remember that energy they're using is not 100% efficient and more importantly the energy they are making is not 100% efficient. In fact if they use any kind of heat engine (eg steam turbine) efficiency ranges from 40% to 60% converting heat to electricity. So not only do fusion reactors have to show a net energy gain, they really have to produce well over double the input energy. Plus they have to offset the energy embedded in the build and the energy cost of producing and transporting deuterium.
All good, but are they saying electrical energy generated is greater than that applied? If they are only measuring heat energy produced, they still have a long way to go to get overunity as an electrical generator.
Unfortunately, this guy didn’t read the details. There was no net energy gain. This specific experiment consumed 300 megajoules of energy to power the lasers, all to produce 3, or a hundredth of the power it cost. The 2.05 megajoules input is just a recalculation, or estimate, based on how inefficient they’re claiming the lasers were.. And of course they’re asking for tons more money and equipment, to “really understand” what happened. When they can get the lasers 100x more efficient, we’ll see if it’s real and not just sleight-of-hand, but if you have to spend $300 to “make $3”, that’s not a “net gain”.. That’s a day at the casino, holding onto the $3 “winning” you left with, ignoring the $300 you came with.
Hopefully we'll reach matured goods that are viewed a art and unique to us individually, that end planned obsolescence. Which will lead to the use of nuclear diamond batteries.
Using 300 megajoules to create a 2 megajoules pulse to harvest 3 megajoules is a start but far far from delivering to users! Give it another 2 decades... Check the numbers yourself!
The Laser energy put in was about 2Mj, the energy out was about 3.1Mj. But the energy to power the plant other than laser was 3Mj so total energy in was about 5Mj and energy out was 3.1Mj. You need to know the Total in, Total out and not just the Laser or plasma energy in. Still a good try but way more needed to be done.
I have this same story since my childhood, reading Popular Science magazine. This whole story is nothing more than hype and white noise until someone files for a fusion reactor license with the NRC.
When we Master nuclear fusion we will be able to assemble not only designer molecules but designer atoms. With nuclear fusion we can traverse the cold abyss between the Stars! With nuclear fusion we will be able to have replicators like predicted through the most fabulous sci-fi ever Star Trek.
You need to make a distinction between Q and Q(total). Q is the energy gain factor for the reaction (running laser compared to energy released by fusion) - and the energy based on the energy to sustain the fusion reaction in the fusion reactor.
Q(total) is the total energy of the power station , and for comparison, a gas powered station uses 15% of its energy produced to run the power station (excitation of the stator + cooling, control systems)
The amount of energy for Q(total) compared to Q in a fusion power station is about 10 times - ie you need 10 times of energy of the laser to run the "power station". So you can see that a fusion powerstation based on this CURRENT technology would use energy to run as the additional containment energy, generation power and just general running is large.
This issue with Q and Q(total) has dogged the fusion publicity for years.
Not now
What do u think Sabine?
I'm watching this after the press conference. It looks like they put 2MJ of light energy in, and got 3MJ of energy as neutrons out, but it took at least 300MJ of electricity to power the lasers. I'm glad the scientists are being clear about the distinction. It's still a huge achievement, though, because the lasers were designed to have precise timing, not to be efficient. As a point of comparison, 300MJ is similar to the power stored in the battery for an electric car, whereas 2-3MJ is closer to the power stored in an electric bike.
💯Is that a research grant application I see in your hand ? We already have a working fusion reactor. It’s called The Sun. All we need is a solar panel to collect its almost infinite energy.
for this experiment, Q(total) was about 0.01 (300 MJ in, 3 MJ out)
They should have better explained the difference between target gain and total gain.
They still had an input of 300 MJ to obtain 3.15 MJ of output at the end.
Yeah, but they need funding so...
A 100:1 loser? No wonder the department of no energy showed up all excited.
The announcement is basically a fraud intended to impress the scientifically illiterate.
@@incognitotorpedo42 also it seems to me a political move by the Biden administration to gain approval from the scientifically illiterate...
Actually the 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy and the output was 3.15 megajoules. The lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target. So all in all it was cool however it was not a net gain when you look at energy consumed vs. energy produced.
There are 2 fusion energy milestones. The plasma creating more energy than it took to create the plasma, contain it, heat it and react it JUST DURING THE EXPERIMENT is what they did.
Its like starting a fire and having to heat the wood continuously with another source of heat. Like in a hige blast furnace and up until now, burning the wood actually COOLED the bast furnace. And now it slightly gets warmer
The other energy milestone is actually creating enough energy output to power something. They currently power the facility with many megawatts of power 24/7 but only run it for fractions of a second to seconds a day. And the trillion dollar facility cant be run for longer.
And How did they beat the first law of thermodynamics ?
i think this is another Money grab like most projects => not to free us but to enslave us more !
That's the true agenda while whiping out most of the global population !
Never forget it's money they have from all the working people in this world !
just like the plandemic => it fits there whole agenda 😲
@@kareldegreef3945 no laws were broken. The fusion of 2 hydrogen atoms to make nitrogen results in a slight reduction of mass. That mass conversion to energy is where the "extra" comes from.
For different reasons, i agree with you. In today's money the total expenditures on fusion COULD HAVE BEEN used to advance solar cell technology and implementation. With that money, the southwestern states could have been covered with hundreds of miles of solar panels. Roofs across the country could all be panels. And more than enough $ left over to have batteries storing excess for night use.
