I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how far we've come.
Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.
When you consider that they laser they used consumed 300 megajoules from the wall plug, in order to send 1.8 megajoules to the target, the fact that they got 2.5 megajoules out looks puny in comparison. Even newer lasers only have 20% wall plug efficiency according to the press conference.
So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain. They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only talk about the 1.8 megajoules of laser energy sent to the target, not about the 300 megajoules of electricity needed to send 1.8 megajoules to the target.
The NIF is not intended to be a power plant, and inertial containment in general is probably not a great design for producing power.
This is scientific breakthrough. The best point of comparison is probably a fusion bomb, which requires an initial fission detonation to create enough pressure and free neutrons to force a net-positive fusion reaction. But at the NIF they do it using only lasers… incredible.
Mass is energy. Add energy (in any form, such as heat) to a system and you increase its mass. Thus, in the NIF reaction, the mass lost from the pellet is mass imparted on the surrounding environment. Immediately after the fusion reaction, before the energy can dissipate further as heat, etc, the reaction chamber system has the same mass as before the ignition.
There are some nuances regarding the distinction between rest mass vs relativistic mass, but they're not really relevant in this context.
I think what trips people up here is confusing mass with matter. Matter is also subject to mass-energy equivalence, of course, but AFAIU in most common types of nuclear reactions little if any matter, per se, is transformed.
Power plants add energy to an electrical grid by converting external (chemical/nuclear/kinetic) energy into more electricity than they consume. There's no loss of energy/mass overall, but the amount of available electricity goes up. Since the laser would use electricity from the grid, that should be taken into account.
The point is to get some of it from somewhere cheaper/free - mass, or outside air as in heat pumps.
You can't run your laser on mass or air, if you need a coal firing power plant to run your fusion reactor, from which you get less than you consumed from the coal plant...
It's great progress, it's just not as close to viable as it might sound like - more breakthroughs needed.
I have yet to find someone saying it sounds like fusion power reactors are right around the corner, but I have found lots of people shadowboxing these people and attacking the scientists for misleading press releases.
Seems like an overcorrection to something I haven't even seen anyone here say.
I think to a lot of the technically minded, but non nuclear physicists here, it initially sounded like less (paid for/electricity) energy was used than was put out. That's extremely exciting, and the actual news is still fantastic, it's just that 'actually, we needed to pay for over 100x more energy than we counted as the "input" energy [and it's possible to do 10x but not 100x better than that]' is quite a massive caveat on a 3:2 or whatever yield.
I'm not saying they've claimed anything wrong or deliberately misleading, it's just a misunderstanding/misalignment and possibly made worse by the PR teams in the middle.
In other words, I don't think it's an angry 'well actually' type correction so much as it is disappointment - it initially sounded even greater.
Not necessarily, it depends on how the reaction scales. If the reaction does not scale linearly (as is claimed) you don’t necessarily have to get more efficient, you just have to up the power until the output curve has increased past the input scaling. How big that is is determined by the efficiency of the input device itself, but it isn’t a question of if it will ever happen.
Yes, sure, it's just still a breakthrough or so (or at least work, I don't know how within grasp it is) away from what one may have (as did I) initially assumed.
Tangentially, it does seem fairly intuitive that it should be non-linear in that 'jump start' as it were: a fire can be grown arbitrarily large having started from a single match (or flint or whatever).
You are correct: this is the important point. Until this is actually powering homes at scale and competitive price- which, clearly from these numbers is a fantasy- developments in this field should be dismissed. It's embarrassing to see HN so excited about what's really quite the failure.
As was pointed out in other comments, their lasers and electrical equipment were not efficient as it was not necessary to get the scientific knowledge.
In the press conference they mentioned that modern lasers have "20% wall plug efficiency". That means fusion has to generate 5x more energy than this experiment did, for you to get more energy out than you put in.
Because now it’s reproducible, controllable and consistently net positive in terms of energy output.
It’s not a fluke anymore and I assume the engineering behind this is now understood well enough to develop it further and scale it up.
Fusion for the most part isn’t a physics problem it’s an engineering problem the difficulty was always in how to implement it in the real world rather than in math at ideal white paper conditions.
What information available to the public suggests this is reproducible and consistent? They do hundreds of shots every year. Why do we think that this energetic shot wasn't just a result of getting luckier this time than they did a few years ago?
