U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

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

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Let’s just put a marker here.

According to the Washington Post, a ‘net gain’ announcement is coming Tuesday:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... eakthrough

This oughta be interesting, I can hardly wait.

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

Post by Richard Hull »

Subscribe or no read

Net gain? Q plasma or Q total?

Watch this entire video to be on the wise at the physics level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

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

Post by Frank Sanns »

Subscription required. Article not available to view.

Here is a free link https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 7.html?amp
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 Paul_Schatzkin »

I heard a report on the radio this morning that it’s Lawrence Livermore announcing a breakthrough with their laser gizmo.

Nice, I guess, that they can report a net gain, but it’s hard to fathom how that becomes a sustainable source.

It’s sorta like having a one-cylinder internal combustion engine. You need four to run the whole cycle. Could they run four of those things in sequence? Charge the first one before the fourth has fired?

Color me dubious.
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Frank Sanns »

Crunching some numbers gives some perspective on what is being claimed.

A few sources say 2.5 MJ of energy release from 2.1 MJ input power. Let's give them that even though that is not the entire equation from a production point of view.

A Kg of petrol or other hydrogenous fossil fuel contains ~46 MJ of energy. The total energy released was then equivalent to 54 g of petrol. It required 45 g of petrol to produce that.

The resultant net energy produced was equivalent to the burning 9 grams of a fossil fuel. The conversion of matter into energy was 4.4 nanogram.

While the result of multiple decades of work with this technique is finally giving a Q of 1.2, it is not exactly producing appreciable amount of useful power even if they could pulse once per second (in parallel or series). That would only be equivalent to 540 grams of fossil fuel burning per minute. That is enough to power a single house or two and that is it.

Not trying to be a pessimist here but even if they had a Q =5 and had a throughput 1,000 times greater than they achieved, it would be 2 decades before a small demo plant could be built. And at what cost as they are in the billions for this setup.
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 Matt_Gibson »

Sounds like we need fission for the foreseeable future still…

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

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The Jet 59 megajoule thing is very ancient history at the end of 2021, reported here a year ago and was Q plasma of .74.

Is this new thing coming out of NIF?? Again a true and real joke of useless putt-putt boat fusion. All news here is continuing hokum of the first rank. In short, all news is old news, and thus, is old news rehashed by news media looking for news that is, in effect, news they missed first time around.

Until they speak Q total well over 5.0 with a net power run time of a few hours, there will forever be nothing but "same old - same old" news pouring out of the fusion effort. They really dare not start up ITER for with its failure to do a constant running time of 5 hours Q total of even an unusable 1.5, this will show an abject failure of any form of fusion future in the power biz. There are always those bean counters at the electric power utilities that will forever militate when we are truly fusion power ready.

Fission power is the only sustainable net zero 24-7-365 power. The only other 24-7-365 power is coal, oil, and natural gas with carbon signatures.
All zero carbon "spasmodics" require efficient, highly power dense storage which really doesn't exist yet.

I have always been highly suspicious of the entire climate change debacle. Fortunately, I will not be here to see the full and complete answer to this issue. Probably no one reading this will either. We are blowing billions on some phantom of a net zero emission future while the world sinks ever deeper into poverty of, now, both nations and people. People, who will forever demand the "bread and circus" they have grown accustomed to.

Avoiding nuclear war and failing at it is a 99% more important issue than climate change. Too many people left to steep in a stew of poverty and uncertainty may trigger such a war. Regardless of war or genuine climate catastrophe, we will survive and adapt. There will just be a lot fewer of us, demanding far less energy and all not giving a flip about our carbon footprint. Far fewer footprints to carbonize the world then.

Just like the hope for the lucky donkey to stumble upon that which will bring forth fusion, it only takes one nut ball with their finger on the button to start the nuclear holocaust rolling. Which will we see first?

