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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.'"
Cool. Let it run the US gov't.
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Mr. Fusion here we come!
why is the bbc first to report on this? It happens in CA, and we get scooped? wtf??
And about time too. I imagine there is still a great deal more work to be done before this is of any real use, but still wow. Just wow.
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Seems to have just a little more information than the source material :)
https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/index.php
A few points - Still more energy needed than produced - because lasers aren't 100%. They exceeded the amount of light energy going in, but not the power level fed into the laser. Second, how much of the released energy was in a form that could be fed back in to make the next thingy go moob? Not seeing anything on that here...
Overall though, it's a step in the right direction. Go guys go!
Fusion achieved. Sometimes we are awesome creatures, congrats to all involved.
And not a minute too soon.
define facility, because fusion is known to release energy with great facility.
Here is a picture that looks to me very much like a facility.
It achieved a net fusion output about 100X as much as the energy input. (This facility did have the drawback that it was vaporized within a few microseconds after startup, but that's just a cooling issue.)
I don't know a lot of about fusion, but I've read Helium is a byproduct of fusion reactions. Once these things start getting run more and more, will we be able to harvest the helium generated to stave off the coming shortages?
I had a sucky sig.
I agree. This experiment has a ways to go to true break even.
More output than expected? You mean like "Castle Bravo"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
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.
Exactly, and highly misleading really. After all, fusion bombs put out a lot more energy than you put in, but we can't capture it. This they are getting 1:1 but still won't be able to capture 50% of what they produce.
If this is the same system I saw a few years ago there is no chance of runaway reactions or explosions. Basically they put a BB sized amount of fuel into the center of a several story sphere and blast it with a bunch of lasers for a femtosecond. The amount of energy produced is basically a combination of the amount/type of fuel placed in the center of the chamber and the amount of laser energy they are able to hit it with. Sure they could put a baseball sized chunk of fuel in, but with the available laser energy it would never go nuclear. At current there is no way of adding fuel continuously to the chamber, and even if there were I don't think the lasers can fire in a sustained fashion.
Once again the devil is in the details. All they are saying is that the energy produced by the reaction is slightly greater than what it took to shoot the hollaram with the friggin laser. They haven't exactly captured it and put it back into to a laser pulse, because the energy in the form of D-D, D-T in neutrons is very hard to grab, Secondly it probably lasted a femtosecond, not exactly steady state. Progress, but my money is more on Internal Electrostatic Confinement devices like the Pollywell if they could somehow get around that nasty Bremsstrahlung Radiation.
Well, you have to keep feeding those pellets of hydrogen fuel into the reactor. Without those pellets, nothing to fuse, no energy out. I don't think there's a way for the reaction to go out of control with the way this works.
It isn't really a continuous reaction in the way that you are thinking. The way it works is that lasers fire at a tiny pellet containing a few milligrams of hydrogen fuel. Lasers are fired at the pellet from all sides. These lasers heat the surface of the pellet, which essentially implodes and causes a fusion reaction with the hydrogen. This causes a pulse of energy.
Each laser shot on each pellet generates a fixed amount of power, since there is only a small amount of hydrogen fuel in each pellet.
Getting continuous power means continuously dropping new pellets into the chamber, and firing the lasers at each pellet. So you can't really have a run away reaction in the way that is possible with uranium reactors, as with this design of fusion reactor, if you want to stop the reaction you either stop the pellet feed, stop firing the lasers, or both.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
It would just explode, and the ultimate ceiling is the tiny amount of fuel they're using (though in practice, there are lower ceilings related to the amount of heating/compression the machine can manage and the amount of time this compression is maintained). Wikipedia says that they're ultimately expecting 20MJ with the current setup (though the announcement indicates they only surpassed 1.8MJ), and with design improvements to the apparatus up to 100-150MJ. It also says the chamber is designed to contain a 45MJ explosion, equivalent to 11kg of TNT. To make a politically incorrect analogy, that's roughly as much a suicide bomber would carry, or the warhead of a hellfire anti-tank missile. It will make a decent "boom" but it won't destroy the building.
To achieve fusion, you heat fuel to about 50 times as hot as the interior of the sun. So you're WAY beyond red hot, like a million times red, when it's operating. That's one of the major problems - it tends to melt anything that gets near it, so how do you hold it in place?