> In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition, but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the following months fell short.
A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it?
If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?
The hype machine is fully engaged, and may lead to an influx of budget, something of deadly seriousness to DoE. They have had trouble getting funding increases for this kind of weapons work when it was represented as weapons work. Pretend it's not, and people fall all over themselves to praise it.
The one where the US tends to perform well against its adversaries. True in the Civil War. True in WW1. True in WW2. True in Korea. True in Vietnam. True in the Gulf War. True in Afghanistan. True in Iraq.
And now just a smidgen of its old weapons are helping Ukraine humiliate Russia.
The US was in Afghanistan for two decades with 1,932 soldiers killed by hostile action.
Russia lost 15,000+ soldiers in Afghanistan in ten years (probably far higher given the information available and how we've seen Russia lie so dramatically about its losses in Ukraine). It's going to lose 100,000 soldiers in Ukraine in a little over a year.
The US could have held Afghanistan perpetually with 15,000-20,000 soldiers on the ground. The Taliban is a joke of a fighting force, they never competed well with the US; but they have replacement numbers, and guerrilla wars are very time consuming to fight and require massive troop deployments to actually win (you have to suffocate every corner of the enemy presence, like battling an infestation). It wasn't worth it and voters decided that, it had begun to become an unpopular nation building exercise despite the very low losses for the US.
>You think so? Ya'll lost 200,000 men to Southern fever, steel, and shot. Next time it'll be 20 million. Know your limits, yankee, and stay north of Dallas.
The south started with a treasonous surprise attack and had most of the the infantry that wasn't stationed in isolated western frontier territory or along the us-canada border, the countries war college at westpoint and many of the countries highest generals, once the north got its act together it started to burn the south to the ground. There is a reason the south still dreads the name Sherman.
You got set on fire once when you started the fight with sucker punch, and you want to try to pick fight again?
Well put. For our international observers I would note that the War of Southern Aggression that began with the treasonous attack on Fort Sumter is nearly identical to the behavior we're seeing out of similar origins today. New US states were increasingly free rather than slave states, and thus when democracy wasn't going the way of those who wanted to maintain slavery, they attacked their own government.
The terrorist attack on January 6th was the exact same root cause, democracy not going the way some want it. Leading them to embrace terrorism and violence. After the Civil War, the KKK was created, which continued the terrorism of our citizenry for decades. Yet in that case, the KKK came after the failed attempt at succession, today MAGA came before the attempt.
I describe myself as a 'pre-MAGA Republican who supports labor unions', but there's a rotten seed in American discourse today that was always there and it's largely the same people then as now.
The south would have no chance in Round 2. Most of their money and manpower actually comes from 'Yankees'. Which historically when someone is called that, it's the easy indicator to who is loyal and true to the United States, a real American patriot. Whether spoken spoken by a Brit or Johnny Reb, you definitely want to be called a Yankee as it's a badge of honor that you are loyal to your nation.
Those that are moving south are whose ancestors' allegiance was to the United States of America in the Civil War, and they still maintain that allegiance to this day in those families. They are not loyal to the defunct Confederacy and would not die for their Lost Cause.
> badge of honor that you are loyal to your nation.
When ya'll roped us into fighting the British, that declaration you published called us the "united States of America." Not the "United States of America." That's a subtle difference, but an important one.
When in the course of human events, one State does something another State considers intolerable, that State has every right to throw off the shackles of friendship and loyalty. We united our states out of a common interest, but we _never_ signed away our rights to a federal government. We started as, and remain, a republic of states.
And yeah, you may be Athens with all your philosophy and fem lit universities up north, but before you go threatening war, remember which part of the country is Sparta.
>And yeah, you may be Athens with all your philosophy and fem lit universities up north, but before you go threatening war, remember which part of the country is Sparta.
There is just so much wrong with this statement I don know where to begin
First off the Athenian league Won against the Spartans... so Ok we are agreed that the south is Sparta in this analogy.
Also you do realize that the southern culture and spartan culture are completely opposite on everything but slavery right?