The best holocaust outcome would be 2 or 3 nukes launched by some deranged entity. The civilized world is so frightened by the 1 million dead, over night, that the loss is accepted and there will be no response beyond the entire world turning on the nation state, conventionally, who spawned the nut ball.

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 Paul_Schatzkin »

This could be 'hot" fusion's "cold fusion" moment.

#1989AllOverAgain
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

While engineering at my job of 45 years, I had a small poster over my desk that bespoke my attitude. An attitude not appreciated by the bosses, but heralded by us worker bees. It delineated the six phases of a corporate "project".......

The 6 phases of a project
1. Enthusiasm by all
2. Disillusionment of many
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and honors for the non-participants

This is how business and governments work on a daily basis. We are all part of a never ending series of "projects", not a few being of our own making.

Fusion is just one aspect of the energy project. We are deep into the disillusionment phase. The panic is about to begin when the energy well runs dry that fusion and "renewables" promised us all these years. The search for the guilty is moving in the direction of blaming us for being led into the project assuming a fine outcome. The punishment phase is dimly starting as we are accused of starting the downward spiral by "living large" as the project promised. Praise and honors will go to the tree huggers and others who "dropped out, tuned in, and turned on". They contributed little within the colony of the "project", but remained outsiders, adrift in solace, but soon to be heralded as the wise.

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 Paul_Schatzkin »

Richard, your boundless optimism never ceases to inspire me.

#InsertSarcasmEmojiHere

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

Post by Richard Hull »

All one needs is to have lived how it was, and look carefully to see how it is.

Just still gathering info in advanced curmudgeonism to prepare and sit to defend my PhD thesis in same. One skill set in curmudgeonism is the ability to think far into a number of possible murky and viable, dystopian futures, and thereby, cast the bones.

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 Paul_Schatzkin »

Who needs a dystopian future when you've got a dystopian present to live in?

Personally, I think we're in the wrong time line. We're living in the 'Biff rules the world' segment of 'Back to the Future II.'

If you have any doubt about that, see what BTTF writer Bob Gale had to say about who inspired the character of Biff Tannen:

https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-fu ... mp-2560286

Also, do you think it's a coincidence that the 'mad scientist' who created the (first plutonium and then) fusion-powered DeLorean time machine was named 'Doc BROWN'?

All fiction, sadly.

Or....???

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

Post by Emma Black »

Saw this pop up today as well, the engineering pretty impressive. Wonder what the neutron counts would look like.

If they do announce a Q of over 1 (still far less than would be needed obviously) to me that really shows just how difficult achieving it is. NIF is massive, these little fusion startups with pretty car sized devices don't seem to stand a chance.

What they should have done is made the targets bigger say a few kilos each. Then rather than use lasers use some kind of super explosive, perhaps made from some mythical heavy elements, installed around the target container.
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

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Emma Black wrote: Mon Dec 12, 2022 6:10 pm rather than use lasers use some kind of super explosive, perhaps made from some mythical heavy elements, installed around the target container.
I think they've tried that. It's called a "hydrogen bomb"

#InsertROFLEmoji

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

Post by Frank Sanns »

Conventional explosives are just not fast enough to start D-D or D-T fusion on their own. They work great for fission but fusion is another beast entirely. It still takes at least a tiny fission nuke to trigger fusion.
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’

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Liquid deuterium was used to "boost" large A bomb energies out of the tens of kiloton range in the early 50's into to the half megaton range. The H bomb was just the reverse, but with a unique and clever packaging. Big terawatt fusion doesn't happen in a vacuum, but is used as an uncontrollable engine of mass destruction. Controllable, micropower fusion, (fusor), does take place in a vacuum, (relative). It is the human scale, controllable fusion power that is in between and in the megawatt range that is the issue, and seems it always will be.

Controlled peta-terra watt-power fusion in a self-running engine is as natural as can be on a universal scale with gravitational assist to both trigger it and contain it, running smoothly with no hand on the throttle for billions of years.