If it got out of control, you'd let go, allow it to fall to the floor. 1 gram of hot fuel + 10,000 kilograms of cold concrete = cold, inert fuel. Alternatively, allow air in. Air mixed with the fuel would dilute it and the reaction would stop.
Suppose you couldn't drop it or otherwise disrupt the perfect conditions required for the reaction to continue? The reaction slows down if it gets TOO hot, so it can't get above that temperature. It would stay hot. That's about it. You'd have a VERY hot little cloud of hydrogen.
I'm not a nuclear physisist. I welcome corrections from any who are present.
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another 20 years of government employment and $3.5B U.S to accomplish that... LOL Hope I am wrong, call me cautiously optimistic.
I would say you are being way too optimistic. We are still at the stage where we are trying to prove the theory can be made real. Have not even thought about designing a usable reactor nor do we know how big such a reactor would be. All we know for sure is that it will be so bloody expensive that failure is not an option - which is why there are doing these far cheaper tests.
There are still three things missing:
1. Scientists are only counting the laser energy absorbed by the fuel. Not all of the laser energy is absorbed by the fuel.
2. Lasers are not 100% efficient. They take lot more energy than they give out.
3. The generated energy is in the form of heat. Converting it to electrical is not there.
Overall, the efficiency is still less than 1%. Far away from anything usable.
The cost of hydrogen has nothing to do with the viability of fusion reactions.
The end goal that must be met is financial viability of say $.05 per KWhr from a continuously operating fusion reactor over the lifetime of the facility.
We are a long time from such a result, if ever. We just don't know if and when we will achieve it.
The experiment has been successfully duplicated on the East Coast... 'During an experiment in late September, the amount of money released through the [congressional] confusion reaction exceeded the amount of money being absorbed by the central banks — the first time this had been achieved (this month) at any government facility in the world.'"
One of the big criticisms of the NIF is that the design is basically unsuited to capture more than a slim percentage of the energy released. It's good for weapons research because it works vaguely the same way a bomb does - rapidly compressing fuel in a burst. But it doesn't really have a mechanism for capturing that energy, unlike tokamak-based designs.
Based on the summary (still reading TFA itself), it sounds like they broke even in terms of the energy input into the fuel being less than the total amount released from the reaction. But to be a self-sustaining, practical fusion power source, it needs to extend that two directions - first, by breaking even in terms of power into the entire system being less than that released, and second by breaking even in terms of power captured, not just power generated. The former is straightforward - more efficient lasers, more efficient reactions - but, and this is from a non-engineer's perspective, I don't think the latter will be simple.
"I have not failed. I've successfully discovered 10,000 ways that do not work" - Thomas Edison.
So we just need someone 1/2 as persistent as Edison to get it done.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZ9HhHU86o
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I admire your gift for understatement...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
It's not our wildest dreams of fusion power realized, but the National Ignition Facility's break-even achievement lays the groundwork for future careers in fusion-related science -- research jobs created in the grand old USA (these fusion-related jobs are more and more being created across the pond, in Europe). As a physics graduate student studying intense laser-plasma interactions, I am keenly aware of the science funding situation. Truly, this is wonderful news!
Call it the US Post Office reactor. It's an upgrade from the Amtrak Reactor.
Table-ized A.I.
His idea was to have something like a geothermal power plant, except that the heat would come from periodically setting off hydrogen bombs underground.
Sure they could put a baseball sized chunk of fuel in, but with the available laser energy it would never go nuclear
But it would make the lasers go berserk and shrink everything around them.
A noob ain't gonna know what a moob is.
Table-ized A.I.
that Scottish guy in a red t-shirt messed with it. He had a big case of these funky crystals that he was trying to fit into the target. All he drank was some smelly green rocket fuel. Promised to be back when we had some antimatter to play with.
the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.
that is, if you consider only the attempts at forcefully breaking the Coulomb barrier.
I think Pat Metheny may have managed this in the 80s.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"I have not failed. I've managed my lab personnel who have discovered 10,000 ways that do not work, the efforts of whom I will now take personal credit." - Thomas Edison.