Sparta had institutionalized Pederasty and post-birth abortion and encouraged homosexuality in the military none of which are thing liked by the south.
secondly Sparta went into decline as it increasingly focused on suppressing the helots (slaves) the the exclusion of all else destroying there society. as Sparta militarized itself to the point that spartan men spent most of their lives living in their barrack away from their wives dropping their birth rate.
as for "fem lit university" spartan women were some of the most independent and educated in the ancient world.
as for claim that
>State has every right to throw off the shackles of friendship and loyalty. We united our states out of a common interest, but we _never_ signed away our rights to a federal government.
you did. what you are talking about dates back to the articles of confederation which was superseded by the US constitution which was ratified by all of the states the south included, and provisions a strong federal government.
Sparta lost, by the way. Just as the Confederacy did. So I can’t argue against that. If you guys can get off disability or out of the Waffle House to fight us.
A states rights argument. We know what you wanted, to enslave mankind so you didn’t have to work. That’s what it was about. We already did war. And we successfully put an end to your treasonous ancestors, and ended your deplorable system of slavery.
I’m not sure what you folks are angry about. Losing? No slaves? Failed at treason?
When I lived in Texas I asked a man there how they could possibly celebrate the 4th of July. No one can answer that. The CSA were traitors, and all traitors receive a traitors death.
Never heard such sentiments before now from an American. That's just disgusting. Disdain for fighting for the freedom of our nation? Much of The South really is a cesspool.
The rest of this recent reply is just hilarious though. Pretending you got "tired of killing them" and surrendered? Yes, exactly. Great interpretation of an utterly and completely defeated people. I lived in Texas, they can't even defend our southern border from illegal immigration, and we're supposed to be scared? I saw nothing particularly tough or built about any of it. They're just bitter and pissed like many south of the Mason-Dixon are to this day. Hatred for real Americans (Yankees) doesn't mean a thing. Come up here and chop some wood in the winter, your balls will drop and may sprout some hair.
As noted, simply being of or from The South does not make one a traitor (nor does it make one wise or tough). Whether it's Ulysses S. Grant or the great patriot, Sam Houston, men from all parts of the US ended up in Texas.
It's everyone's choice whether you want to go the route of hiding under a woman's dress like the Jefferson Davis, or a man that history looks kindly on like Sam Houston. Some of you are built different for sure. Not very bright, and prone to treason. Apparently in both the Civil War and Revolution. That was a new one for me. Lines up well with January 6th though.
> Come up here and chop some wood in the winter, your balls will drop and may sprout some hair.
Hmm... I lived out of a tent in the Catskills for a full year. I only left because I didn't want to go through a second winter. In fact, I've lived on every coast of this country, and walked through a huge chunk of it. Where I live now, I built by hand from scratch. Cleared the land with a chainsaw, machete, and shovel. I seriously doubt you've got room to talk about balls dropping.
My point is that using the Civil War as an example of the "extreme military prowess" of the United States is kind of a joke, because that presupposes that "the United States" was the Union, and the Union lost way more men than the Confederacy did. Hundreds of thousands more. So maybe don't hold that up as a banner victory, because you did objectively lose it for the first ~3 years.
By the way, I'm a fuckin' anarchist, so don't put Jan 6 on me. I don't give a fuck who's president.
“Texas declared its secession from the Union on February 1, 1861, and joined the Confederate States on March 2, 1861, after it had replaced its governor, Sam Houston, who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.”
Russia is struggling with Ukraine and the NATO weaponry they've been gifted. 100 mile supply lines proved too much, and they failed entirely to achieve air superiority.
There's zero reason to think they'd do better against the US more directly.
Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then struggling not to starve to death
Why do you think a country that isn't capable of properly maintaining tanks is capable of maintaining nukes? I mean, ICBMs are literally rocket science with nuclear physics on top of them.
How can a country that cannot even prevent theft of electronics from their "doomsday plane" in front of the 9th of May parade keep a fleet of ICBMs operative?
In a normal year Russia has a total military budget that is smaller than the part of the US military budged allocated to nuke maintenance. How do you think they keep their nukes ready?
All this is before we start talking about corruption. There is a reason why some Russian military leaders have yachts and/or palaces and US military leaders doesn't have them.
In all fairness, maybe most of the yachts are made of missing winter uniforms (I recently saw Russians wearing Tyvek suits as "winter uniforms"). But if they steal so openly from things that was supposed to be used - why wouldn't they steal even more from things that were never meant to be used?
