U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
Rex Allers
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Rex Allers »

After Tuesday's announcement I did a bit of web surfing. Here's a bit more horse thrashing.

Lead speaker in the announcement:
Jennifer Granholm
Secretary of Energy since 2021
former governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011

from a UC Berkeley professor,
she will be "phenomenal for DOE" because "she understands the technology, she understands deployment and she knows how to run a big agency."

Oh, really?

In the Tuesday Breakthrough announcement she is the first speaker. For those who can stomach it, transcript here:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/u- ... transcript

In the first sentence of actual content,
"Today we’re here to talk about fusion. Combining two particles into one."

[Uhm, aren't those particles usually referred to as atoms?]

Second paragraph:
"So what does this accomplishment do? Two things. First, it strengthens our national security because it opens a new realm for maintaining a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent in an age where we do not have nuclear testing. Ignition allows us to replicate, for the first time, certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun."

[Aha. At first seeing this I found it strange. But, as Richard has observed and shared, it seems to be the real reason the NIF at Lawrence Livermore exists. We have agreed not to do real bomb testing anymore.]

"And the second thing it does, of course, is that this milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society. If we can advance fusion energy, we could use it to produce clean electricity, transportation fuels, power heavy industry, so much more. It would be like adding a power drill to our toolbox in building this clean energy economy."

[Interesting scientific metaphor -- power drill -- why not chain saw or jackhammer?]

Enough of that. In the Q/A section at the end, someone asks about the total input power needed for this breakthrough event.

Dr. Kim Budil (the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) replies,
"So the laser requires about 300 megajoules of energy from the wall to drive two megajoules of laser energy, which drove three megajoules of fusion yield. Our calculation suggests that it’s possible, with a laser system at scale, to achieve hundreds of megajoules of yield. So there is a pathway to a target that produces enough yield, but we’re very distant from that right now. So 300 megajoules at the wall, two megajoules in the laser."

So, honesty there, but not a thing I've seen in any mainstream news. The talking heads on my TV seem to be talking like we should have a fusion power plant in the next few years.

Jumping, I found a wiki page on "Fusion energy gain factor"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor

The last section of that page, "Scientific breakeven at NIF", does a pretty good job of describing the moving of goalposts for the input power to make this Q > 1 possible. Not just limiting the input power to just the output of the laser chains, but then to just the power that got focused on the D-T pellet.

A few thoughts:

- An interesting accomplishment but the big announcement probably largely a PR stunt to help ensure funding for NIF.

- Actual Q, as Dennis calculated, probably about .005

- Very putt-putt. I think a few nano seconds through the laser pulse to output.

- A bit unwieldy. I think the facility containing the 192 lasers, etc., and target chamber covers an area about equal to 3 American football fields.

- Nobody is mentioning any way the fusion output energy might be captured and converted to electricity.
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Rich Feldman
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Rich Feldman »

>> One of my favorites was a fellow who talked about neutron measurements to actually determine the energy of the blast via several methods.

Can you give us a hint where that appears in the video?

I ran some numbers about neutron counts, based on quoted 3.15 MJ of total fusion yield.
At 17.6 MeV of energy per DT fusion, that's 1.1e+18 fusions. More than the number of fissions in known criticality accidents, with a couple of exceptions. So there must be lots of materials in the neighborhood with measurable activation even hours after the shot.

If we figure 1 neutron per fusion, and they all escaped from the chamber,
the neutron fluence 10 meters away was 8.9e+10 n/cm^2. What's that in rem, or BTI bubbles?

p.s. If we do ever get electricity from fusion, and the power plants are eventually retired, they will (like fission plants) have structural parts that are dangerously radioactive for a long time. But not even close to the amount of activity in used fuel from fission plants.
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Richard Hull
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

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It is to be remembered that exposure and all absorbed doses must be figured from not only the inverse square law, but in all putt-putt boat fusion the nanosecond fraction of an hour of the single, one and only shot used to make this claim. Right now this is not putt-putt, but merely a putt! The putt-putt bit comes if they ever get a "high capacity magazine" of D-T bullets and go semi-auto to empty the magazine of 100 pellets within a minute. Any hope of nuclear energy would demand a full-auto, endless, belt-fed nuclear machine gun.