A star in a jar? Nice concept, but with the prepared to fail ITER and the already failed JET, just how big a jar are we prepared to build? Putt-putt boat fusion, (NIF), is just a series of micro-hydrogen bombs set off cyclically. It is like trying to capture and use a nanosecond gigajoule lightning stroke and turn it into in a continuous source of smoothed energy. Just like the tokamak's, NIF has not turned one watt of their boasted fusion into electricity. They merely gobble up megawatts of electricity produced smoothly at existing fossil fuel and nuclear power plants! What an irony!

As always, we are hunter gatherers and must look for sources of human scale energy with trapped energy on our scale of recovery over time which is smooth enough for us to boil water. The reactor being a cast iron stove,(cooking), furnace, (heating), reciprocating engine, (transport), or giant burner/boiler power plant, using a fossil fuel that has stored chemical energy easy to both control and locate. We can and have built a reactor that can contain the nuclear energy which is easy to control, by the slow release of the vast stored energy trapped in uranium from ancient ultra-super novae and merging neutron stars, billions of years ago. Such nuclear power plants are only slightly bigger than an old coal fired plant and like those old relics, just as easy to control.

How do we start our mega watt engines? All we need is a single match struck and thrown on wood or coal, a tiny electrical spark in the reciprocating engine or oil fired furnace, merely bringing two fissile pieces of uranium close to one another, all of these simple starter methods work to start a reaction of hunter/gathered fuel and allows us to control megawatts of energy. Energy for cooking, heating, transport, and generating electricity.

I find it laughable that at this moment, as I write this, Germany and a few other foolish countries who signed onto the Paris Accord are pulling their old highly polluting, carbon spewing, coal plants out of mothballs as well as nuclear power plants either mothballed or which were scheduled to be shut down, to just keep their population from freezing this winter. This old world is truly a ship of fools cast adrift in their own folly to appear pretty and forward thinking, casting aside that which works for that which is hoped to work in a glorious future world. Instead of looking pretty, we are looking pretty stupid for all of our boasted goodness and earth shepherding intentions.

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 »

My levels of sarcasm were of course high during the last post. My favourite "fusion" power generating concept was the more ridiculous things to come out of operation plowshare. It was very simple. Make a big underground chamber, then drop a nuke in every few weeks and harvest the waste heat via steam.
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

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The other related Plowshare project was shot crosstie in the Gas Buggy series of shots in Kit Carson national park and forest. They set off a 29 KT blast under ground to fracture gas bearing rock.

It worked perfectly! The gas was to be distributed to locals for heating and cooking. Unfortunately the gas was far too radioactive to put into homes.. There is a flame pipe still burning the stuff off in a huge clearing within the forest. Probably not so radioactive now, but who would cook a pot of coffee on a gas stove at reduced radiation levels.

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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 Dennis P Brown »

No need to repost from my last entry - just that as I said, the discovery is interesting and the fact that scaling of fusion burn to laser input is faster then previous experiments indicated is both of major importance and a discovery (not really a breakthrough). That is both impressive and if it continues, might make inertia fusion actually work for energy production. That is, when they abandon those terribly inefficient glass lasers creating the wrong wavelength (Green), using indirect drive and with extremely complex targets. Rather, they now need to use ArF (extremely efficient laser - 0ver 25% plug energy delivered to target), with direct drive (simpler and more uniform illumination), and use the extremely simple plastic pellet filled with deuterium/tritium that has an inner D/T iced hollow core (these have already been mass produced for $0.25 each, by the way.)

Their real 'Q' is about (0.005); their saying they achieved a 'Q' of over one is more aligned with Q-anon thinking ;) .
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by Richard Hull »

This goes to show that the more pushed and flashy the announcement the more press will allow it to enter the consciousness of joe public. The fact that we had three post threads opened on this intrinsically non-event means it hit like gang busters (old radio show). Frank shut one thread down to avoid a three fingered thread on this fabulous pseudo news. A simple well done report on the upgraded laser scaling find in a scientific journal that caters to nuclear and fusion physics pros would have done the job. However, wrap the important stuff in a blanket of over unity statements and you've bundled a flash that sells fusion to many and warrants more hopes of "real soon now".

