Is this big? Fusion positive output achieved

[Anonymous No.6075687]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621

Is this big or a waste of hopes?

[Anonymous No.6075695]

Huge.

Clearly fusion is no more than 20 years away.

[Anonymous No.6075700]

>>6075695
This makes me feel better about working with aerospace engineering. I get to design the ships that will use those bad boys. Right?

...Right?

[Anonymous No.6075715]

>>6075700

[Anonymous No.6075720]

>>6075687
It's fairly big. It's still not a working generator yet, but it proves that it's possible to run a positive-output fusion reaction on Earth. Still, it's not actually at breakeven - they haven't overcome the inefficiency of the power-delivery method, the lasers - but it's a real milestone.

[Anonymous No.6075723]

>>6075695
>20 years away
When you hear researchers tossing this figure around, it means "We're not even close and are just hoping some genius will make a massive discovery here before too long."

And, because I'm in the mood to translate researcher speak:
>10 years away
"We're vaguely aware of what needs to happen in order to pull this off, but we have no idea what we're doing"

>5 years away
"We could get this running within ten years if we could secure continuous funding"

>2 years away
"We'll have it in 5 years as long as nothing major goes wrong. Something major usually goes wrong."

>1 year away
"It's all worked out and we could having it running in a month, but we can't get a grant and no business wants to finance this pipe dream"

>6 months away
"Seriously people, we've seen grants twice the amount of what we need get approved for watching pigeons! We could have a functioning prototype by a couple weeks if you all weren't such fucking tightwads!"

[Anonymous No.6075727]

>>6075723
It's a running "joke" in fusion research that fusion is 20 years away and always will be, because of precisely that; this is well-known. In other words

---The Joke---

---Geostationary Orbit---

---Low Earth Orbit---

---Atmosphere---

---Your Head---

[Anonymous No.6075730]

>>6075727

You forgot La Grange point.

Faggot.

[Anonymous No.6075741]

>>6075730
Do galaxies have la grange points?

[Anonymous No.6075743]

>>6075730
The joke's not THAT far over his head. At least he understood the vague gist of what "20 years away" meant.

[Anonymous No.6075750]

>>6075720
>it proves that it's possible to run a positive-output fusion reaction on Earth
That was proved on Bikini Atoll, leading to the atomic swimsuit.

This is not really proof of anything, other than that the NIF is making progress, which is good news.

[Anonymous No.6075752]

>>6075750
I'm inclined to agree. Progress is progress, but I think this is mainly the NIF talking itself up.

[Anonymous No.6075774]

>>6075741
Lagrangian points only occur around orbiting bodies, but there's no reason to think that a galaxy in a stable orbit around another galaxy wouldn't have the usual five lagrangian points.

[Anonymous No.6075825]

they got a lotta nice girls there

[Talimar No.6075872]

Needs more math.

Theoretically, you can further improve their work by improving the calculation for how light particles distribute their energy when "interacting" with atoms at the mono-level.

Since we're dealing with pellets, we get stuck with additional bonds and a few other factors. One of the many things I've not read about this kind of reactor is how the pellet is structurally. (crystal-type.)

[Anonymous No.6075878]

>>6075743
I agree, I would say the joke was tangent to his head.

[Anonymous No.6075881]

>>6075687
Its not new. The goal of commercial energy is to have an output of 8.

Japan achieved 1.5 many years ago.

[Anonymous No.6075951]

its expected
took em long enough

[Anonymous No.6076635]

>>6075951
atleast we got it

[Anonymous No.6076642]

>>6075687
Depends on the efficiency.
Is it all heat?
Is it all light?
Is there an easy way to harness it?

[Anonymous No.6076647]

>>6076642
Fusion technology is basically very expensive fireworks until they make something to harness it.

[Anonymous No.6076680]

>>6076647
"Harnessing it" is the easy part. Fusion is hot. Heat can boil water. Boiling water can drive turbines. Turbines can turn generators.

The tricky part is making more energy than you put in, at competitive cost.

[Anonymous No.6076700]

>>6076680
>at competitive cost.
this is the key phrase.
NIF is not competitively priced. neither is ITER or its supposed commercial followup version.

They are cash sinkholes and we'll stop feeding them whenever a smale scale fusion approach manages to produce net power in a decade or so.

[Anonymous No.6076711]

>>6076700
>whenever a smale scale fusion approach manages to produce net power
>in a decade or so.
loloptimism

There's no reason NIF and ITER type approaches can't be cost-competitive, but they're still working out how to get net energy out at all. Of course the experimental facilities are big and expensive, particularly since they're being run as government megaprojects.