The problem, as always, is how do you charge a 350 megajoule capacitor bank at a cyclic rate of 100 shots per minute to keep the energy output somewhat steady and continuous 24-7-365. Naturally, they dare not mention this as part of any hope of fusion energy production and useful realization in the real world. They are talking one-hit wonders here. As an old shooter, in analogy, they have an old civil war, single shot, muzzle loader where the time between shots is long. After each shot, you have to take out the ramrod, pour in the powder, then take a patched ball, (hohlraum), drop it in the barrel, ram it home and then put on the firing cap, cock the hammer, and only then, fire one more shot. They haven't even reached the breach loader or semi-auto version yet, much less the machine gun, full-auto level of sophistication, and are not likely to in any future iteration of such a system. I would guess the current cyclic rate for NIF is on the order of one shot per 24 hour period if they are in a super rush to fire the thing continuously. Probably it is more like 1 shot every 3 days. (it's a big deal, after all) Remember, they have a civil war period nuclear gun here. I don't think I would want to be the ammo bearer for NIF carrying in a new hohlraum 10 minutes after a shot in a now somewhat activated all encompassing sphere of focused decay products.

Even with my water Arc gun of the 1990's with a 1 kilojoule discharge, It took several minutes before I could shoot another shot.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

As long as we're talking about our 'favorite parts' from the DOE/NIF event...
Richard Hull wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 3:02 pm
One of my favorites was a fellow who talked about neutron measurements to actually determine the energy of the blast via several methods. Good one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmzep3YaRNI

Richard Hull
...my favorite part was when one of the panelists said it took more than two months to assemble the fuel pellet that they imploded in a reaction that lasted mere billionths of a second.

They may be able to tout a net energy gain, but they sure can't tout a decent time spent/reward ratio. To say nothing of the dollars involved.

--PS
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Matt_Gibson »

All of this reminds me of a statistic that I heard from somewhere (forget the source):

The world has spent several trillion dollars on solar that has only reduced carbon based energy generation by 2%.

Why aren’t we spending all of the money and effort on smaller, safer, more efficient FISSION projects instead?

I feel like they are trying to skip ahead when we clearly don’t have enough knowledge to be doing so.

Fission is working right now. We need to refine that before we continue down the multi billion dollar route on fusion and solar (trillions actually).

Seems a little ass backwards to me.

-Matt
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Frank Sanns »

When the world was 10 to 20 degrees C warmer, there were huge dinosaurs, plants and prolific life. When the temperatures were just a few degrees cooler than now, we had ice ages that caused many flora and fauna to go extinct. Photosynthesis takes place when it is warmer but not cooler. I will take the warmer.

Much of our money and efforts go into worrying about carbon. Conservation of environment and resources is what is important. We need food, water, clean air, and good habitats. And we need to stop the insatiable need for more of everything and the Hollywood lifestyles. We are the locust of the planet. Buy less and use less.

Yes, fission, renewables, and fossil fuels are all going to be part of the equation. Until there is an energy pinch people will not change. When it does change, there will be war because people cannot live without their luxuries let alone when things get less easy.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

"Buy less, use less". My mantra, too. Fortunately, with businesses closing down, folks losing jobs, there is little money in the hands of the little guy and also less product to buy, at ever higher, inflated prices. That mantra is becoming a reality.