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 Rich Feldman »

Emma joked about:
>>Make a big underground chamber, then drop a nuke in every few weeks and harvest the waste heat via steam.

It would take a lot of nukes, or really really big ones.
For reference, this source says Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona is the biggest in USA.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca ... 994be6a161
Nameplate capacity is 3747 MWe. About 11,241 MW thermal.
Assuming lossless conversion of nuclear bomb yield to steam heat, that's 232 kilotons per day.

Palo Verde represents about 1/300 of USA total electric power capacity (by nameplate).
Maybe 1/125 of annual average power that's actually shipped.
Last edited by Rich Feldman on Wed Dec 14, 2022 3:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’

Post by JoeBallantyne »

Give the poor folks at NIF a break... Its been 25 years since construction started (1997), it cost 4x what it was supposed to cost, took 5 years longer to build than predicted, and it took them 13 years after it opened in 2009 to finally achieve a little bit of what the facility was supposed to be able to do right away... get more fusion energy out of the reaction than light energy that drove the reaction.

At least they have done that. I don't think any of the other fusion experiments have ever even been able to claim that.

So after spending $3.5 billion to build the facility and another likely $3.5 billion or so to fund it for 13 years, we have finally been able to do in 2022 with a laser, what we could do back in the 1950s with fission bombs: make fusion happen and get more energy out than we put in.

Except it works a lot better when you use a fission bomb to drive the process.

Maybe after spending another $10 billion or so, and taking another 25 years, they will have gotten the lasers to work as well as fission bombs for driving fusion.

But probably not.

Joe.
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NYT on Fusion in Popular Culture

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

I guess it's good that the word 'fusion' has entered the mainstream for a minute - although that's what happened by back in '89 with the first 'cold fusion' announcement.

I had a couple of people who know that I have some interest in the topic call yesterday and ask me about the DOE/Livermore announcement. We're all old people (boomers), so I had to assure them they likely would not be seeing any actually electricity from fusion during their lifetimes.

Insert Richard's quote about "20 years in the future" here.

Now I am thinking about this a bit, and thinking about a couple of things Farnsworth said over the course of his life that give me pause to ponder whether larger forces are at work here. These thoughts take me into rarified metaphysical territory that gets very... vague and hard to crystalize. Basically it boils down to "you don't let toddlers play with matches."

So I was pleased to see this article in the NYTimes along side the 'Big Breakthrough' story, recounting the times 'fusion' has appeared in Popular Culture

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/movi ... films.html < with apologies to any who can't access because Pay Wall.

For what it's worth, this is the opening line that I found intriguing:
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced Tuesday that they had made a major breakthrough in studying fusion, a.k.a. the thermonuclear reaction that keeps the sun going.
Note the use of the words "studying fusion."

In other words, the NIF facility was never intended to deliver fusion energy, only to study it.

So, mission accomplished.

Can we have some more billions now?

Those toddlers contemplating matches have to eat something, put a roof over their heads... ya know?

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

Post by Richard Hull »

Yes, photonic light energy out of the lasers to fusion energy out is over unity for sure. As both Dennis and Joe note above, just as Sabine Hossenfelder notes it is Q=total! In NIF's case they are using Q photonic energy, (similar to Q plasma) to brag about over unity. Q total for NIF would have to include all the electrical energy needed to create and pump those photons out of those lasers.

