Fusion Reaction Breakeven achieved!

[paleologos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation..._December_2022

WOW!!!
I remember being a secondary school student (so many years ago) hearing the teacher saying it would be achieved in a decade.
It took so long I did not expect to see that in my lifetime.

So, anybody here nuclearly minded to tell us if we should expect a reduction in the cost of energy any time soon?
Seriously now, I think this is really BIG!
Any prognostications on what to expect?

[alhoon]

According to the guys that made the discovery, you should expect it to make an impact ... by 2050. Remember, they did the fusion. Now they have to make it sustainable reaction and move it out of lab conditions that create the reactions to actual reactors and generators. After a generator is made and tested as we're talking about serious energy here, that generator must be turned to industrial scale.
After an industrial scale generator is made, a factory and procedures should be created for the generator to start creating lots and lots of energy. Then that factory should be connected to the grid which will require work and effort.
Then, more reactors would be needed.

Considering a nuclear power station, something we know quite well how to do, needs ~10 years to plan and make, you can be sure fusion won't be powering your lights in 2030.

It is a monumental discovery. The first full-scale nuclear power station was made in 1956.
Right now, we are more or less in the same stage as the 1938 group that figured what was going on.

And there are (thankfully) more checks and balanced and there is no looming big war to push the development.
So... at the very least 20 years till the first fusion power station IMO.

[Cyclops]

Its still a steam engine, right?

[antaeus]

I remember being a secondary school student (so many years ago) hearing the teacher saying it would be achieved in a decade.

The ongoing joke was that it was always a decade away. No matter how many decades pass.

[paleologos]

Perhaps all decades are equal in the eyes of the Lord but from where I stand this isn't the case.
At least there is some discernible progress this time.

[PointOfViewGun]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation..._December_2022

WOW!!!
I remember being a secondary school student (so many years ago) hearing the teacher saying it would be achieved in a decade.
It took so long I did not expect to see that in my lifetime.

So, anybody here nuclearly minded to tell us if we should expect a reduction in the cost of energy any time soon?
Seriously now, I think this is really BIG!
Any prognostications on what to expect?

It's a good step but it's still a small step that requires lot to happen before it can be commercially viable. To understand NIF we also need more information on how they harness the energy output and how they manage the much larger energy requirement to charge the lasers. In their design they need to repeat the step over and over again to generate power. I'd be much more excited if ITER manages to hold the magnetic field intact for long durations.

[paleologos]

Well, it really feels like we are waiting for materials science-&-technology to catch up to plasma physics theory.

[PointOfViewGun]

To advance as a civilization we need to develop news ways to mine, store and convert energy. It's perhaps one of the, if not the most, important place to invest in on this world.

[alhoon]

To advance as a civilization we need to develop news ways to mine, store and convert energy. It's perhaps one of the, if not the most, important place to invest in on this world.

Very well said!


I am a mining engineer and I have studied time-series as part of my studies in geostatistics and often time series went hand-to-hand with analysis of energy consumption and storage.

[PointOfViewGun]

I have to admit we have been focusing on the wrong projects. There is Helion. It has a completely cost effective and safe approach through pulsed fusion. It's the only reactor to reach 100 million degrees already achieving fusion. Their next (7th) iteration Polaris is expected to provide net electricity next year.



Fueled By Billionaire Dollars, Nuclear Fusion Enters A New Age

The dream inspired Ajay Royan, cofounder of Mithril Capital (with billionaire Peter Thiel), who in 2013 first invested $2 million in Redmond, Wash.-based Helion Energy so that it could build a prototype "repetitive pulse power" machine. Mithril has invested in Helion ever since, including its recent $500 million round (valuing the company at $3 billion) — with the promise of $1.7 billion more if the company’s seventh prototype works as hoped. Helion's round was led by Sam Altman of Y Combinator.

CEO David Kirtley explains that the initial R&D work behind Helion was done in federal labs, out of which Helion was spun in 2013. Freed from the federal R&D bureaucracy, Helion has been building new prototypes one after another ever since. “The startup mentality is not nice to have, it’s a requirement. and what we have focused on from the beginning," says Kirtley.

