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votes
What's the thinking out there on the fusion news that has been coming out?
Link information
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- Title
- US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving 'ignition' over and over
- Published
- Dec 15 2023
- Word count
- 1083 words
The article seems to gloss over the fact that none of the reactions it mentions actually generated more usable electricity than they consumed.
The laser used to generate the current record required an energy input higher than the output of the resulting fusion reaction. The fusion reaction was real, with a real value of Q > 1, it just wasn’t internally self-sustaining.
In other words, when they got the energy to the plasma, they created genuine fusion. They just can’t direct the energy input in a specific enough way for this to be economically viable. We have not achieved ignition.
I would be surprised if we made any major progress here before ITER’s tokamak goes live in ~2035.
My understanding is that if they have been trying to start a car, they can get engine noises at this point, they can do it reliably, and that's a big step, but we are no where close to the engine turning over?
Seems that there has been a recent breakthrough in fusion reactions putting out more energy than they take in. There's a lot of hype and exaggeration that comes along with popular science reporting, so I thought I'd check to see which end of the spectrum this lands on.
My very limited understanding is it’s questionable if any of this can scale and is still in extremely specific and short conditions
The Sun is a good example of fusion at scale.
With a big enough tokamak, achieving a higher energy gain factor becomes more realistic. There are other potentially viable methods too.
For reference, the entire cost of ITER is about $5.6 billion. As far as international partnerships to generate infinite energy (!) go, that’s actually not very much money. The US government allocates about $1.4 billion/yr to fusion research, an amount that has increased with the recent breakthrough at NIF.
Unscientifically, we could probably figure it out with high hundreds of billions or low trillions of dollars suitably appropriated within the next 25 years. Funding is slowly being prioritized for fusion research, it’s just an enormously complicated set of technical problems.