The man was a douchebag, and a patent troll to boot. He stole the LumiÃre brothers' motion picture apparatus and patented it in the US. When they brought their own invention to the US they had to pay Edison royalties.
Add to that his antics in the AC vs DC competition with Westinghouse/Tesla, and I'm surprised Edison didn't die in an "accidental" house fire.
Oh yes he does. All those Mountain Dews and Hot Pockets end up somewheres.
What of burning magnesium?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Read TFA, turns out summary was accurate for once.
I also realized that there's a third breakeven point that needs to be reached - the economic one, where the amount of money spent on fuel and operations is exceeded by the profits generated. NIF-type "reactors" may have some issues there (with the expensive "lens" of sorts that gets destroyed during the process), but even for them, I think just getting to the practical breakeven is harder than getting to the economic one (and for more continuous designs, it's even easier to get from practical breakeven to economic breakeven).
Nonetheless, I think this is a decent milestone. While the reactor design itself is unlikely to ever break even, hopefully they're at least learning enough about efficiently triggering a fusion reaction that they can apply it to more productive designs, whether they be tokamaks or some other design.
This is "theoretical breakeven" - the reaction put out more energy than went in. It's not "engineering breakeven", where you get out enough energy to power the system. Or "commercial breakeven", where the thing starts to make money.
It's a single event, not a continuous process. Laser fusion has always been an experimental way to study H-bomb type reactions, not a potential power source.
There are different ways to break-even.
Scientific break-even means the energy you've provided to the fuel's environment is less than the energy the reaction liberates. This is what is claimed here, although even then they're squinting a bit by only counting the light absorbed by the fuel pellet.
Engineering break-even accounts for the inefficiency in providing energy to the reaction (losses in laser beam generation and transmission, in this case) and inefficiency in converting the reaction energy into electricity (or other useful form.) Once you've reached engineering break-even, you have a facility which, provided with fuel, will provide you with electricity.
Economic break-even is when the amount of electricity generated is sufficient to pay for the capital, consumables and maintenance (and perhaps waste disposal and decommissioning) cost of the facility.
Incidentally, I thought magnetic confinement fusion reactors had reached scientific break-even a decade or two ago. I haven't found any support for this belief in a quick web search, so maybe I'm delusional.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Maybe because it isn't actually significant. "Breakeven", IIRC, is most commonly understood to mean that the fusion reaction put out more energy than was used to initiate it.But if you're going to be commercially honest about the energy accounting, you need to consider all the energy you used - the 'wallplug' efficiency, as most laser folks would say.
But LLL wants to sell this as a milestone because it yielded more energy *than the target absorbed*. Two way different criteria. LLL's milestone, while of academic interest and doubtless an engineering tour de force, provides no encouragement for commercial use of this technology.
My understanding is that no, they didn't attempt to capture the energy in a meaningful way. That really doesn't seem too hard, as all energy turns to heat pretty damn readily, but apparently that's tricky for fusion.
So sure it's a minor milestone, but a minor milestone on something that's a big friggin deal. Potentially as significant as when man learned to harness electricity.
You just put them in the basement of large buildings and use them as space heat. Cogen with fusion. Might generate a little heat in the bodies of shoppers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In 1952, we had a fusion reactor generate 40 petajoules of energy on input of well under 400 gigajoules.
FYI the traditional mooning emoticons have been ( | ) or ( * ) or =( * )=
The last being the full goat.
Kids think they have to reinvent everything.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Or will I have to fire up the flux capacitor?
Or by electrocution? He did also give us the electric chair :-)
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I think this is a decent milestone. While the reactor design itself is unlikely to ever break even, hopefully they're at least learning enough about efficiently triggering a fusion reaction that they can apply it to more productive designs
This achievement opens the door for future designs. Inertial confinement works; it needs improvement, but we're no longer debating whether it's possible to maintain symmetry or any of the other many doubts the detractors dwelled on.
The haters of NIF — and there are many — won't permit followup; they'll have it shut no matter what. For them, the whole idea of seeking energy sources that don't demand energy poverty is inherently illegitimate, and they run the show now. But the work and the results won't die at LLNL; there are other people and other nations that haven't decided to turn themselves into a windmill powered nature preserve.