The difference between mainstream fusion and these oddball little fusion projects which make big promises is that we know the mainstream fusion designs can be made to function, and with the oddball designs we don't know whether they're even physically possible.

[Anonymous No.6076726]

>>6076642

the reaction is exothermic. The energy produced will be conventional i.e., heat used to do work (boil water).

Lets say we produce limitless energy at little to no cost. New problem: the fact that the 7-14 billion people on the planet will use that energy to deplete all resources as quickly as possible, reducing the planet to rubble populated by surplus and redundant morons.

With cold fusions, success in the primary reaction is just the beginning of a whole new set of intractable problems. Its just physics. We have not solved the greater problem of limitless human stupidity, religion, and etc.

Science has a terrible track record of putting high technology in the hands of total retrograde morons. It will continue to do so until the planet is destroyed. There is a flaw in the method, that is, it does not solve problems so much as create them

[Anonymous No.6076748]

>>6076711
How do they all get funded if their proofs of concept aren't functional?

[Anonymous No.6076787]

>>6076748
Now THIS fusion project is worth watching: using gigantic pistons to both initiate fusion via shockwave in molten lead, and the molten lead and pistons are also used to extract the energy. It is like a FUSION internal combustion engine. The technologies are much more mature than those of ITER, Tokamak, etc. I hope it works.

[Anonymous No.6076790]

>>6076748
Charismatic investment pitch. Credulous family and friends. Gamblers with lots of money. People who are curious to see whether it works. Research funders who are interested in improved neutron sources.

[Anonymous No.6076824]

>>6076790
Really though? Promises?

[Anonymous No.6076846]

>>6076726
I always thought of it in another way: think of all the countries that are petrostates: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran (sorta), Iraq (more or less), Nigeria, etc. All opressive governments that rely on petro $ for stability. If that kind of thing came on line and replaced carbon fuels with any speed, those regimes would collapse. Imagine the global instability shitstorm that would create......It'd be a fucking disaster.

[Anonymous No.6076856]

>>6076824
Are you really this bad at communicating?

Did you mean to say, "But General Fusion did a proof-of-concept prototype that proves that it can work!" ?

Because they didn't. The General Fusion concept starts with heating a plasma to fusion temperatures, in a similar way to operating a fusor. Of course their little toy model made fusion neutrons. So do things that high-school kids made, so do sealed-tube neutron sources commonly used for prospecting.

The whole concept here is that they can dramatically increase the rate of fusion, in plasma already heated to fusion temperature, by compressing the plasma with hot metal. That still hasn't been demonstrated at all.

[Anonymous No.6076868]

>>6076846
Big oil would remain big. You need oil for a lot more than just powering your computer. Everything involving plastic needs oil products, for example. If I remember right, our non-energy uses of oil are substantially larger than our energy uses of it.

[Anonymous No.6076874]

>>6076868
We could start producing some fun organic compounds with all of that excess power and fossil fuels.

[Anonymous No.6076875]

>>6076868
If you have lots of cheap electricity, you can just make hydrocarbons from any source of hydrogen and carbon, such as water and air.

Remember that the Nazis made most of their aviation gasoline out of coal. Bombing their gasoline synthesis plants was one of the key strategic moves that put them out of the war.

[Anonymous No.6076876]

>>6076868
That is a good point, and it's not like our cars would suddenly run on tiny fusion reactors. I do think it's intersting to think how radical changes in the energy industry would shape politics and conflict. There'd be some sort of restructuring, for that i'm certain. I suppose initially it'd replace nuclear power.

[Anonymous No.6076879]

>>6076875
This.
Once you have very cheap, abundant energy, nothing is a problem. We will easily solve all the world's problems from hunger to global warming.

[Anonymous No.6076884]

>>6076856
That device proved it is possible to compress a spheromak with the piston system. It wasn't just a plasma injector.

[Anonymous No.6076907]

>>6076884
But it didn't prove that it's possible to get more fusion out of it than you would without the metal.

[Anonymous No.6076914]

>>6076907
Yeah, because the point of the design is to use the metal. It's acoustic compression.

[Anonymous No.6076959]

>>6076914
I don't even know what you're trying to say. You just fail at communication too hard, and I'm giving up on you.

[Anonymous No.6076967]

>>6076959
>misunderstanding the reactor design this hard

[Anonymous No.6077913]

>>6075687
I feel generally opposed to this.

I don't know for sure, but I can almost guarantee you 2 things about the fusion type they're shooting for. 1- It uses deuterium and tritium as its fuel, whose fusion process emits a neutron, and 2- it uses any kind of our harder alloys as a container

thus you get activation of these harder alloys, most significantly the cobalt, and you end up with the same potentially extraordinarily high radiation levels of a conventional fission power plant.