@@johnb7430 it's still energy => something happens to that like the small incident at LHC but with this => mmm => loooong way from being usefull ;-)
In Russia, an alternative energy source was created back in 2000, but they do not want to introduce itruclips.net/video/az7tZFG16t4/видео.html
After listening to the press conference it sounds like they were energy positive for about 5-seconds. And that on a single pellet. Next will be dropping a second pellet in there to keep it going even longer. Heat extraction as I understand it will be in the structure( walls ) of the device. Very exciting.
Excellent! They just brought the price of fusion down to about $1B/watt.
It is important to put this in perspective.
1. It has not been independently replicated and confirmed yet. A test of basic science.
2. It has yet to be proven scaleable. A bumblebee flies, sure, but that technology doesn't work for aircraft.
So let's be cautiously optimistic, and hope this isn't a dead end. And, keep it classified.
It is a milestone. But the figure is for the input power from the proton lasers… the trouble with that figure is that it ignores the fact that that about ten times that energy was used to create the output of the lasers. It’s a bit like saying that you get 200 miles to the gallon as you freewheel down Mount Everest but ignore how much petrol you used to get to the top! But it is a great breakthrough and lasers will get more efficient knowledge will improve but we are still looking at at least 1 order of magnitude to get to a power station!
there was a question later on the podium, how much of the "fuel" got burned. about 4%. not saying this means too much, but just to give an idea how much improvement is still possible in that compartement itself. at the end i believe it's going to be hard work together and in competition of various concepts and teams learning from eachother. in any case, i was excited Q > 1 is fantastic, total or not.
I liken it to using an industrial power boiler to warm up a cup of coffee. 400MJ input is not equal to 2MJ output.
Can't you elaborate? As I understood it the put 1x energy into the lasers and calculated 1.5x energy released by the reaction. Do you mean they actually put 10x energy into the lasers and had extremely bad lasers with an efficiency of 0.1? Those lasers sound extremely bad in that case because that's like 1/3 the efficiency of a petrol engine.
@@simonpettersson6788
I don’t know the exact setup… but imagine, , a series of transformers raising the voltage… loss on each step… then feed that energy into capacitors to store and release… loss on input and release, then the lasers are again in series raising the potential energy loss on each step. Then you have to cool the lot! So for the sake of argument all steps are 70% efficient if you take 200 as your starting figure and run it at 70% 7 times you get 31 as your output. And you can add switching, computing, lenses and accuracy to the list as well. Many small holes in the bucket!
@@simonpettersson6788 i had to research a bit too. Lasers in general have pretty low efficency. in this breakthrough, they only talk about the output energy of the laser. there are some real physical/quantum constraints with (current) lasers, 40%-ish efficency max. in the case of the NIF setup, in order to shoot the 2 Mj, they had to pump the laser up with 300 Mj. so, all-in-all, we are looking more at like 1% output... anyway, it's a nice step, it's more important than many other clickbaity science news, but it's just a step. one to build upon. Here the quote from an article i found: "Producing those beams at NIF involves a space nearly the size of a football field, filled with flashing lamps that excite the laser rods and propagate the beams. That alone takes 300 megajoules of energy, most of which is lost. Add to that layers of cooling systems and computers, and you quickly get an energy input that’s multiple orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced by fusion. So, step one for practical fusion, according to Cappelli, is using much more efficient lasers."
Does this mean I'll be able to power my DeLorean with banana peels and beer cans?
This was just a test. They have been succeeding during tests for years.
Nobody had been able to run one at ANY scale for ANY time.
What is the cost of fusion energy? Will it be able to compete with the low cost (and getting lower) of wind energy or solar power? Will fusion energy leave a bunch of hazardous waste material behind like nuclear power does? My current belief is that fusion energy will be too expensive to compete with cheaper alternatives.
Commercial fusion is still decades away but this is one of the biggest steps forward for fusion power so far.
Absolutely. "Small steps, Ellie, small steps .... "
Clean, abundant, reliable, cost competitive. That describes geothermal. By the time fusion is available, geothermal and wind, solar and batteries will have met our needs, IMO.
Added to my "Fusion solved !" playlist.
I’ve followed fusion for years and understand your enthusiasm, but I think this Is more very important evolution as opposed to a breakthrough. I think we will get there but as old hands say fusion is always 30 years away. Still, it is really good to hear you realistically appreciate the current limitations of renewables and how fusion is very probably is the best clean and limitless energy source.
Économic production will take more than that Imo. But there is a lot of company with différent itération and système, break even is at touching distance, différent serious système race for the 2030's just Hope one get there. This wasn't ever true. Now it is. Things change this adage may not be accurate anymore.
It's both a major breakthrough and a an important step for our evolution. They are not mutually exclusive
@@N1rOx I think that is correct. It can be both. Net energy gain from fusion is a huge breakthrough but it could still be decades or centuries to make it practical, if ever.
I agree. If it only used hydrogen it would be awesome. But it doesn't. The world doesn't have enough tritium and dyptherium to run 1 reactor for a week. It will require many fission plants to make what's needed. This isn't as it's being sold
@@kennedy6971 Interesting. That's way beyond my knowledge of fusion tech. I did work with tritium though in a genetics lab. Short half life and low energy, but bioavailable...not good. ;^)
I won't see commercial fusion in my lifetime and I don't plan to die anytime soon.
Important to understand that the net gain, is in regard to the energy used to heat the plasma. NOT the entire experiment. There's a way to go yet.
also you still need to ''harvest'' that energy produced and turn it into electricity.
@Morgan Angel
Indeed. ITER is an experiment, a former laser nuclear testing facility being used for fusion. The entire plant required 300 mega joules, 2 mega joules were put into the laser, and three came out.
