Fusion Reactor Breaks Even

mysqlbytes writes "The BBC is reporting the National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Livermore in California, has succeeded in breaking even — 'During an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel — the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.'"

Comments

Here's the real story

[Neo-Rio-101]

FTFA:
"Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission."

Makes you wonder where we'd be now if we stopped pissing about on weapons research.

$200 per pound = millions of tons of coal

[raymorris]

The RESEARCH is expensive. The base fuel comes from seawater and costs hundreds of dollars per pound. The energy in one pound is equal to millions of pounds of coal.

Even better, most of the fuel cost is the energy needed to separate the fuel from seawater. With self-powering desalination / fusion plants, fuel cost would be pennies.

The difficulty is that conditions have to be just perfect to keep the reaction going. If anything isn't just right, the process stops and you're left with what looks and acts like a baby aspirin. That's awesome for safety, though. That's the opposite of fission, where they are trying to keep a naturally volatile reaction under control.

Re:Holy fucking shit, this is AWESOME.

[WalksOnDirt]

...released energy (a large chunk of which is energetic neutrons, i.e. not recoverable)...

The energy in neutrons is not unrecoverable. You would probably need to use a heat engine to get the energy out, but at high temperatures that could be efficient.

The break even point is somewhat arbitrary, as any neutrons out will give you some heat. All you have to do is harness it. In practice, though, about 10X break even is thought to be necessary. To be economic you would need much more, especially since fission is so easy. Most fusion reactions will also create waste, and any reaction that creates copious neutrons will be a proliferation risk. Aneutronic fusion is very hard, and the NRC would probably crush anything else.

It's a nice technical achievement, but I can't see us using it to produce electricity.