So we'll have to let them take the ball and run with it. At least it will continue, now perhaps with far more enthusiasm.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The NIF just broke the world record for fusion energy gain factor (Q) with a burn of Q >= 1. The previous record was the Joint European Torus at Q ~= 0.7 . If the JT-60 could handle Tritium, it would probably have Q ~= 1.25 . ITER is expected to operate at Q values of 5-10.
The current cost of electricity in the USA is anywhere from $.08 to $.17 per KWh depending on location. If fusion can do it for $.20, or even $.25 it would probably be considered a win when you factor in the environmental benefits and reduced dependence on coal and other resources. If you figure in increased use of electric power in areas that currently use gas/oil like cars, then even $.25 looks great due to the reduced reliance on foreign sources.
You don't get that for free. It arrives diffuse and with low reliability, blocked by clouds and, half the time, but the Earth itself. Collection requires other expensive technologies. Solar power is so far from "free" and "uncomplicated" it's hilarious. The closest thing to free and uncomplicated is burning wood, given that it's about a million-year-old technology, and that's not actually free.
Why do people keep acting like there can only be one power source? There's lots of good things about solar and wind power. That doesn't mean there aren't also imperfect things that we can shore up.
Tokamaks are far closer to practicality. In 1997, JET achieved 16 MW of fusion power with 24 MW of heating. ITER will almost certainly achieve much greater than breakeven. The goal is Q=10, where Q is fusion power/input power.
It's sort of unfair to compare tokamak Q with laser Q. Lasers and holrahms are very inefficient at getting energy to the target. I don't have the numbers for the efficiencies of the neutral beams and microwave systems, but they are certainly better.
If we wanted an opinion from a science denier we would at least have asked one with entertaining bulging eyeballs and interesting lies about polar bears.
We just don't know if and when we will achieve it.
Sure we do. We're about twenty years away from a practical, economically viable fusion reactor, just as we've been for the last forty years.
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What of burning magnesium?
Yes, even that. You did remember to weigh the air before and after the experiment?
Yay! Phlogiston has negative mass!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
It was probably on the Discover channel (yeah yeah I know) about scientists and fusion research. One in particular was a geek girl who happened to belly dancer (what made it so memorable) who made the comment that she thought they'd have positive energy fusion power technology developed within 5 years. The thing that struck me was that it wasn't the typical "oh, in 15 years or so" vague timeline that never arrives. That kind of a statement struck me as peculiarly confident.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Don't we have one in the sky already, wouldn't it be better to use it and covert it (light/energy from the sun) into electricity ?
Why do I suspect that they will go on the rampage when this technology will be promising?
Make that: "resulting in a total efficiency of less than 1% if I read the wikipedia article correctly". It seems one of my links went wrong, and ate some text at the same time.
I'd say yes, this progress is terrific, butr concerning headstart I thought the NIF started maybe 10 years before Iter?
Herve S.
One prominent fusion researcher didn't say that - he said it's often said "we're X years away" but in reality mostly we're "$x billion dollars away" (where x was about 80 a couple of years ago). The problem is that fusion power generation research money has been declining since the 1970s so we're moving a lot slower than expected in earlier years.
Now $80bn is a lot of money and people often say "why should we spend that on something that might not work". Well, we know it'll work (ITER will have a gain of 10) and it's mainly now an engineering problem, not a basic science research problem, to get it to a working power plant. Considering $750bn (that's the DoD's estimate - so guaranteed to be the low estimate) cost of the Iraq War, $80bn is only just over 0.1 Iraq Wars. The Iraq War didn't exactly work. So all we do is have to not go to war one time and put the money into fusion research. Perhaps the money that has been saved by not going to war in Syria can be put into fusion research.
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This is not news. Even during the NIP failure, conditions reached 1/3rd of ignition. Breakeven occurs at about 20% self-heating, which is somewhere around what they saw.
This is fluffing. Here, some background:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/fusion-the-power-of-wishful-thinking/
Good thing too. I needed the money.
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I believe you are talking about the price of electricity to the customer, while GP was talking about the cost to produce at the plant, not including distribution, profit, etc.
Only if we can get enough people in politics to start planning for the future again.
It's simple really; it has the word nuclear in it.