The target was a BB sized diamond sphere with a miniscule straw attached to it, through which tritium fuel is injected. A working laser confinement reactor would require thousands of these, hard to engineer, diamond shells to be injected and blasted with an ultra powerful laser every day.
Quite how you would manufacture, in a cost-effective way, untold thousands of these microenginnering marvels that require highly expensive tritium is something I would ponder.
Deuterium doesn't work for laser confinement fusion, so you are stuck with tritium, which is immensely expensive. Tritium is also in short supply.
Something like General Fusions concept seems more viable to me.
I've heard that fusion will be economically viable if it generates a 10% net energy gain. This achieved 25% (ish). That's an incredible breakthrough which could finally make fusion energy generation a reality. Really exciting news.
Sort of. The lasers are currently less than 1% efficient, so they'd need to improve the efficiency there and/or make a much higher net energy gain. But this is still a tremendous achievement--the lasers are super precise and powerful, even if they weren't designed to be efficient. I'm looking forward to ITER having a net energy gain!
you read wrong, it's 10x the energy gain, not 10%. because there are tons of auxiliary systems that takes an awful lot of energy. even if you can extract a bit of heat from the plasma, you need to convert that to electricity.
No it didn't. It took 300MJ to produce the 2MJ laser shot. That was 100x the energy output, or 1% efficiency at best. This is non news.
It is still news because we now know that ignition with laser fusion is possible. We've solved half the problem by squashing some hydrogen so it fuses producing more energy than the energy squashing it. If we get a more efficient laser, we can solve the other half of the problem. Then maybe we can make it economical. The scientists were pretty clear about this at the press conference, but the media rarely broadcasts that part.
@@nathanbanks2354 Well, good luck getting a 100 fold increase in efficiency. What I did notice about the press conference was the amount of time dedicated to the (very thinly) veiled threat of nuclear readiness. Keep in mind this announcement came on the same day as news about weapons secrets and equipment leaked to a foreign entity. Problem is, if you want to "Speak softly and carry a big stick" it helps to actually have the stick. It's non news re: 'green energy'. Still decades away from anything practical (even if possible) and as others have pointed out, humanity has been capable of nuclear fusion since the 50's. Also connected to this is LLNL's ATS-2 supercomputer (aka 'Sierra') which has been running nuclear stockpile simulations since 2018. My guess would be high yield weapons, and winnable first strike scenarios.
I wonder if the scientists at LLL would yell _FIRE THE LASER !_ when they pressed the start button.
The laser ignition facility is about H bomb testing and validation. It is largely irrelevant as a power source as the device (worlds largest laser) is impractical.
Fusion bombs (hydrogen bombs) were created and tested more than 50 years ago. Come up with new conspiracy theories
@@enadegheeghaghe6369 NIF is about maintaining the nuclear bomb stockpile. The laser itself is the size of three football fields and produces an explosion similar in size to a commercial fire work from a piece of material the size of a pin head.
It is needed because H bombs deteriorate in storage and need periodic testing maintenance and upgrades. Full scale testing to check their performance was banned under the nuclear test ban treaty. Therefore the ignition facility allows tiny bits of H bombs to be blown up in fusion explosions to check performance.
Additionally, there is a holy grail for H bomb designers, fusion without the nuclear fission component (ie no plutonium). It is on boundary of possibility that such weapons could be designed. This would allow H bombs to be made smaller and lighter without the expense and complications associated with a plutonium trigger. NIF helps in this research by exploring the compression and heating needed to ignite tritium and other fusion precursor materials in a fusion reaction.
To quote Lawrence Livermore Laboratory website:
"NIF is a key element of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the reliability, security, and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without full-scale testing."
Check it out for yourself:
lasers.llnl.gov/about/what-is-nif
In summary, the NIF method of generating fusion while of interest, has no credible application to peaceful commercial fusion based power generation. It's not designed for that purpose.
This announcement (like similar previous similar announcements from LLL) is about securing on going funding from Congress to keep this very expensive facility operational.
Nah this shit is cool
I think I heard this claim many times. It depends on how they calculate the energy put in. The keep excluding input energy that should be included.
I am glad you're not American
Same as inflation and unemployment calculations. Phony inputs.
Embodied energy of the facility wasn’t taken in to account. Nor was the energy of creating the fuel.
All the deuterium in the world at any one time would sit easily in 10 litres of water. All the heavy water manufactured for medicine at any one time amounts to 1.5 litres and it has a half life
Hype aside, one thing the NIF did definitely improve on, is how much more power they’re getting vs. in 2021, when they first had “ignition”. They’ve gone from 1.3 mega joules output to 3.45 mega joules … almost triple.
Whatever can be said about milestones, that’s a lot of progress right there.
That's great for science, but this design is not even build to create electricity, that's not even the goal of this type of fusion
But still a major breakthrough
Last time they said that they have found bugs from Mars, even the president Bill Clinton join the show ..... turns out to be a hoax. 😀😃😄😁😆😅🤣😂🙃
Yup. It sounds like their measurements were more precise this time, so they're sure they had ignition, and the lasers were tuned better but the target wasn't quite as round.
Yes, 2 megajoules of impacting lasers created 3+ megajoules output. But the total system energy input was actually over 400 mega joules. For Q of 0.0085. And add in the total annual energy input of the facility vs the aggregated annualized output, Q is too small to discuss. And they dont even have concepts for the equipment needed for a continuous sustained reaction.
102¹⁸ joules or 102¹² megajoules. Thats the energy consumption in the USA (2021). So to meet that with fusion they only need a 12 order of magnitude increase.