Before I round up, some hearsay: Some journalist that claimed he traveled throught the former Soviet Union shortly after the collapse (I have forgotten the name and I am in no position to verify it anyway) said that he saw missile silos full of rainwater. And when he asked people said it had already been like that for a few years before the collapse in 1991.
Do I think we don't have to care? Absolutely not. They might very well have a few functional nukes, maintained by enthusiastic crews, sailing around on subs somewhere I don't know (I don't follow the space to closely).
But I am not worried that they will send US back to the stone age at all.
A nuclear arsenal where only 100 of the 6,000 warheads are actually maintained and functional is still a useful one, though. Less so if 100/6,000 tanks work.
Do you remember when there was a tiny blip in production for COVID, and suddenly the shelves were empty? What do you think is going to happen if 100 nukes go off and wipe out strategic chunks of the USA?
The idea that any armed conflict between the two is guaranteed to escalate to nuclear weapons is widespread, but certainly not proven. A US invasion of Russia seems likely to result in nuclear war, but an engagement between conventional forces over a third-party nation like Ukraine seems quite unlikely to. Neither side is suicidal at the leadership level.
US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam without nuclear holocaust.
If Putin had a big red button that ran wirelessly and automatically, I'd be concerned.
Human beings have to actually implement the order. I think a first-strike order on the US without a serious and immediate existential threat to the Russian state and people winds up with someone offing him with their sidearm.
The Russians have plenty of precedent for this (both offing the leadership, and more generally "oops, he fell out of a window" as a solution), and we've a number of historical examples of lower-level folks going "I don't wanna" in false-alarm situations, like Stanislav Petrov.
I agree, a first strike order is very unlikely.
But what if he fires off a nuke over Ukraine? Maybe in a way that it's not 100% clear whether it's a Russian nuke, or a power plant blowing up, or somebody else?
Or he orders to detonate a bomb over the open sea to demonstrate the capability?
But certainly, if I would be Putin, I'd be nervous drinking tea, or walking close to a window. That doesn't make him more stable though.
You can't make a nuke look like a power plant explosion; they're simply too different. No nuclear power station can explode in that fashion.
A bomb over the ocean wouldn't demonstrate any new capacity, and would be seen as the bluff it would almost certainly be.
A nuke on Ukranian soil would further open the floodgates of Western aid, expand sanctions, and push more nations firmly into the EU/NATO fold as Finland and Sweden already have been.
A nuke on Ukrainian soil also has the problem of the prevailing wind direction being from west to east. Detonating a nuke on Ukraine looks a lot like detonating a (smaller) dirty bomb on Russia.
Let's check our assumptions. The bulletin of atomic scientists first published in 2017 [0] that they felt the modernized US nuclear arsenal is likely sufficient to execute a devastatingly successful first-strike against the Russian arsenal and nuclear command and control, because the new 'super-fuze' in the submarine arsenal significantly upgrades the hard-target kill capability of the warheads. The risk they communicate in this article is that Russia will misinterpret a false positive from their early warning system (which offers only half the warning time of the US') and launch a "retaliatory" strike against the US on a false alarm, because they do not expect to have that capability after a US strike. The modernization program has continued since 2017 and extended to the minuteman arsenal.
>the United States would be able to target huge portions of its nuclear force against non-hardened targets, the destruction of which would be crucial to a “successful” first strike...The garrisons and their support facilities would probably be destroyed quickly, and some of the dispersed road-mobile launchers would also be quickly destroyed as they were in the process of dispersing. To destroy or expose the remaining launchers...Just 125 US Minuteman III warheads could set fire to some 8,000 square miles of forest area where the road-mobile missiles are most likely to be deployed. This would be the equivalent of a circular area with a diameter of 100 miles.
>Many of the nearly 300 remaining deployed W76 warheads could be used to attack all command posts associated with Russian ICBMs.
Probably the warfare that involved invading and occupying 2 states thousands of miles away for 20 years with complete air dominance and suffering under 10,000 KIA. Russia has suffered 20,000 deaths in under a year on its boarder.
> The service has not fully delivered on, or explained what, that unmanned concept or capability would look like. Defense experts told Military.com prior to the rollout that it is unlikely we’d see a fully autonomous bomber anywhere in the near future.
They also canceled the drone wingman:
> In 2021, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall publicly discussed the idea of having a drone counterpart to the B-21 that would essentially act as a wingman alongside the bomber. But Kendall later backtracked, telling Breaking Defense in July that the concept was not as “cost-effective” and “less attractive” than previously thought.