The government has always been occupied by self-enriching, self-aggrandizing dolts, elected by an ever more stupid and self-centered, stuff consuming electorate. Big business, the military/industrial complex, and now, big tech with the media are plugged directly into the elected officials with their special hold and interests getting top priority in governing decisions. The decisions are becoming ever more bizarre and fly against simple reason to become law or presidential edicts by decree. They can't even hold to the simple routine they used to be good at; giving us bread and circus. Bread is in short supply and expensive, and even with the circus going on, an ever increasing number of circus goers are leaving the tent as times are getting tough.

Even the economists and business types are saying this recession, inflation, hiring market and consumer activity has a number of twists never encountered before in past such events.

Again, we need to be 99% percent more focused on preventing a civil or nuclear war. Put all future energy spending into energy systems that are working now in the gigawatt range and this includes coal, oil and gas while working on a number of fission power stations of modern, updated design.

Cease all solar and wind projects now! Pour it all on getting the grid secure and full power back on line and once this smooths the power needs of all those future millions of electric vehicles, then figure on cranking those renewables up again. The focus on carbon is a game they are running on us to keep big business in the money.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Emma Black »

Buy less has gone a bit too far over here, we now full time workers unable to pay to heat their homes or buy enough to eat. As a result there are a lot of strikes happening this winter for those who can.

SMR's small modular reactors seem to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, unsure how the economics stack up but on the face of it these sound like they would be easier and quicker to build.

One other area that I also don't think has received its fair share of research is hybrid fission fusion schemes.
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Richard Hull
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

Agreed on the small reactors for large neighborhood power solutions. The draw back is each would still need a staff for monitoring, maintenance and even security, Governments are reticent about scattering items that contain fissile material about at the reactor quantity level, even a small reactor.

The government in the 50's and 60's did a lot of work on small reactors, but for ocean buoys and and small teams of arctic workers tended to use large thermoelectric nuclear generators. We had plenty of blisteringly hot, non fissile reactor waste due to bomb manufacture back then. We figured why not use the waste heat of decay. Many satellites and especially probes used RTGs in the 60's and 70's, They are still favored for incredibly long missions to the outer planets where the inverse square law limits solar power beyond Mars. RTGs are a rough road coupled with modern densely packed electronic chips that are hyper sensitive to radiation damage.

Thorium breeders or any breeder arrangement have a bad taste to them due to old research with them in the 50's and 60's.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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A Day That Will Live In….. Famy!

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

.
Bring on the Celebrity Physicists!

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains fusion for stupid people:

https://youtu.be/4s2ynUAJ5ZU

…and we get a new name for ‘the strong force’ –– “Quantum Love”

#ThisIsWhyWeCantHaveNiceThings
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"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

Fabulous!

Two brothers talkin' trash. What a great video!

I liked the other brother more than Tyson. His great wisdom came in analogizing the electrostatic repulsive force as when you meet someone which you realize is just like yourself at a party and you immediately dislike the dude and are repelled by him or her. This is my big takeaway from this video.

Introspection, self realization; for all the self-wisdom in seeing this, do we make corrections to ourselves? Probably not. We are who we are; what we have become. At 76 I loath change, and self-doubt is a one-way street to a downhill slide. I ain't movin' off who I am at this stage of the game. Onward and upward to the end!!

Thanks perfesser! A good one indeed.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

I have noted hundreds of you tube blurbs about this "breakthrough". I have commented on many, as any good "Debbie Downer" would amongst the florid and hopeful comments proffered by the gullible, that this was a 100 to 1 net loss breakthrough. I even pointed on the DOE video my comment to check out minute number 2:00 on the NIF video where the guy says "Of course we did draw 300 megajoules of energy from the electrical grid for the shot".

Will they let this stain on their party comment stay up?

As of this moment it is still up at...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ktAL4rGuY&t=179s

Again, I post the URL put up by NIF as a news conference with a Q and A session.

Look at minute 2:00 on for this statement. Nothing like getting all the data around a breakthrough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmzep3YaRNI

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Frank Sanns »

After listening to both presentations, it is clear that it was about limelight more than anything.