Progress? Yes. But after 60 years of research, still showing the mega waste of resources that it has been, is and will be for the foreseeable future.
@@johnb7430 The energy input for the lasers is irrelevant as it's just an experiment. Commercial reactors will obviously use much more efficient lasers, especially as the ones NIF uses are really old.
They have a breakthrough every few years to keep the funding fresh. The less experience the suckers have with the scam, the more enthusiasm each breakthrough can engender. This is only possible because there's one born every minute. The Electric Viking is relatively young and enthusiastic. To the young, all things are new.
That net gain is deceptive to say the least. They spent 2.1 MJ of high order (low entropy therefore costly) laser energy to produce 2.5 MJ of thermal (low order- high entropy) energy. If you put it back, 2.5 MJ thermal produces about 1 MJ electricity which can be turned into maximum 0.5 MJ (probably a lot less for that high performance laser) of laser energy to put back into reaction.
It is actually much worse than that, it took 500MJ to fire the lasers !
yeah so....this is 20 years away from being a practical means to generate energy right? :D
That's a relief!
Oh my God, this is much more faster than I expected ever
For 60 years ,humanity has been 30 years close to fusion. I will be dead and still fusion will be 30 years to be done :(
Sam, kudos for your overall work on batteries, BEV's, etc, but if you're going to discuss this you should be CLEAR that this is INCREMENTAL progress, and using Q(scientific), NOT Q(practical) -- so it's ONLY measuring the DIRECT energy into the lasers for the experiment -- not all the overhead for things like fusion containment.
But obviously any practical power plant using fusion has to be solidly into Q(practical) to be economically viable. As you said, we're still (at least) decades away. The popular press is WOEFULLY bad about not pointing this out and just regurgitating the Q(scientific) as though it were Q(practical), apparently not knowing any different, which is why I point this out. (It's about misleading to draw more funding, which I DON'T like).
Sabine Hossenfelder, a very respectable physicist and teacher, does a good job explaining this here.
ruclips.net/video/LJ4W1g-6JiY/видео.html
i agree. he's overhyping. it's exciting news, just from a science standpoint alone. but it's just another puzzlepiece of knowledge and capabilities, one of thousands.
At Kill Devil Hill, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - the Wright Brothers achieved flight. The flight was 1m in altitude and the Wright Flyer only flew down the beach for a few hundred meters. The flight changed the world. Consider this fact - the net energy gain collects up the energy used from buildings that cross three football fields to direct energy into getting fusion to occur across the electrostrong barrier - if you're going to shrug away the event - just remember. This is the first test.
I think that is a good view of situation. It may not result in practical fusion power, ever, but it is a "proof of concept." It's like going Mach 1, for the first time. In a wind, solar, battery world, it is likely way too expensive and dangerous, but a huge scientific achievement, none the less.
Correction, the real first flight was Whitehead’s one, ending in a crash. It was using a self made steam engine. The Wright brothers did their best to suppress this historical event by blackmailing the Smithsonian to delete Whitehead’s flight in order to get the kitty hawk for the museum.
It’s a promising result, but it lasted 5-seconds and was enough energy to heat about 10 gallons of water.
It’s at least one decade, if not two decades away from powering a single house for one day.
Could be wrong. Hope I’m wrong.
@@JohnBreezy22 It's more important for science than anything that will ever be practical. Wind - solar - batteries will be way more cost effective. I prefer the free fusion reactor in the sky.
The proibleem is that it still doesn't produce useful amounts of energy, and required a massive and expensive set of lasers. Every step towards producing useful amounts of fusion energy has required ever larger and more expensive reactors. Moreover, this laser method requires precisiion manufacture of tiny fuel pellets, making the fuel expensive. It will be too expensive to be competitive with renewables, or even fission reactors. It may find some use in "cost is no objection" applications, but it won't solve our energy needs.
Great lab experiment but we all know that experiments are easy compared to implementation.
Im still extremely skeptical of this method of fusion EVER being commercially afordable. That laser bank will be ridiculously expensive to build and operate at the shot frequency a commercial reactor requires. Ok for testing nuclear weapons as military doesn't care about cost, but otherwise ... This sort of presser just enables the military to charge the cost of their test facility to energy research instead of weapons.
While this accomplishment is the milestone that they have been working toward for over 25 years, where the energy produced is greater than the laser energy used to produce it. However to produce that laser energy takes about 10 times the electrical power.
I have visited the NIF (National Iginition Facility) several years ago, an interesting fact about it is that they have to store up energy in huge capaction banks and then release it all at once in an extreemly short pluse, to power the lasers, during this pluse the energy going to these lasers exceeds the entire electrial energy being used in the USA at the same time.
The 2.05 input is just an estimate, or recalculation based on how inefficient they’re claiming the lasers were. They’re ignoring nearly 300 megajoules of the energy cost “lost” due to inefficiencies they’re explaining away. It’s most likely that calculation that’s wrong. When they’re trying to rationalize away around 300 megajoules of the input though, it’d be easy to lose track of 0.95 of a single megajoule. Until they’re no longer pumping in (and losing) 100 times the energy they’re getting out of this, there’s no way to prove there’s any net energy gain, at all.
@@aalvarez2914 Yes, NIF says the lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to target and got 3.15 megajoules out; however, the lasers consumed 322 megajoules in the process...so overall it was a net loss...if you read the fine print. 😂
Two things seems to make this fusion shot especially interesting. One is that the holram was less peefectly shaped than previously created and they were able to compensate by changing the relative intensity between the 192 different beams. If true, lower tolerances means cheaper fuel assemblies, which means more experiments, total.
