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Finally Fusion? Well, Not Quite
There’s a paywalled Financial Times story linked on Instapundit that appears to claim that scientists have finally achieved a net gain in energy during a fusion reactor experiment. I’m not an FT subscriber, so I can’t read the article, and the summary news story (also linked by Instapundit) doesn’t contain a lot of details.
I’m assuming the reactor was of the inertial confined design, in which lasers are directed from many different angles at a small pellet containing deuterium or tritium (i.e., “heavy hydrogen”), with the rapid vaporization of the pellet’s walls creating a roughly spherical shock wave that compresses and heats the hydrogen atoms to a point at which their nuclei fuse — the fusion reaction.
What the story (as summarized) claims is that the energy produced by the reaction was about 20% greater than the energy of the lasers used to trigger the reaction. This is characterized, in the summary article, as a “net gain in energy.”
Well, yes and no. It’s a net gain if one is comparing the energy of the lasers to the total energy released by the fusion reaction.
However, it isn’t truly a net gain in a meaningful sense for at least two reasons.
First, the actual energy put into the system is considerably greater than the 2.1 megajoules of energy delivered by the lasers: even with the most modern high-efficiency lasers, the true energy input is like to be several times that number. With a claimed energy output of the fusion reaction of 2.5 megajoules, it’s certain that far more energy was consumed than was produced.
Secondly, it isn’t clear from the summary article (though the FT report might contain details) just how the energy of the fusion reaction was calculated. If it’s a measure of energy actually extracted in a usable form (e.g., as contained heat or as electricity), then the 2.5-megajoule figure may be valid. But if, as is more likely, it’s an extrapolation based on discrete samples of the radiation produced by the reaction, it’s a safe bet that the energy that can be captured and converted into a useable form is less than the 2.5 megajoules given losses in the confinement system and inefficiencies in the conversion process.
(After all, we know how to create a net excess of energy in a fusion reaction. We demonstrated that 70 years ago last month. By the way, it’s a widely held belief that the bathing suit was named after the site of the first hydrogen bomb detonation, but that’s incorrect: The first hydrogen bomb was detonated a couple of hundred miles away from the established Bikini Atoll test site — and six years after Louis Réard coined the name for his skimpy gift to mankind.)
Yes, achieving a fusion reaction that yields a total energy output that exceeds the immediate energy input and that does it without vaporizing a South Pacific island is a milestone. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory people deserve their well-earned pat on the back.
But we are a very long way from actually getting as much out as we’re putting in. Reporters are ignoring the true cost of this nuclear transaction, focusing only on one moment in a long and complex process.
Affordable nuclear fusion remains, as ever, just 50 years away.
Published in Science & Technology
Yes, and a certain amount of energy goes into producing the fuel pellet, and… annndddd… There is a lot more to it. Even before you get into losses from transforming one type of energy to another.
Let’s not think about it too much until we hear about the Clintons trying to buy up all the stock of Dilithium One so they can sell them to Russia for campaign funds.
I read the story and steeled myself for the inevitable yes but.
We can hope, though, no? And keep pushing?
There’s another dimension to this, which I read about a few years ago. It’s been suggested that there’s a strategic misrepresentation of yield going on here, probably motivated by an effort to secure funding by portraying the technology as more advanced than it really is.
Something similar goes on in wind and solar, with yields routinely overstated to justify big projects. Actual power production from such sites often runs well under half of the nominal power generation claimed for the site when the site is proposed and funded.
I like the thought of fusion, but suspect that the barriers are truly enormous. Practical fusion is hard. It requires creating otherworldly conditions and either sustaining them for prolonged periods (magnetic containment) or reproducing them in a continuous series of carefully contained laser-driven explosions.
In contrast, fission is a piece of cake. We should pat the fusion guys on their heads, tell them they’re doing a great job, and then give most of their funding to the fission guys so we can get cheap electricity before I’m too old to enjoy it.
Fusion may well be of far more use in space than here, since concentrated light-weight fuel is much more useful in space, and it doesn’t matter as much if it takes a lot of energy to produce it in the first place in some facility that might easily be fission-powered.
We have, in every way we can measure, limitless energy at low prices already. Between coal, oil, natural gas, and fission, mankind has as much energy, at pennies per kwH, as we could possibly want.