The first press conference were the politicians who did not do the experiments telling the press who did not understand the science. They will go on to tell the public even more fantastical stories which many of us have to spend time answering to our friends and family. It is pathetic how one sided the hype can be..

The second conference were the core people doing the work. They are the researchers in the strictest sense. They do not bother themselves with economics, practicality, time, or anything else. They are fine tuning something that is so many orders of magnitude away from anything useful that it bordering on being useless. I am NOT trying to diss the work or the people but in reality, high Q nuclear fusion was done in 1952. SEVENTY YEARS AGO!

When I was a R&D manager at Bayer, one of the questions were, when will the new product be ready? The answer from a salesman is it already is ready. The answer from a scientist is, just need a few more experiments. The point being, if there is not a plan at the helm with multiple approaches and bold experimentation, it will never get done. I cannot stress more the bold experimentation. Fine tuning before you even know you are in the ballpark is a waste of resources. One of the changes with this ONE, yet underproduced experiment from NIF, (you never believe ONE experiment without reproducing it) was the thicker diamond capsule. In all of this time, the thickness and the compression of the laser front and back end has not been fully explored????

In another post I was talking about experimental design and the importance of doing bold experiments (wide parameter changes). Here is an example that was nails on a chalkboard to me. They only now are finding that the imperfections of the shell are proportional to the mass. More mass and the same size, non spherical imperfections have less of an effect???

Not trying to rip anything apart (which I guess I am) but I am just not impressed with a 4% conversion of D-T fuel to release 0.000....01% of the input energy. End of rant.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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From DOE/NIF to "The FarnoBrown Manifesto"

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

.
Thank you, Frank, for that very sanguine assessment of the DOE/NIF 'breakthrough.'

It occurs to me as I start typing this morning that two things happened last week:

1. Something happened at Lawrence Livermore that is notable for some reason.

2. DOE held a press event and The Media reported on it.

As Frank and others have observed – here, elsewhere, but certainly not in the mainstream media - those two aspects are very different sides of the same coin.

Of the first, I will defer to the expertise of others like Dennis, Richard and Frank to counsel us on what the NIF's 'shot' really means in terms of science. I can only surmise that getting a Q of "1+ anything" is notable, even if it only lasted a billionth-of-a-second and drew more power from 'the wall' than anybody wil admit to. I don't want to give that short shrift. I'm inclined to think that's what it deserves, but, again, I defer to the more scientifically knowledgeable.

Of the second, I am somewhat more qualified to comment because that's the realm that I wander in. You know, Marshall McLuhan and 'the medium is the message' and blah blah blah ("why, I've got Marshall right over here...." <– extra credit for the first person who can tell me what that's from....).

That's why I was intrigued by the Neil DeGrasse Tyson video. Richard seems more enamored of it than I am.

I think Tyson has gone off the rails with his fame. I swear to god I heard him on Bill Maher's show a few weeks ago say that "hygrogen bombs don't produce any radiation because they're fusion devices, not fission devices." Seriously, Dude? Do you not know how a hydrogen blast is triggered? Behold, the Clown Prince of Modern Astrophysics! Check out the cool neckties!

I think this whole DOE/NIF 'event' was a carefully orchestrated effort to do something with all the money that goes to Lawrence Livermore, to:

a) gloss over all the money the US spends building bombs (on that point I agree with Tyson: blowing shit up is one thing America is really good at), and

b) provide some infotainment for the public under the guise of "look at this very hopeful thing that we're doing with all the taxpayers' money!" Cheap, Abundant Clean Energy now within our reach! – if not exactly our grasp, and never mind that even a fusion plant is gonna have some by-products to contend with.

I wish I had adequately convincing words to say that "these monoliths are never going to produce anyting useful by way of actual electrical power" – and that "if fusion is ever going to be useful, it's going to come from something much more on the scale of the Farnsworth Fusor than ITER" or it's insanely complex and expensive brethren.