Now, if they were shooting renewable turds with lasers and making energy, then the U.S. Press would be all over it like shit on a pig.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They may be producing energy but they're way way way behind in the expenses vs. revenue equation. They make these little target pellets that are crazy expensive, and the energy output is heat so that's pretty cheap. As always, they're still 20 years away from having a viable operation.
Because they believe the hype that they have been fed. These people tend to believe that the electric grid has storage abilities as well.
Time to offend someone
How is exceeding the amount of energy absorbed 'breaking even'?
I've always though the sideways 3 looked more like a ballsack than an arse anyway...
Is 1563649 a prime number?
BBC???
So make a big announcement without ANY details?
About the only figure mention in the article was that the program cost $3.5bn.
How can you have an article about fusion "breaking even" and not even mention input and output power. Kinda important.
Particularly if the power is not scaleable, Like you broke even, but only when using .005 watts or something.
"Progressives" automatically oppose any energy source that actually exists, even if it happens to be one they originally proposed. Get in line now for the T-shirt concession at your nearest fusion protest site.
Fusion energy looks great for in-space propulsion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zh9abFF3ZE
I was amazed to hear a goat.se reference in a movie. Why it stuck in my head.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That device is cheating. Most of the energy output is from fission. Most "hydrogen" bombs use the fusion as a neutron generator to induce fast fission. The energy boost from the fission is a nice extra, but not all that important.
You could build a nuclear power plant like that, with a fusion device at the center to generate lots of neutrons to strike a uranium cladding. It would have the advantage of being unable to melt down (as the cladding does not have to be near criticality), but it would be somewhat more expensive than existing designs. It would also have the same waste product and decommissioning challenges as existing reactors.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This project relies on hot fusion not crazy cold fusion. Speaking as a physics prof (but not one in plasma physics) the basic physics principles behind the project appear sound - at least I can find no obvious clangers. However that does not mean it is feasible since there are lots of unanswered questions such as will the liquid lead vortex collapse heat the plasma sufficiently to cause fusion etc. etc. The guy in charge is quite realistic about these problems and is quite upfront that there is no guarantee of success but, regardless of the result, this is not some completely nutty cold fusion scheme.
That device is cheating. Most of the energy output is from fission. Most "hydrogen" bombs use the fusion as a neutron generator to induce fast fission.
I realize that. That's why I only said the gain was about 100X, instead of the much higher number one might assume by using the total yield. However, it was still really only a wild-assed guess, because I don't actually know how much energy the primary trigger plus plutonium spark plug generated.
I really hope you're right. 4 billion dollars for cheap, plentiful energy by 2033? That's possibly the greatest bargain our species has ever been offered.
Last post!
A new suspense drama about 2 scientists looking for a new way to synthesize blue fusion and become pushers to the world economy. Only on the SyFy channel.
You have a peer-reviewed reference for that? Heh.
Who's "denying science" here? I merely agreed with a good observation. You're flinging completely irrelevant monkey poo.
Given that the NIF cheats by not accounting for the laser inefficiencies, by the same token, breakeven was achieved by the Japanese J-60 tokamak in 1998.
The conspiracist in me tells me that this is not new at all, and the significance of the progress has been inflated to satisfy investors.
And succeed from the Union. As the 15th largest economy in the world and a place where business interests from the South and Midwest are unpopular, read agribusiness and carbon based fuels, we can address the gridlock in Washington caused by the political abuse of these interests and separate from them. That includes Wall Street and the Right Wing of the Republican Party and the Bible Thumppers in the South. We can tell them all to take a hike. We wouldn't even need their water since having unlimited electricity means that we could desalinate from the Pacific Ocean. We can grow our own food, get out own water and have as much energy as we need, we can reduce the need for the internal combustion engine and use our own oil for petrochemicals, not burn it.
Does his mean that the enterprise won't crash into earth now?
Seriously? We need to go to the UK to learn about something happening in California? What's wrong with this picture?
I'll believe it, when they unplug the thing and it still stays on, and all they have to do is keep adding fuel ( where this fuel is not electricity).
Now, I see a story saying that they didn't really "break even" even in the limited sense that was claimed. Yet another case where skepticism (what you call "science denying") was warranted.
Here's the link to the Slashdot story of which I spoke.