In the end you'll have just as high of a cost and the need for extreme safety controls as conventional nuclear power. One of these fusion reactors might get too hot, blow itself apart, scattering extremely radioactive particulates into the air, these particulates get inside living things, and people get really sick and die or have cancer.

congrats fusion, you ended up being only marginally better than nuclear fission. It may be impossible to achieve, but I'm only going to be happy with nuclear power when it doesn't release tons of neutrons.

[Anonymous No.6077930]

>>6077913
>I don't like this because I have done no research at all and assume they'll use cobalt in the reactor chamber walls.
I could understand worrying about the nuclear weapon proliferation potential, since fusion makes much more neutrons than fission does, but worrying about radioactive waste is silly.

They're not idiots. They're going to use mostly materials that can't be made radioactive by neutrons (like lead and lithium), or develop only low-grade radioactivity (like steel).

[Anonymous No.6077941]

>>6076680

>making more energy than you put in

This is impossible.

[Anonymous No.6077945]

>>6077930
They're going to use materials that have significantly less chance of being able to contain the energy release of fusion?

Really?

>Hey investors our fusion reactor cracks in half within 9 months, I'm sure this will work out for you give us money.

[Anonymous No.6077963]

>>6077941
In context of fusion we're simply talking about finding an efficient enough way to reach the required temperature and pressure to overcome the repulsive coulomb force so we can utilize the even stronger nuclear force and resulting energy release.

[Anonymous No.6077985]

>>6077945
You obviously know absolutely nothing about how this stuff works, and about engineering in general.

Learn more before you try and criticize.

[Anonymous No.6078041]

>>6077985
I understand plenty.

This progress is essentially no progress at all in harnessing fusion for practical energy.

There are real material concerns that they have no way of addressing. They don't even have practical ideas on how the energy release will be turned into usable energy. How is it going to heat water efficiently? At what level of power does the fusion reactor have to operate at to be considered self-sustaining, and thus how much further will they have to scale up the size to achieve that? How will they prevent the generation of massive amounts of radioactive waste with the extreme levels of neutron generation this kind of fusion results in? How do they replace the fuel pellet each time? How do they return to the extremely cold temperatures needed for their system to successfully ignite the fuel in the first place?

Succeeding at generating more energy release from the fusion fuel than the energy put into the fuel for the first time on earth is a big whoopdy-fucking-do when the entire design has zero practical connections to actually using fusion practically.

[Anonymous No.6078070]

>>6078041
>They don't even have practical ideas on how the energy release will be turned into usable energy.
Are you joking, or are you really this ignorant?

[Anonymous No.6078100]

>>6078070
If it's so obvious, why don't you explain to me how they're going to do it?

In fission, they can run water over huge amounts of the surface area of the fuel. In fusion, we have a sudden exothermic reaction of fuel contained in extremely precise hohlraums at cold temperatures with extremely high powered lasers pointed at it. You realize the hohlraum has to be destroyed with every shot, right?

I mean you're going to tell me that OBVIOUSLY they're going to just be able to have some water nearby and it'll conveniently get hot with NO efficiency losses from the fusion energy relase, and that water turns to steam, and that steam spins a turbine efficiently enough that they can refreeze the chamber and refire the lasers all over again, right?

[Anonymous No.6078148]

>>6078100
>refreeze the chamber
See this shit? This shit right here. Completely fucking insane.

The chamber isn't frozen. Only the fuel pellet is, and that's just so it's dense. It only needs to stay frozen until its put in place and hit with the lasers. Why would anything else need to be cold?

The chamber walls would most likely be coated with liquid lithium, to catch unburned hydrogen isotopes and protect the solid wall of the chamber from damage by plasma exposure. Behind that there would be a layer of lead to serve as a neutron multiplier. Behind that would be the lithium blanket for breeding tritium. Maybe then a neutron reflector like carbon, and behind that some plastic with boron in it to soak up any neutrons leaking out. There would need to be some structural material and pipes, but there are various options for materials that won't become too seriously radioactive when used in this role.

You'd have cooling pipes through the lead and lithium blankets. This is where you'd get the power out. And yes, it would most likely be by boiling water to make steam.

[Anonymous No.6078239]

>>6078148
>It only needs to stay frozen until its put in place and hit with the lasers. Why would anything else need to be cold?

the lasers also need to be cooled.

[Anonymous No.6078283]

>>6078239
The lasers aren't in the chamber.

[Anonymous No.6078363]

>>6078283
Do these lasers even have cryogenic components?