But then, we also know, as Richard misses no opportunity to remind us, that the Fusor is never going to amount to anything useful, either. Insert <*sigh*> emoji here.

As long as we keep believing that, it will be true.

There is more to this.. I am, frankly, right now, struggling to articulate.... something... the gist of which is "WTF are we missing?"

Because in my storyteller's heart, I believe that when Farnsworth turned to Pem and said "I've seen all I need to see" ... he had in fact seen something that confirmed his understanding of the 'cosmos and the quantum' – an understanding that was delivered unto his brain even before he started thinking about bouncing electrons around in a vacuum tube so that we can watch Neil De Grasse Tyson make jokes about 'Quantum Love.'

And yeah, I know what Gene Meeks and the others at the Pontiac Street lab said when they came in the next morning and found the fusor in the pit fried.

I also know what Gene Meeks told me when I met him in Fort Wayne in 2001: "We were close. Very close."

But then, I'm not a scientist, or a Clown Prince of Astro Physics. I'm just a guy with a laptop who likes to tell weird, interesting stories - and this story has fascinated me since the first time I heard it back in the summer of 1973.

https://waterstarproject.com/the-point- ... cruz-1973/
(for the uninitiated, that link is why this site has been around in its various incarnations for more than 20 years)

My take away from the DOE/NIF annoucement:

1. Something happened.

2. Squirrell!

There is one reference Tyson made in that video with which I am in 100% agreement – his allusion to the last scene in Back To The Future – when Doc Brown tosses beer and banana peels into his now-fusion-powered DeLorean and heads back to the future.

Squint a little, and you can see three Big Ideas in that scene: fusion energy, gravity control, and time travel.

That is the confluence of possiblities that I believe constitutes "the universe of magical things" that we toddler humans are being shown but is kept out of our actual reach. That's what Philo Farnsworth saw that night he returned to the lab with Pem, it's what Townsend Brown saw in his gravitator inventions.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that the character's in the BttF movies name is 'Brown.'

https://ttbrown.com

I have inferred before and will say again (hell, it's right there in my f'ing avatar!): that scene is trying to tell us something.

In my half-baked Townsend Brown bio, there is a mercurial character named 'Morgan' who tried his damnedest to tell me the truth without actually telling me.

Morgan told me that the 'intelligence' he referred to as "The Caroline Group" communicates with us through art as well as science. Consequently, what I have come to believe – again, because I tell stories, or at least try to – is that a higher intelligence is telling us in that scene that, "this is what dwells in the universe of magical things."

I realize it's an insanely idealistic stretch, but what I also think, and what is ironically embodied in the DOE/NIF announcement, is that somebody in the universe is trying to tell us "stop building bombs with this knowledge, and we'll show you the rest of it."

Well. That's more of a manifesto than I thought I was gonna fire off this morning, but, then, I've been thinking about these things for a very long time.

--PS
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Nicolas Krause »

Annie Hall
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Oh Boy! More Fusion Humor!

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Here's a little more evidence that the "media event" is a bigger deal than the "scientific breakthrough."

"Nuclear Fusion" is the first question on this week's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me – The NPR News Quiz:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w ... 0590483934

Again, the go to reference is that last seen in "Back To The Future."

I'm tellin' ya, this is not a coincidence.

--P
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Nicolas Krause wrote: Sun Dec 18, 2022 12:10 pm Annie Hall
We have a winner!!!!

https://youtu.be/ROIrLRQi-m0

And what does McLuhan say to the guy in the line with Woody Allen?

"Clearly, you know nothing of my fallacies."

I'm still puzzling over that one.



--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

Finally! I have noticed a number of you tube videos that are truly balanced on this "breakthrough". That is, they do, indeed, say "wait a minute!"