The other thing, which is in all.the hype, is ignition. But I've yet to have anyone express what ignition means, and it's important. It means that initial fusion reactions put out enough energy to create more fusion reaction, which created further reactions, etc. In other words, more fuel was fused than can be accounted for by the laser-energy input. The reactions were self-sustaining... for a few trillionths.of a second.
Regardless, ignition is ignition and if the NIF can reproduce this shot it means we genuinely are closer to a fusion future bc it would mean loads of studies of actual fusion in a bottle.
If they can't reproduce the shot.... they made a mark in the history book, but that's about it.
....
Fingers crossed.
@Dyne's Lair It took me a bit of thinking on this one.
Assuming I understand correctly, there are generally two reasons a fusion power plant is large.
In the case of magnetic confinement, like ITER or W9, larger more powerful magnetic fields constrain the movement of changed particles (the nuclear fuel) is constrained to smaller "gyro-radii" and so have less value to move through. This makes them easier targets. But bigger fields need higher electrical power, needing larger coils for any given material. Even so, an ion will jump from one Flux line to another and slowly "walk" away from the middle, and eventually being lost to the chamber walls. This means the reaction chamber has to have a certain volume, dependant on field strength, to allow enough walking steps before being lost to give them enough time to fuse instead. So now you *really* need a big reaction chamber and a *really* big electro magnet.
In the case of enertial confinement, like NIF or HIF (not made yet but designed) you need a large enough facility to create enough Flux (photons for the first, ions for the second) to compress the material hard and fast enough to make the fuel fuse.
In neither case is it about accuracy or precision. If you can make a very high magnetic field in a very small space without blowing things up, you could make a tokamok that would fit in your arms. In a way, that what focus fusors and z-pinch machines are trying to do with their collapsing electric fields.
In the same way, if you could fit an election accelerator on a microchip, you might be able to make an inertial confinement fusor (like the NIF but with electrons) small enough to fit in a car. Indeed, I believe that is one reason there's an international committee that has been trying to make just such an electronic accelerator and succeeded just last year... or was it the year before? I forget.
Regardless, attempts continue to make fusion small bc everyone understands the ideal fusion reactor is the size of a refrigerator or smaller.
Fusion in space is the ultimate game changer goal.
NIF delivered 3.15 megajoules from about 2 megajoules of input energy (so Q=1.5, roughly) in a single pulse. No mention of pulse repetition rate or damage/repairs necessary to fire again. By comparison, the Culham Fusion Lab JET experiment in the UK produced 59 megajoule of continuous power for a five second test (so almost 11 megawatts) - although its Q ratio is at best only 0.67 (less than the 1.0 break even point). Its successor, ITER (in France), is more likely to produce a working fusion reactor than the Livermore NIF, in my opinion, and some as yet unseen, dark horse may beat both. Interesting news, though.
I agree completely....we already have fusion bombs that achieve a Q greater than 1... The actual breakthrough will be when we achieve a long term Q greater than 1 and the energy needed to contain, recover AND convert to electricity the energy of the output of the reactor is put into the equation. I don't see this as anything more that a Federally funded lab putting out headlines in an effort to keep their funding.
When you discuss Q ratios and don't SPECIFY if it's scientific or practical (or experimental vs. total), it's MEANINGLESS and it can be VERY misleading.
This is ONLY the DIRECT energy into the lasers. So what? All the overhead like containment, etc. still takes a LOT of energy. This is creeping forward, but still LIGHT YEARS away. The arm waving is all about trying to attract funding, and the media is mostly too stupid to point out that it's NOT Q(practical) they're talking about in such announcements.
Does it really matter which country does it as it long as it gets done?
@@rogergeyer9851 There is NO NEED TO SHOUT. Anyone interested can easily look up the relevant information (Livermore isn't holding back and nor is Culham) so please try not to make (mostly) pointless remarks in the future.
@@rogergeyer9851 They were very clear that this was scientific--it took over 300MJ of electrical energy to power the laser. (The lasers were designed to be precisely timed & powerful, not efficient.) However without this test, it would be difficult to know if it's even possible to have inertial confinement using lasers. They were also saying that JET/ITER was further ahead even though they got ignition first.
Super job to the Ignition Lab and kudos to Sam for presenting this video. Unfortunately any technology of this type is totally unacceptable to the public. I have direct experience in this. As a kid engineer I worked for a World Class energy company who made a proposal to the San Diego CA community to site a completely safe, produce nearly free electricity and no hazardous components or after effects. The project would be funded without public funds and was to be located just South of Del Mar California. San Diego County would have become a net exporter of electricity. As these things go before the first shovel into the ground the project had to be presented to the voters. The result was an overwhelming NO!!.
California has not opened a new power station of any kind since 1979 regardless of technology used. The voting public is terrified of these things because there is always a radical response and predictions of nuclear fallout, nuclear bombs, widespread cancer and Armageddon. Ignorance will prevail.
Nuclear power in Australia has been a complete bust. There is one station, Lucas Heights, Sydney, but is not used to produce electrical power, but instead is used to produce medical radioisotopes. So the same situation exists there. I suggest that if a credible organization offered to build Nuclear Fusion power plants in Australia, for free, it would get an overwhelming NO!!!! vote. And wide resistance.
Thanks to everyone here for the nice comments about Nuclear ( Fusion ) Power. Think hard would you, or your Community, vote to allow one to be sited near you? I suggest NO!
www.ga.com/
We'll articulated!
Your mistake was California. Anywhere else, people aren't batshit crazy...