I agree. This is a Big deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or polio-vaccine big.
My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star Trek.
Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as their future are just sooooo tiny compared to their reality. I'm thinking of faster horses and they're going to live in a world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small thinking of mine.
I'm so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are going to live such better lives.
I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into my old age. Even if we don’t get commercial fusion until the 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still need to pay for likely massive capex, R&D, and transmission) and its repercussions!
At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no need for fission plants, radically reduced costs for industrial manufacturing. Cheap energy could make raw resource extraction much cheaper and more easily automated. Fast transportation, vertical farming. With the concurrent innovations in battery tech, robotics/automation, and electric vehicles and ships, the future is looking incredibly bright
I think you're hand waving too many of the problems away and letting your imagination run way ahead of reality.
> no need for fission plants
Not sure why this is a goal in and of itself. Everything you said is available today with fission and yet still too expensive to remove CO2. Fission has a more real shot at getting to the right price point before fusion even gets off the ground so why not push for more arrows behind something that's likely to help in our lifetime?
Energy is an input to basically every single thing we make or do. In economic models it’s often been found that “technology” parameters (inversely) correlate almost entirely to energy prices.
If energy cost very little, we could do previously unviable things like vertically farm and let farmland go back to nature, smelt ore onsite, or run simulations/models for a fraction of what they cost now.
That’s what I’m saying. Why are you assuming that energy costs for fusion would suddenly be lower? These plants take a lot to build and it’s not like the primary cost for fission is the fuel. It’s the recoupment of massive capex spend, cooling, maintenance, highly trained personnel.
I’m trying to show you that fusion isn’t going to magically rain energy mana down on us. It’s just fission with less waste (if you discount newer fission designs) except and potentially safer (if you discount newer fission designs) It’s likely significantly more expensive given it’s a more complicated reactor and we’ve built 0 commercially (and even with this achievement we’re not that much closer).
My point is, if you’re looking for boundless carbon-free energy, fission reactors already meet all the needs. Additional investments would get reactors that would generate waste competitive with fusion (and in fact can consume all existing generated waste as fuel) and are similarly safe (no runaway reactions).
I would encourage you, if you’re serious about carbon-free boundless energy, to devote your advocacy to advancing fission reactors. They’re here and there’s a straightforward R&D path to get the new reactors (regulatory hurdles are another thing). Fusion reactors won’t be here in any reasonable time frame (even if we had a workable design today it would take many decades to build them and then upgrade the grid).
Let's be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2/3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.
The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that's the climate change problem. And it is big.
Now let's pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won't change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.
We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that's the only way.
Not that I enjoy being a downer, but I think we're still quite a ways off from a trajectory towards Star Trek society. Clean energy production is absolutely key, with pollution and climate change being big obstacles to a prosperous future, but clean energy doesn't solve all air and water pollution. It won't necessarily scale economically. It also doesn't temper any megalomaniac's pride, to stop them from creating conflict as they try to subjugate everyone else. We live in a very divided, hierarchical world with a fragile order, subject to the whims of people with godlike power over the masses.
One of the most fantastical aspects of Star Trek was the societal evolution into one without interpersonal conflict, the idea being that without scarcity there's no good reason for conflict... I'm just not sure how well that would hold up, knowing people. I don't think all desire for status and power stems from scarcity of resources, and people will continue to lie and do harm to each other as long as they desire power over others.
> My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.
Being available to everyone does depend on who "everyone" is. If people use the energy to grow food (and more people) until we run into some other population-limiter, we'll always have too many people. Part of achieving sustainability is ending runaway growth. Maybe you can ask people nicely enough to stop reproducing, maybe education will do it, maybe nothing short of force will. Yet our economics were built around continual growth. So, that's all a big problem to solve, still.
The yield numbers don’t factor in all the energy needed for lasers etc. It is still massively in the negative. There is also no feasible way to extract energy from fusion done this way.
I love the optimism but it sets you up for failure and disappointment when you start thinking about all the free energy your children will have from this.
Free energy from a very successful fusion experiment called the sun bathes our planet every day. We know fusion works, but the devil is in the details.
I listened to the two hour press conference. NIF leadership made it clear that energy research is not what Ignition Day is about, why the NIF was made, or why the NIF is operated.
Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.