Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

ITER is planned to generate 500,000,000W. Thats actually usefull

NIF uses lasers to heat and compress a small amount of hydrogen fuel with the goal of inducing nuclear fusion reactions. NIF's mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain, and to support nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear weapons

>They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid.

Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own. Each wanting to protect their IP from other vendors supplying the friction reducers.

>It gets pumped back down underground where it dissipates into the rest of the water system.

This is the most inaccurate and hyperbolic part of your response. It is markedly false. The slick water is typically reused after the well back flows. They store the water onsite for the remaining wells. Or transport to another pad for continued hydro fracking use. Any water that is produced during well production is pumped into non-human use reservoirs. These disposal wells are called SWD’s, saltwater disposals. The depths of the wells vary, in our field it was 7500’. Whereas freshwater wells for human and cattle use were 300’. Regulatory bodies strictly manage the creation of SWD’s with significant research and paperwork to show the reservoir you are disposing into is not or has ever been used for human consumption. The water at this reservoir will not magically make its way into the freshwater reservoir.

>These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't predict the weather accurately next week.

This seems more emotionally driven than anything. Who are ‘these people’. How does this correlate to weather? I have worked with hundreds of wells that are +80 years old still in good standing. If the well integrity is in question a cement bond log is run, along with other logs. If it is found there are any discrepancies they are fixed. Or the well plugged and abandoned, is filled with cement and the wellhead removed.

I have not heard of fracking water ever being used for crops. Apologies for any spelling or grammar errors as I am on my phone writing this message.

I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly treating and testing it, as discussed in the article.

In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal, after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it. Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust, which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups.

I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices, directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the producers.

The models may or may not be accurate but they have nothing to do with predicting the weather. There isn't any weather underground... It's all slow diffusion and buoyancy.

A better starting place might be asking where the model inputs come from.

Like, why does it make more sense than "the people at the LHC claim they understand well enough to be confident that the LHC wont produce a black hole that swallows the earth, but how can we trust that when computer models can't predict the weather next week?" ? What does one have to do with the other?

It is not at all clear to me that the inability to predict the weather is at all a good reason to significantly doubt the accuracy of their models of the impact of the wastewater fluid. There may be other good reasons to doubt it! I'm not claiming their models are good, I know very little about it. But, without a further explanation as to why the two are comparable in this way, I don't see the "but we can't precisely predict the weather for next week" argument as having any non-negligible weight.

That's not what your linked article says. The article says treated wastewater is being used. That being said, it appears to be in dispute if the water is treated enough, with the water district claiming that it is and an environmental group claiming its not.

We can model the climate decades into the future, which this situation seems more similar to. Obviously the fracking companies would be biased, so I am not siding with them, just that particular argument feels like a straw man

If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are:

1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change.

2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention.

3) Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and put millions more in risk.

The problem isn't the technology, it is the economics.

Isn't this the same capital expenditure analysis your post starts with though? How many billions does it cost to get the solar panels to orbit in sufficient quantity? And ground stations to receive the energy beams (microwave presumably). This is where Musk/Spacex push for cheap kg to orbit really matter. Even in the 70's they worked out that mining the moon for raw materials to build space based solar was much more economical.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

I’m guessing you meant photons but this still seems amazing. Is there somewhere I can find out more about that?

As just one example - when the wind turbines aren’t running, your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and that somewhere has a cost to keep it available.

That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the source of the problem - wind and solar generators.

The question is if fusion is really the cheapest way to do it, say vs alternatives.

My question about fusion isn't about thermodynamic efficiency, but about economics. Our waste heat solutions produced electricity at about 2x the LCOE of a natural gas turbine. Since it was carbon-free electricity, by selling the carbon credits we could get close to the ROI of a natural gas plant. A NG plant might have a 20 year IRR of 14-16% - we could get to 11 or 12. But that was enough to kill the project.

And we have other technologies that produce carbon free electricity at a price close but not quite at NG turbines - renewables + storage, for example, or geothermal. But those aren't considered economic to build right now, despite being here and ready and understood.