Lots of clean, and hopefully not abandoned energy.
Seriously, thou, I'm super excited too that someone reached fusion Q>1 in my lifetime! Some faith in humanity restored
Hi, if you look closely they are talking about the power gain of the plasma alone, and that for a fraction of a second. What a power station needs to do is generate more power than it receives, and do it 24/7. The power losses due to steam generation and then electricity generation are 40% at best. The power used by all the other kit it significant. So in reality they have made a good step forward, but are way, way short of making a useful power station. Strangely, the scientist know this well, but insist on reporting the plasma efficiency alone, which is at the least misleading.
You explain this very well Sam Kudos to you and thanks for sharing.
Glad you enjoyed it!
“In the year 2525. If man is still alive.”
Isnt a 0.5kwh laser a pretty expensive equipement to use to get a output surplus of 0.1kwh....
Oh please, this isnt the first time there has been an energy gain recorded. Will hold back my belief for a scaled up demonstration.
I hope someone is keeping a log of Viking game changers. I’ve lost track.
Not just a gamechanger, but a worldchanger. In this case, it's true, but not quite yet. It's a huge step forward, through a barrier that has frustrated nuclear fusion scientists and engineers for about 40 years. Now, we have at least one approach that could be generating clean electricity 24/7/365, like our sun does, within 10 or 20 years. In the meantime, the best way to tap this inexhaustible source of clean energy is using and further improving the converters we already have, namely solar panels and wind turbines, along with battery banks that will also be needed along with the future baseload fusion powerplants.
LOL Good one!
This was interesting...2.05 megajoules delivered to the target and 3.15 megajoules produced. However, one thing missing from the story...the 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy ...so all in all there was still a net loss.
Is it a net positive for TOTAL energy input or just when considering the laser power?
Net positive for total e. input is likely 30-50 years away. This is just for the laser. So this is nothing. They are inching forward.
@@mrthegrievous i hope that's an overly pessimistic estimate. my hope is for a governments as well as capitalist markets race to start, then all bets are off.
@@CodepageNet is a running joke between scientists, commercial nuclear fusion is 20 years away, amd it alway be 20 years away 😂😂
Sounds great, but even if you achieve a 20% gain in energy out, how long will the equipment stand up before needing replacement? Will the replacement and maintenance costs keep it from being practical?
only one way to find out :-) i for one am pretty certain, all of those steps can be solved. but it's even possible, that at the end it's "just" another means of producing energy, along other hopefully clean sources.
just a tiny hydrogen bomb， but it is needed for presidential election.
It's cool to see my old hometown making the news. Livermore is a really cool place and has about 40 wineries plus a bunch of science geeks running around. It's in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay area and very close to Silicon Valley. The national ignition facility at LLNL is a very cool science experiment. However, I think TAE, Commonwealth fusion, first light fusion, or general fusion will be the people that achieve engineering break even estimated to be around q equal to or greater than 5. The cool thing about TAE is that they do not rely on tritium and have a direct way of capturing the resulting energy. I think it is less of a science experiment and more of a practical solution.
How do they directly capture the Energy?
Problem is what fuel being used , many fuels talked about for fusion are limited , forms of hydrogen that are very scarce
They used the typical Deuterium/Tritium blend. It's not the only fuel they use for experiments, but it's the one used when they're trying to get ignition. The Tritium would have to be produced from a lithium blanket that captures the excess neutrons from the fusion reaction. Currently, Tritium is most often produced in heavy water reactors like the CANDU. Deuterium can be harvested from water, which has been done for decades for how heavy water reactors.
Wow!
I think this is one of those 0 vs 1 moments that Peter Thiel talks about. As long as we have more energy out than in from the process, even a scrap, it proves it's possible, and we just hit the '1' case. Mental and financial capital will flow towards this technology rapidly, because all of human civilisation is predicated on our ability to harness energy - indeed.. all of life is.
This not the essence of the hand-off between science and engineering. Once a process goes from being scientifically possible to understood well enough to be demonstrated reliably in the real world, it becomes an engineering problem. And engineers (I speak as one in an unrelated field) have pride in the fact that once something is a 'mere' engineering problem... then success will come quickly. The minds of engineers are tuned to find and optimise pragmatic solutions in a way that never stops surprising those outside of the field.
exactly, it could be a tipping point. i'm well aware of all the caveats. but the potential price is enormous. each failed startup will inch us closer. in addition, there's tremendeous national interest in this.
Every decade there is a "breakthrough" in fusion. Then nothing happens. This time it's slightly more promising but the road from theoretical to commercial is still decades away.
i'd say, the breakthroughs are heating up lately (no pun intended). i wouldn't be surprised if A.I./ML would actually bring us there.
@@CodepageNet is a running joke between scientists, commercial nuclear fusion is 20 years away, amd it alway be 20 years away 😂😂
"Clean, Abandoned, Reliable, Competitive" energy. LOL Thanks for reporting this great news.
You'll pardon me, Sam, if I temper my excitement somewhat. I hope you're right and that this signals a truly major breakthrough. It's just that I've seen countless "breakthrough" videos on fusion energy, each one glacially creeping towards the goal of sustained net positive energy, and beyond that, of being able to mass produce a significant number of such reactors which will work as advertised.
You really just don't understand.
Sam did a fantastic job explaining, thank you 🇺🇸
Glad you enjoyed it
How does this affect the petrodollar
It’s an interesting energy source. First, Let’s focus (pun intended) on the fusion taking place 150,000,000 kilometers away. That will give us all the energy we can use at the lowest price to both pocketbook and the environment. It’s difficult to name anything useful to humankind coming out of the Lawrence Livermore Labs in the past 70 years. Most of their work has been to improve the USA’s capacity for death and destruction. Whatever they achieve regarding fusion reactions they will try to make into a weapon. Depend on it. It’s in their mission statement.