Yes, there are folks willing to take the hype and bamboozling to a rational moment of thought which, while not as adamant as myself on this matter, points out that this is no breakthrough. They do discuss the fact that the net energy Q, (Q total), is on the order of 1% and the net loss of all energy used here is a 99%. In order to not look totally negative, they note the lasers at NIF are grossly inefficient and that modern lasers are on the order of 20-30% efficient. (as if that is a big deal in this case). I wonder if these modern more efficient lasers can produce hundreds of mega joules at the desired frequency and retain this high percentage of output power which would mean only 100megajoules from the electrical grid to get 20 mega joules of light energy transferred to the 1.5 Q to get 30 mega joules of fusion. Qtotal = 0.3. Still, with brand new 2022 lasers a net loss of 70%

These thoughtful videos still fall back on the fact that for the first time, we have done a Q of 1.5 in fusion, direct energy in to fusion energy out. Only one video that I saw took the real viability to wall outlet Q needing to be on the order of a fusion Q total of 10X to 20X before wall outlet fusion will be viable. I have noted this many times in these forums. Then, there are those all too serious bean counters at the power utilities.

One guy, in one video, took it all the way. Sadly this is lost in a sea of "ata-boys" and "fusion is virtually here now" puff pieces echoing the DOE's huge roll out of "puff" over this truly non-event. We knew this fusion boost was possible not only in theory, but in fact due to solar fusion that is gravitationally induced. This foreknowledge is, after all, the only reason we have spent 70 years and billions of the money to chase fusion! We knew it could be done with a Q over 1.0! The big deal is supposedly we have done it in a lab environment on earth. To bad it was at a gross net energy loss, and this must not be mentioned, but, instead, hidden in all puff pieces. Finally, voices that think deeply and rationally are chiming in openly, noting the emperor has not clothes.

I note that my highly negative comment on the DOE official video that I gave the URL to above, is still there and oddly is the only single comment made by anyone, thus far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ktAL4rGuY&t=179s

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Paul_Schatzkin
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'60 Minutes' Report on NIF 'Breakthrough'

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

CBS '60 Minutes' did a segment on the so-called 'breakthrough' at the top of the show last night:

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/nuclear-f ... 3-01-15/#x

It's a pretty good recap of all the issues, and does catch the detail that while the amount of energy coming out of the lasers was less than the amount coming out of the reaction, the amount of energy going IN to the lasers was a great deal more.

The report also goes into interesting detail about the fuel pellet and what it takes just to get ONE of them ready for a 'shot.'

Scott Pelley stops short of arriving at the obvious conclusion, but he does a reasonable (for mainstream media) job of going right up to the emperor, even if he doesn't quite say 'Dude, yer nekkid!'

--P
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Peter Schmelcher »

I liked the video. It’s more of a major milestone and know doubt more are needed, but I am not that concerned about the old NIF laser power consumption. The replacements would fit into a school gym.

The NIF lasers were designed late last century when CO2 lasers were the big boys on the block for industrial manufacturing. In that era Xeon flash lamps (tubes similar to film camera flashes) pumped photons into YAG solid state lasers achieving about 1% electrical to optical conversion. Then LEDs got much better, replaced the flash tubes, and today electrical to optical conversion is over 20%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nd:YAG_laser

At the same time optical fiber research created high power fiber lasers for data communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_laser
Communication fiber laser amplifiers have output power today will even burn the core of the very transparent optical communication fiber the light travels in. At lower but still high optical power levels, the refractive index (photon velocity) of the fiber core goes nonlinear (modulates/mixes photons) which limits the useful communication distance span.
Imagine you put a mechanical shutter that interrupts the beam of a perfect single wavelength laser this activity produces optical double sideband AM photons. These are photons that have a different wavelength from the perfect laser and travel at different velocities in optical materials (fibers). This causes the data bits to stretch out in time smearing bits together again limiting the data rate. Chirped pulse amplification and correction came to the rescue. It is somewhat like a prism that separates wavelengths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_p ... lification
In communication systems the differing photon velocity is compensated for by inserting extra distance (time) to realign all the wavelength arrivals before all the photons are converted together into an electrical data signal.
If you want a very narrow high power optical pulse that would damage optical components you make the pulse longer. You stretch the AM sidebands in time to reducing the peak pulse power before the photons are amplified and then realign the photons after amplification back into a narrow pulse. I believe this increased the NIF pulse power above the original design specification about 5 years ago.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/inside-loo ... -arc-laser

The experiment established the scope of what is needed to do laser fusion.
A big list of Manhattan sized engineering challenges remain to be solved.