We just refuse to use it. We put up barriers to extracting and efficiently using all of the above. And in so doing, we make life harder and more expensive for everyone in the developed world, while dooming the undeveloped world to abject poverty and an early and miserable grave from the particulates that are created when burning wood or dung indoors just to keep warm. It is a crime against humanity.
CO2 is plant food. Power should be produced as cleanly from fuel sources as can reasonably be achieved in terms of other pollutants. The net benefit to mankind and the planet from burning those fuel sources for energy are enormous. Why the planet? Because enhanced CO2 production is providing an enormous boost to the sum total of life on earth!
Green areas are the areas in which the vegetation has increased since 1982, massively in some areas. Infografic: Boston University
But at least we have Suddenly Salad.
If we put all our amazing diversity to work on fusion, we could at last conquer it. Let’s put Gen. Mark (or is it Mildred?) Milley in charge of it. Sam Brinton could be his deputy, if he can take time off from stealing women’s luggage; and Brittney Griner could blow her pot smoke over the whole thing while Chelsea Manning and Caitlyn Jenner work their magic. We’ll have nuclear fusion in no time!
Scientific American has been promising “fusion in ten years” for most of my life.
I did my Master’s thesis on fusion.
In addition, I wrote a short essay for one class titled “30 Years: The Commercial Fusion Constant”. My argument was that for the previous 20 years, the “experts” predicted we would have a working commercial fusion power plant in 30 years. Got an A . . .
Like Brasil and Africa. The future, and always will be.
Geopolitics, inflation, asset bubbles. I have a feeling people aren’t going to give a damn about the downside of coal pretty soon.
This post and comments have been far more informative than anything I’ve seen from the press this morning.
Thanks!
Fusion is far to unprofitable for those in power. There will always be yes buts.
And soccer.
Everybody goes on and on about natural gas. When you have to manage any logistical or geopolitical issues, coal and nuclear are a lot better because you can just pile up what you need right at the site. You don’t have any of that stupidity they went through in Texas a couple of winters ago.
Coal plants failed then too. It’s not only about the fuel supply.
This is really long, so I get why people don’t want to watch it. It’s really depressing about how they shouldn’t be forcing electric cars right now. This is going to cause all kinds of grief.
Explain.
Equipment can stop working in extreme cold even if you have fuel for it. Which is actually what happened with most of the natural gas plants that failed too: the natural gas didn’t freeze, the equipment that handles it did, and some of the power-generating equipment itself too. And frozen coal piles aren’t all that easy to use either.
For example:
https://acee.princeton.edu/acee-news/andlinger-center-speaks-the-texas-freeze-and-widespread-energy-system-failures/
Fair enough.
Coal and nuke still have lower logistical complications than natural gas.
Yes. However, gas has enormous virtue, not the least being its versatility, cleanliness, and abundance. What happened to gas in Texas doesn’t happen in northern places where supply lines are hardened for weather. That’s an unnecessary expense in Texas — until it isn’t. Perhaps the best lesson to take away from the Lone Star State’s transient energy crisis is that it’s worth hardening more of the gas lines for that once-in-a-century cold snap.
The local environmental lobbyist was trying to tell me that, that was a once a decade cold snap. I have no idea. I thought it was like 30 years or something. I don’t see how you can screw something like that up. Insurance companies can’t survive without that type of analysis.
And maybe not bothering at all with windmills, which had even worse problems in that time.
I’ve read there were similar problems during a 2011 event, although there probably weren’t many windmills affected that time.
Cost cutting and just-in-time inventories mean that companies don’t harden their facilities for 30 year events or store supplies. CEOs hope it won’t come while they are in charge. But it does come on someone’s watch.
I’ve seen tons of videos about this. It’s inflationary to go back to a more sensible, less risky policy.
But don’t they WANT – even NEED – inflation? So they should be all for it!
Who are you talking about? The utilities want regulated profits not inflation. The consumer doesn’t want inflation. The governments want inflation, but that’s a pretty complicated thing to do deliberately.
The consumers are getting inflation anyway, because of Biden energy “policies” etc. Which are deliberate.
I’m talking about changes in supply chain management. The government has easier ways to create inflation.
Fusion is the energy of the future. And it always will be.
More seriously, I hope it is possible. If it is, it will unlock the stars in ways nothing else really can.