I don't know how this technology really works, they say it use the most powerful lasers but how are they containing the reaction. I know that the problem with ITER and other Tokamak reactors is the configuration of magnetic fields to contain the generated plasma, only one of the magnets takes more than 5 years to manufacture and its costs are very high, which is why I think the reaction using magnetic fields to create plasma is far from commercial implementation. The technology is different and that is the point of such an announcement, or are we at the same juncture.
“ there’s a starman waiting in the sky” i think he just blew my mind.🌠
Don't get carried away! While there was a 'net' energy gain, overall, energy was lost. Still not there yet.
Buddy that's like saying "yes we can make a nuclear bomb but it's very small, so let's just abandon it." . Of course if you can't replicate this then that's a problem
I was wondering too... if they are simply measuring the electrical energy in and out? If so, can be misleading. I read that power plants have about 10% loss for transmission lines to the customer. Plus, maintenance/operating costs could require the input/output ratio to be even higher to truly 'break even'.
@@Mako2401 Yes, nuclear fusion with an overall energy gain will happen, it is merely of time. There is however, the cost of these fusion generators to be taken into account, and that may be far more important.
once the first large scale fusion plant comes online, i expect a lot of fission plants being developed as well. just because of the huge lack of tritium on earth. i think theres only about 20kg worth. the fuel used in this net gain fusion reactor was deuterium and tritium. thankfully, a waste by product of fission reactors is Tritium. the fusion reactor will be dependent on fission just for fuel. luckily we also have safer gen iv uranium reactors and msr thorium reactors to replace the worlds old fission reactors, that relies on incredibly high pressure water cooled reactors.
Neutron producing fusion cycles like deuterium-tritium can be used to breed further tritium from lithium-6. This is infact how it is made in fission reactors and thermonuclear weapons.
I believe ITER will be testing a molten lithium neutron absorption blanket for shielding and tritium breeding.
Dunno if they have plans to harvest the tritium yet.
If we ever make D-T fusion practical enough to commercialize, the tritium supply won't be an issue.
A Science magazine story says that tritium is as expensive as gem diamonds.
"At $30,000 per gram, it’s almost as precious as a diamond." - Science magazine
Well done Sam you put this announcement up nearly 2 hours before I got notified that the BBC in the UK had put it on their website.
Last time they said that they have found bugs from Mars, even the president Bill Clinton join the show ..... turns out to be a hoax. 😀😃😄😁😆😅🤣😂🙃
This breakthrough whilst significant does not produce net usable energy as although the energy produced is greater than the energy used to produce that output it does not take into account the energy to run the actual plant eg. The cooling systems, Super computing, ancillary devices etc. ITER in France is aiming to produce 500MW from 50MW will not produce enough to run the plant that makes it.
Sabine Hossenfelder on her channel has a good explanation for this
While net energy gain is an important hurdle to overcome, it is not a key metric for being economic viable. Not to talk about being comparable to other energy sources. I guess that could quite take some time if ever achieved.
That's just it, you have to sell it. Nuclear FISSION isn't cost competitive with renewables plus storage now. Fusion might be cleaner, but would it be cheaper?
@@jamesvandamme7786 if it cost billions to build the reactor and the bet gain is about the same as a solar farm that cost millions... not very profitable.
@@morganangel340 Don't forget that if it takes 20 years to build - and a few more to get the bugs out of it - your billions in loans will be accruing interest and you're producing no income.
@@morganangel340 Looking how much most modern fission reactors cost i'd imagine that fusion reactor is a lot more expensive... we're talking about tens of billions if not hundreds.
Even if there had been a net energy gain it's still only a technology for boiling water to run a steam engine. So you still need to convert that into electricity where 60% of the primary energy is lost, as in all thermal power plants. But LLNL is mainly a weapons lab where the energy research is a side hustle.
There's a term, EROEI, energy returned on energy invested. There's a great lecture by Charles Hall about it. 20% return for something as complex as fusion reactors is not scalable. To give you an idea the supergiant oilfields in east Texas of the 1900's returned 100-200 barrels of oil for 1 barrel of input. That made the US industrialization take off in the 20th century
What welcome news, The holy grail for sustainable human life.
Appreciate your enthusiasm, but I've heard about "breakthroughs" since the 1990s. So color me skeptical. I believe in the first fusion reactors once they actually connect to the power grid.
Yep, yep. Taking all the wasted energy into count also I just guess that we are still clearly on the negative side when talking about total energy. We are coming closer but we aren't there yet. IMO
is a running joke between scientists, commercial nuclear fusion is 20 years away, and it alway be 20 years away 😂😂
A win for America and its friends, Alliances 🇺🇸
Before Elon Musk was Annie Easley human computer NASA battery technology, Satellite, hybrid vehicles rockets technology
Is it true? I've been researching but hard to figure out if it's legit
it's legit. but it's not like a completely unexpected event from this lab. and it's not something that changes everything. it's just a nice step, again showing us a glimpse of what might be possible in the future. it's mostly good for "we can do it, let's go!!". still 1-x decades away from productive.
@Bert Rich 2 concerns ...us the energy production sustainable? Seems like maybe the best near term use case would be to boost efficiency of a standard nuclear plant.
Also concerning that during the announcement they talked more about defense than energy.