Cheers-Peter
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Richard Hull
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

get lasers in the net megajoule light output at 98% efficiency at firing rep-rate of 100-1000 firings per second blasting a machine gun belt feeding hohlraums at that rate and we might have the very finest putt-putt boat fusion system ever made. But we still need a net Q electrical to fusion of 10 +
to absorb the energy from the putts to heat and then the 50% loss of steam to electricity.

Then, no matter what, we face a far more daunting challenge than fusion, itself!....The final arbiters standing in the way of wall outlet electrical fusion..........The utility bean counters figuring amortization of a fusion power station over however manner years before it will pay based on a retail sale price to a waiting public and how much they can make the public swallow the costs of the new green fusion power...

Hit a man's wallet hard enough and the green environment moves far down on his list of real world goals.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Richard Hull
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

I found the 60 minutes program dealing with the NIF wonderment of December.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZejZxjvFng

Paul, above, gave a similar pointer URL to this 60 minutes segment. I feel that watching it again is worth some thought.

While loaded with hype and amazing numbers, blessedly, they did note the falsehood around Q total surrounding the claim as mentioned in detail above. They noted the grid power to fusion power being a 100 to 1 net loss! Still, hope springs eternal throughout and the announcement that to be commercial they would need to blow up 10,000 hohlraums per day. Even the director and engineer noted this would be impossible. Fusion energy via putt-putt boat fusion is and will always be a joke.

The DOE head announced that Biden's admin was looking at power ready fusion in 10 years as a result of NIF's achievement. Next, CBS brought in a Physicist who noted that this was dreamland and doubted any fusion energy even by 2050. CBS 60 minutes immediately point out the 20+ fusion startups may just beat this time frame noting that Billions were already committed among the startups. They left it here which is where we came in on this segment. No real fusion for the foreseeable future. They did not boost fusion. They did tell of the lie of NIF and total Q as a net loss. A true nothing burger served up with hope that one of the startups might just turn the trick. Very informative to the common joe provided they absorbed and understood every concept discussed.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Dennis P Brown »

Inertia fusion is the most likely method that could provide economical fusion.

NIF had the wrong laser (freq. tripled IR laser) and target design (very complex Hohlaum: $25 k, months to make one), and beam arrangement (indirect drive via x-rays produced by laser light.)

There is a laser and arrangement that could produce net energy - the ArF excimer laser (deep UV; ideal to minimize non-uniform fuel compression) using direct drive (beams on pellet. Extremely efficient and good coupling.) Rep rates of 432,000 a day are easy for this laser (been shown for three months straight so far.) The pellets are easy to mass produce (plastic sphere with an inner layer of DT ice; been done @ $0.25/pellet). The laser delivers over 24% of its wall outlet energy to target surface photons (far beyond what's needed.)

All results have been peer reviewed and published for years. There is zero interest in this system.
Last edited by Dennis P Brown on Sat Jul 29, 2023 10:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
Matt_Gibson
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Matt_Gibson »

Get me some pellets and I’ll aim my 4KJ ruby laser at it!

J/k, but it is very interesting to incorporate lasers.

-Matt
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Richard Hull
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

No experiments and no direct fusion data or numbers on any supposed high efficiency lasers have yet been made. The fusion Dreamland Fair gates remain wide open and the fairway is filled with distractions and hucksters in many sideshows designed to get you into their tent and take your money.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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