Nuclear fusion as pearly energy froth

https://web.archive.org/web/20150719060659/http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-fusion-power/

will this holde promise?

you mean the announcement this week? some of the immediate responses to it were "eh this is not that exciting' but I kind of don't think they'd have a massive conference about it the way they are if it wasn't. I don't know how long and much work it will take to replicate the results and scale them but if this is true then yes it appears to hold promise

as i always tell my physics students, if god had wanted humans to make use of nuclear fusion, he’d have hung a bunch of giant fusion reactor in the sky

It's like god's sick joke to make peak oil, nuclear fusion, and irreversible catastrophic climate change all racing for the line in the same short span of years, with climate change clearly out in front.

I'm old enough to remember this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_experiment

"Not sure how rock and Jazz together are supposed to halt climate crisis" Diles Mavis

I remember the cold fusion thing.. something something about an Igloo cooler

as i always tell my physics students, if god had wanted humans to make use of nuclear fusion, he’d have hung a bunch of giant fusion reactor in the sky

I see what you did there

I think the Dyson sphere holds promise.

xp i stole it from someone else, forgot who so unable to give proper credit

this is pretty different from the cold fusion case, which claimed success at a process that hadn’t ever been observed, but that they thought could be possible.

in the current case it’s a process with huge technical hurdles, but at least it’s been observed and confirmed to work (not just in the sun but also in hydrogen bombs).

i should probably clarify that the "they" (that thought this particular cold fusion process might work) refers to the guys who did that experiment (and a fringe of vc-supported researchers who pursued similar schemes for another 10-15 years afterward) and not the mainstream of nuclear physics

The DYson sphere has a whole new meaning now that that name is associated with quirkly sassy household cleaning products

Maybe that's how it will happen one day in the future - The Dyson Corporation will solve everything

The lasers fired 2.05 megajoules, the system produced 3.15 megajoules. Great! Except... there's small text at the bottom, which is: it took 300 megajoules to heat up the lasers to get them that far.

^ where I got these numbers: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-unlimited-clean-energy/

This was an ok thread on it

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has achieved net energy gain from fusion! This is incredibly exciting scientifically, but what does it mean for the future of energy?

In all likelihood, very little.

A thread: https://t.co/hgC6WxCV6k

— Wilson Ricks (@wilson_ricks) December 11, 2022

thanks, that helped.

The experiment released 2.5 megajoules vs 2.1 MJ of laser energy. But due to inefficiencies, the lasers consume ~330 MJ to charge, with the energy stored in 3,840 high-voltage capacitors for 60 seconds before being released in a 400-microsecond burst

and the laser used in the experiment can only be fired once a day at best!

i think it would be fair to say that this is maybe like the kitty hawk, and we're trying to get to where we are currently with aviation. of course, analogies like this are kinda arbitrary and by choice of analogy we can make things look more or less hopeless as we like. we got kitty hawk, and we got airports and easy air travel, but nobody takes a helicopter or jetpack to work.

on the other hand, the span of time from the first cell phone to everyone walking around with an iphone was a lot less than the time it took to get from the kitty hawk to the modern era of air travel, so i suppose one could take a rosy view too. definitely nothing is changing overnight, that's for sure.

the span of time from the first cell phone to everyone walking around with an iphone was a lot less than the time it took to get from the kitty hawk to the modern era of air travel

According to Wikipedia "the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City in 1973." It's not possible to say when "everyone" had an iPhone, but they were pretty pervasive by 2013. Call it 40 years, give or take.

The first proof-of-concept flight at Kitty Hawk was in 1903. Hard to say what constitutes the modern era of air travel. PanAm's first commercial passenger service transatlantic flight was in 1939, less than 40 years after Kitty Hawk. A better marker would probably be when Pan American World Airways began regular Boeing 707 passenger service on October 26, 1958, 55 years after Kitty Hawk.

definitely nothing is changing overnight, that's for sure.

otm

right. it’s arbitrary. i could pick apart your specific figure, but i’m not going to. because it’s arbitrary. who’s to say cell phones and airplanes are the right analogies anyway? why not running water and toilets? or a certain medicine?

maybe pick apart is a bit harsh, i guess i could quibble with it. but again - these analogies are arbitrary

It was only eight years between Kitty Hawk and the first military use of airplanes, so whatever spins-off from this will be a military asset long before we start seeing household Mr. Fusion reactors.

"We got the fusion bomb! We got the fusion bomb!" - The Weirdos

Fusion bombs already exist. I was thinking more along the lines of this tech powering an aircraft carrier, ICBM sub, etc.

hello future lifeform, using your pocket fusion brain implant to listen to this post

My understanding is that this particular experiment was in fact conducted as part of the research program devoted to better understanding and improving what happens inside nuclear fusion (ie hydrogen) bombs. It's not at all a promising approach for energy generation.

what nonsense is this? hydrogen bombs generate lots of energy!

I thought existing bombs were fission, not fusion?

both types exist, the hiroshima / nagasaki ones were fission, the newer fusion ones (first successfully tested in the very late 50s iirc) enclose a load of hydrogen inside a fission bomb (like the fission bomb is literally a shell around the inner hydrogen payload) and are designed to focus much of the initial fission energy inward in order to initiate a fusion reaction with a much bigger release of energy

maybe i should say "enough of the energy", what proportion goes inward is obviously a state secret, i imagine it's small compared to the overall amount though

why not use chaptgpt to find the cheaper solution

There was a thread on fusion on Tyler Cowen's blog. He linked to an interesting 2017 critique of nuclear fusion, which prompted some interesting comments:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/wednesday-assorted-links-380.html#comments

Fusion clearly has a sexiness that fission lacks, but there are reasons to suspect that as a practical energy source, the pros and cons are not so cut and dried. Or in other words, it might be nice if there was also more interest in trying to improve fission reactors.

fusion egg!

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/fusion-startup-tokamak-energy-attracts-125m-for-its-egg-like-reactor-design/

30 years away when you started this thread and it remains 30 years away.