Massive breakthrough - so now it'll be closer to achieve commercially in another 30+ years
is a running joke between scientists, commercial nuclear fusion is 20 years away, amd it alway be 20 years away 😂😂
The US says this every few years, so don't get too excited about it.
EV: I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment; To say this is a big deal would be the understatement of the century.
Don't get carried away they still have a long way to go
this is a very optimistic news
for our grandchildren
Fusion will never be cheaper than Molten Salt Reactors. Don't believe what they're telling you about net energy gain, because they don't include all of the energy used for the whole system, they only look at the amount of energy in the Lasers.
However it's done, it's going to be massively more complex than a similar MSR which is as efficient and actually burns waste fuel from existing reactors.
Don't assume it's going to be certain that it will ever be economic proposition. MSRs are very simple and much easier to build. How is Fusion ever going to compete?
Sounds like a foothold that promises exponential growth in the right direction, exponentially quickening what we have come to know of the work in this field up to now.
We already have access to a huge, free, fusion reactor, our sun. We just have to collect the power.
It will all come down to economic math. Cost of an actual facility weighed with how much energy produced. The theoretical benefits are promising. It is engineering it at good cost.
You have to be kidding! :O According to Wikipedia and other source, we just beat science with a current estimated Q=1,39 THIS IS A BREAKTHROUGH BOYS, YA YEET!!! Now the only thing that remain is to get that efficiency higher as we make new improvement on the subject
positive result means the chain reaction could continue relying on the heat created by itself . in other word it may not need external heat or laser beams. lasser beam would only ignite it . once ignited the chain reaction will continue for as long as you need. I think we are extremely close
They haven't proven in physical evidence if no hazard waste build up or breakdown/meltdown won't happen, but in less chambers in secure places, could *AMP UP many other natural electric* conducters. As Solar, Wind, Aqua motion, Thermal etc.+helium use.
Inertial Containment is not a practical approach for a Fusion reactor. A Tokamak or Stelarator approach is needed for a constant reaction. Also the seawater bit is not quite right either . The current process requires both deuterium and tritium as far as I know and trituim is not so easily obtained. So they used Hundreds of Lasers bigger than 4 football fields to get Fusion in a tiny pellet . As much as I want this to work this seems like a side show.
Helium 3 from the moon is all that will be needed!
Yeah. It's sure nice to have a side-show to watch while we wait for ITER to fire up! I also think it's possible to design a fusion reactor based on this technique, but the Tokamak is more likely to be economical.
Come on people, STOP FUSION NOW, STOP FUSION NOW!!
A net energy gain is great but it is only the first step. Remember that energy they're using is not 100% efficient and more importantly the energy they are making is not 100% efficient. In fact if they use any kind of heat engine (eg steam turbine) efficiency ranges from 40% to 60% converting heat to electricity. So not only do fusion reactors have to show a net energy gain, they really have to produce well over double the input energy. Plus they have to offset the energy embedded in the build and the energy cost of producing and transporting deuterium.
All good, but are they saying electrical energy generated is greater than that applied? If they are only measuring heat energy produced, they still have a long way to go to get overunity as an electrical generator.
Unfortunately, this guy didn’t read the details. There was no net energy gain. This specific experiment consumed 300 megajoules of energy to power the lasers, all to produce 3, or a hundredth of the power it cost. The 2.05 megajoules input is just a recalculation, or estimate, based on how inefficient they’re claiming the lasers were.. And of course they’re asking for tons more money and equipment, to “really understand” what happened. When they can get the lasers 100x more efficient, we’ll see if it’s real and not just sleight-of-hand, but if you have to spend $300 to “make $3”, that’s not a “net gain”.. That’s a day at the casino, holding onto the $3 “winning” you left with, ignoring the $300 you came with.
I hope this means light sabers and laser guns.
This is like designing a wing of the right shape, at the right speed, that can lift itself. It is not a fleet of 787s.
Hopefully we'll reach matured goods that are viewed a art and unique to us individually, that end planned obsolescence. Which will lead to the use of nuclear diamond batteries.
"All that glisters is not Gold"
Sam and team… what a great presentation of this complex topic… my hat is off to you all for your excellent work. Thank you.
Using 300 megajoules to create a 2 megajoules pulse to harvest 3 megajoules is a start but far far from delivering to users! Give it another 2 decades...
Check the numbers yourself!
funny how every five years we make a ""fusion breakthrough"" making the tech available in two.
is a running joke between scientists, commercial nuclear fusion is 20 years away, amd it alway be 20 years away 😂😂
"A star in a jar" #fusion ⭐
The Laser energy put in was about 2Mj, the energy out was about 3.1Mj. But the energy to power the plant other than laser was 3Mj so total energy in was about 5Mj and energy out was 3.1Mj. You need to know the Total in, Total out and not just the Laser or plasma energy in. Still a good try but way more needed to be done.
My error the energy to power the plant other than just laser was 300Mj so energy in was 305Mj so not a massive breakthrough.
How many times I heard this before...
This should be state owned, no private company must have access to this
Great video, very informative. Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it!
always good to listen to your vlogs...
I have this same story since my childhood, reading Popular Science magazine.
This whole story is nothing more than hype and white noise until someone files for a fusion reactor license with the NRC.
Our bimbo energy secretary tried to upload a RUclips video announcing our “great accomplishment” of one billionth of a second of extra energy.
When we Master nuclear fusion we will be able to assemble not only designer molecules but designer atoms. With nuclear fusion we can traverse the cold abyss between the Stars!
With nuclear fusion we will be able to have replicators like predicted through the most fabulous sci-fi ever Star Trek.