I might be wrong, but I can't imagine a nuclear fusion plant getting within spitting distance of a NG plant for capital cost. And if it's even twice as much money -- which seems wildly optimistic -- maybe nobody will build them. Or maybe they will, because there are other factors at play besides carbon free electricity and cost! That's what I'm asking - what are those other factors?

Have you? Or you just read about it?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily-eb...?

NG is likely going to be a critical transitional fuel for the planet to depend on while we get to more abundant renewable options, grid batteries and nuclear/fusion/thorium.

Quotation needed

Open Brayton cycle fission reactors would be outstanding on Titan, with all that cold gas to compress and reexpand after warming to quite moderate temperature.

The real power generation tech here will be wind and solar, not nuclear. We can build lots and lots and lots of it, easily and cheaply. And using it to charge vehicle batteries doesn't even require intermediate storage.

Even construction powerhouses like China are deploying more than an order of magnitude more renewables than nuclear, because renewables will be the backbone of any future grid. Nuclear isn't getting any cheaper, yet wind solar and batteries are on exponentially decreasing cost curves.

People on HN are far better able to understand exponential technology advancement than people in the energy industries. And hopefully we can all see how renewables plus batteries is going to make nuclear obsolete.

Superconducting magnets like ITER uses don’t require energy to continue running as they, of course, are superconducting. They “only” have to dump heat put into them by the reaction radiation. The SPARC reactor by MIT is similar but much smaller by using Cuprate superconductors (high temperature superconductors, but here operated at much lower temperatures to increase the critical field) that allow much higher field strengths. They often have non-superconducting joints which cause a (sort of) small amount of additional heat that needs to be dumped, but it is possible to make such joints superconducting as well. Anyway, all such designs for commercial scale power from Tokamaks use fusion generated electricity to power the magnet cooling, and those electricity requirements are less than the electricity produced.

"A reactor small enough to fit on a truck could provide enough power for a small city of up to 100,000 people."

On the other hand, there are a lot of good arguments in favor of state ownership - matter of national security, need for redundancy instead of efficiency, it's a commodity and a basic necessity, low margins, large scale leads to financing issues for corporations, chicken-egg problems that state is better at dealing with, the domain is primarily about engineering challenges with branding and management having very limited impact, simple supply chains, cost-cutting may lead to disastrous consequences, etc...

The plants were mostly in Alberta, where NG is cheap but there is no hydro.

Not at all like conventional electricity plants, the heat is already being created in industrial processes and is a waste product.

We're familiar with delta-T and thermodynamics. Current off the shelf technology can easily hit half of the Carnot limit at most delta-Ts. That's not the point, the point is the "fuel" was free, and the price was "close" to existing sources as these things go (about 2x the price of natural gas) and even with a carbon market and climate mandates, it's impossible to get investment.

Not trying to knock the progress made or anything like that, I just needed the conversion to a more familiar unit in order to appreciate what sort of scale they're talking about.

> Ignition should not be confused with breakeven, a similar concept that compares the total energy being given off to the energy being used to heat the fuel. The key difference is that breakeven ignores losses to the surroundings, which do not contribute to heating the fuel, and thus are not able to make the reaction self-sustaining. Breakeven is an important goal in the fusion energy field, but ignition is required for a practical energy producing design.

The civilian applications of the facility are secondary, as others have pointed out.

However, Sabine misconstrues things in the opposite direction and lies through omission to the audience. For example including startup energy and not ammortizing it over runtime, or not assuming that the energy consumption of the experiments is part of the required energy consumption of the fusion reactor, or trying to construe that once you have a fusion power reaction that is burning it is still especially difficult to further create a functioning power reactor out of it.

The true hard part of fusion is the burning plasma aspect. Once you have a burning plasma, it's a heat source like any other (with a few side-effects like neutron output) and everything we know from fission power reactors (but with a much lower radiation) and fossil fuel generators applies.

None of these plants are even attempting to have real energy breakeven and spend a ton of energy supplying experiments and unrelated support equipment. They don't even have a method of capturing energy as that's not the point as it would make it harder to test the physics. Additionally these plants have high amounts of "startup energy consumption" that is also factored in to the energy usage but would be amortized out over a long run. Trying to use the absolute power consumption of the experiment as if that's where the state of the art is at for true energy break even is completely wrong.

Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically, which then can be used to create energy. The point of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining and just pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used to keep the reaction going.

That's not how ICF works. Plasma, being a gas-like state, will always expand to fill whatever volume is presented. With ignition, the rate of expansion is essentially lower than the rate of fusion, allowing you to fuse all of the fuel before the plasma dissipates and cools down.

In ICF as studied at NIF, you start with an extremely precisely machined piece of metal called a hohlraum, you put a solid pellet of fuel inside at an extremely precise location, then fire a laser with extremely precise alignment to heat the hohlraum until it generates X-Rays that heat the pellet just right so that its outer layer explodes, creating an equal implosion, generating two shockwaves inside the pellet; if the two shockwaves meet just right, at the center of their meeting place you get a fusion reaction, and you hope that that fusion reaction has enough time to heat up and cause more fusion reactions before the initial implosion loses speed and expansion happens.

That initial shock is the only thing containing the plasma - once it has lost its velocity, the plasma dissipates and cools down. If ignition was reached, the gas that cools down and dissipates should be 100% He, instead of a mix of He, D and T. However, there is no way to stop this dissipation, it is a fundamental part of ICF.

The only way to keep an ICF reactor going is to shoot one laser burst at one pellet, capture the energy of the fusion, and use that to power the next laser burst fired at the next pellet.

Of course, after each burst of laser heating the hohlraum so much that it radiates the heat as X rays, and then briefly containing a 1-10M kelvin burst of hot plasma, plus a neutron bombardment, the hohlraum is destroyed. Since machining the hohlraum to the precise shape required to achieve the shockwaves discussed above is never going to be a cheap process, it is impossible to imagine ICF would ever be even a tiny bit close to economical, even if it could in principle output more energy than it requires as input.

As such, ICF is strictly a scientific pursuit, mostly interesting for nuclear weapons research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion

Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis would put many a pundit out of a job.

Ad tech will start segmenting right down to the individual customer, burning thousands of watts to work out how to entice then to spend $20.

Perhaps raw heat, rather than the indirect heat effects of global warming will be our next challenge.

Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.

That said, one thing that I think would really help is to have smaller reactors, more of them, and using a standardized and approved design. I remember hearing an interview with an Oregon State University professor some 15+ years ago who was working on a project that did just that. IIRC, he said one major contributing factor to the cost of building a reactor, besides waste, is that basically each one is designed and engineered from scratch. He envisioned more of an assembly line. Universal design, universal parts, etc. I believe they went on to form a company called NuScale and a quick DDG search led to this:

> "Portland company's innovative nuclear reactor OK'd by feds (September 26 2020)" ... The modules — each capable of producing 60 megawatts of energy, which is enough to power 45,000 homes — also allow a plant to scale up as needed, with a maximum capacity of 12 modules for a total of 720 megawatts.

https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/482166-388954-portland-co...

Maybe if you can't fathom the precision required to irradiate the NIF hohlraum sufficiently isotropically to achieve ignition in the first place, you shouldn't be trying to answer this question.

You don't even need explosives to get a self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction if you don't want a bomb; Harry Daghlian did it accidentally, Fermi did it underneath Stagg Field in Chicago in 01942, we do it routinely to generate electricity, and 16 fossil natural nuclear fission reactors have been discovered in Oklo. The explosives are only there to keep a rapid chain reaction from driving the pieces apart before you get enough yield for a weapon.

It's true that the NIF would not make a very useful bomb, being difficult to deliver to enemy territory even by ship, and probably inflicting more damage on the funding agency than the destroyed enemy city. But a significant part of that is non-recurring engineering costs, and it's probably possible to miniaturize it to a significant degree.

I read Freeman Dyson's autobiography recently, and he claims (contrary to the report of continuing DOE research in the Wikipedia article) one of the things they stopped working on in the 01960s due to the arms treaties was specifically hydrogen bombs that didn't require fission igniters.

I think construing her video as a "debunking" does it a disservice, for what it's worth. It's a call for journalists and laypeople to be cautious when interpreting lab results. She doesn't "dunk on" fusion power or say that it's not worth investigating.