NIF was a debacle from the get go. I long ago supplied the link to the huge government GAO investigation into why NIF needed yet more billions in mid-project. Mismanagement abounded, it was discovered. In addition, Schott glass works told the GAO, that they only felt that they "could" make the giant 96 or 100 plus glass frequency determining laser slabs and not that they were certain of doing it!! They blew up a few of these massive glass slabs in tests before they got it right. More money and more time was OK'd by congress. Why?!!!

Telling the Tale

It all goes back to the original funding and mission for NIF placed before congress years before. Here is the true tale. Once underground nuke testing was abandoned by international agreement, the poor nuclear weaponeers were forced to design laboratory sized tests of weapon ideas. The continuing effort to design hydrogen bombs in a manner to make 'em smaller and more powerful and less expensive at the same time was euphemistically labeled, "the nuclear stock pile stewardship program". The bold weaponeers hit a brink wall in there efforts to serve the goal of makein' 'em smaller, more deadly and cheaper at the laboratory scale. Crying in their beer, they came up with a laser pumped fusion bomb test scheme. To help sell the stockpile stewardship necessity for this new giant laboratory, they salted the deal with the concept that with their new "big Lab", fusion energy research could also be advanced co-jointly for a future electrical energy source. How could congress not fund a combo defense necessity coupled with a forward looking nuclear fusion energy tool?!

Congress funded NIF with the demand of the weaponeers that they get the first full year with NIF to test a long backup of ideas for new and better hydrogen bomb weapons to put in our nuclear defense quiver. Only then would they allow the fusion energy egg heads into their lab to "play fusion".

It turns out that with all the delay's, cost over runs and general bungling, mishandling and mismanagement, those ever clever weaponeers developed a number of workarounds to test the bulk of their ideas over those many years. When NIF finally opened, both the weaponeers and the fusion energy folks manned the helm. The weaponeers ran a few quick tests to verify what they had figured out during the long multi-year road to NIF. They quickly turned the facility over to the fusion energy folks who were rather unprepared to proceed and due to a few burps in the operation of NIF, within a year or two, they were actively playing laser fusion. Many wonderful announcements came, but many advanced thinkers realized it was putt-putt boat fusion and the effort, even if successful, would demand super engineering to capture the mini-H bomb blasts and turn them into a nice, steady stream of electrical energy to Joe public. That remains an issue today, in spite of the latest "break through".

How do I know all of this? I read the da%$#ed GAO report and followed their efforts religiously, reporting it here over the years. I lost all interest around 2017 when, at a presentation I went to at one of our local American Nuclear Society meetings, a bunch of NIF big wigs, using a very well done power point presentation, tried to convince our largely professional fission members at Dominion energy that fission was dead or dying due to their fusion energy efforts. Lots of BS flew into the face of the audience who were truly nuclear professionals. You just can't sell hype to professional nuclear people using a presentation made for the public. At the end, the Q&A session hit them below the belt. They sent PR and upper level management people and not a single fusion physicist to a nuclear meeting!! I now equate their failed attempts to answer direct questions to the current white house press secretary who seems to constantly refer reporters to other government sources. The NIF people noted that they were not prepared to answer highly technical questions related to specific operations and test runs at NIF.

That's my story related to NIF and it can also stand for my feeling towards the fusion community as a whole. Smoke, mirrors, hype, delays, failed promises, and requests for ever more of the public treasure to keep their jobs, is, and has always been, their real job.

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 »

From the horses mouth or more accurately the herd's mouthes. DOE NIF department heads speak to the great breakthrough.
"stewardship program is used only once.
This is current as of today.

the first guy, at the podium, a near giant, does touch on the 100 to 1 net loss while also giving the figures for the 1.4 Q light or Q photons.
The oriental lady at the far right is the government PR booster and you can see it in her smiles and PR push. She is later asked the "tough one" effectively, "just how can we hold out hope for a fusion energy future with a net 100:1 Q total loss. she has some well prepared answers designed to sound good and "marble mouth" wiggle room to cast the program ever farther into the future.
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!
overall a very good presentation from technical bosses at NIF.

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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