In 2020 Helion completed its sixth prototype reactor, dubbed Trenta. It’s now building a seventh, Polaris, while already designing the eighth, Antares. Helion intends for Polaris to be the first fusion machine to produce net electricity — generating more energy that it takes in. Alongside fast iteration, Helion benefits from local expertise. It’s building Polaris in Everett, Wash., near Boeing’s biggest factories, where they can tap a welcoming ecosystem of contract engineers and precision manufacturers. Kirtley says they spend the mornings tinkering, updating systems, and powering up capacitors. “Every afternoon at 3 pm we start doing fusion.”

To understand Helion’s approach, first consider the magnetic repulsion that occurs when you try to force the positive poles of two bar magnets together. It’s the principle that enables “mag-lev” tech like Japan’s famous bullet trains, which utilize magnetic repulsion to float on a cushion of air.

In Helion’s novel system, the energy released in the fusion reactions continuously pushes out against its magnetic containment field, which pushes back — causing oscillations (“like a piston,” says Kirtley) that generate an electric current, which Helion captures directly from the reactor. (For more, read up on Faraday’s law of induction.)

[Kyriakos]

Hopefully there won't be fusion wars ^^

[paleologos]

Is this really going to work?

The American NIF is not trying this method nor is ITER.
Considering the amounts of money that are being directed in that company through the donations of super billionaires, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it is a tax avoidance scheme.

[PointOfViewGun]

Hopefully there won't be fusion wars ^^

Helion uses deuterium and helium-3. Deuterium is a common resource found in the ocean and helium-3 will be created within the reactor. Wars of Helion's fuel would be pointless.

Is this really going to work?

The American NIF is not trying this method nor is ITER.
Considering the amounts of money that are being directed in that company through the donations of super billionaires, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it is a tax avoidance scheme.

Each reactor uses a different method. Each are quite different to one an other. What's different with Helion is the relative simplicity of the approach allows for relatively quick iterations which allows for the bettering of the ideas in play as its being built. With reactors like ITER and NIF you have to pray that you got things right before committing billions of dollars. Their 6th iteration, Trenta, reached 104 million degrees already and was capable of firing once every day to keep on testing. 7th iteration will fire once every single second and actually produce electricity. 8th iteration is being designed to close to a commercial model.



I would say that a few billions for the above (one side of the 7th iteration Polaris reactor) is quite a small number to write off.

[Lord Thesaurian]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

Latest interview with Helion. If fusion tech is as revolutionary as advertised, especially with commercial applications being the goal, it’s equally important to safeguard it as a matter of national security. Stiff criminal penalties at all levels of the public and private sectors are needed for participating in tech transfer or theft to non-American entities. 30 years of neoliberalism taught us that much.

[Roma_Victrix]

The ongoing joke was that it was always a decade away. No matter how many decades pass.

That was said without the context of this colossal milestone, the moment a fusion reaction produced a higher energy output than energy input.

This event at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is arguably similar to the Wright Brothers inventing and flying the first motor-operated airplane in 1903. Before the passage of two decades warplanes were already being used to devastating effect as fighters and bombers in WWI. This could potentially move quicker than you think. On the other hand, it did take several decades before commercial airlines became commonly available to the public (German airship line was the absolute first in 1909, but the USA had the first airline with motor-operated airplanes by 1914, albeit initially limited to Florida).

[Knight of Heaven]

From what i have been hearing from other physicist, this was a an important experiment, but doesn't change things considering the commercial aspect of it. Anton Petrov has a good breakdown of this.
Most likely the commercial reactors will be still the tokamak fusion reactors. This laser version expends lots of energy, and uses tritium as the pellet, so this model probably would never be viable for commercial effects. Unless we found a way to produce tritium cheaply. ( tritium being hydrogen-3 rare isotope)
The overall trick to make it viable is to produce more energy then it expends from the grid. That is the challenge.

That was said without the context of this colossal milestone, the moment a fusion reaction produced a higher energy output than energy input.

Technically yeah they achieved ignition, but practically not really, they still weren't able to replicate it yet.

[swabian]

I know it has been said before many times that we are close to industrial nuclear fusion. We HAVE to pursue this magic bullet more than ever. It would solve most of our energy problems, because the main source of fuel would be WATER. It would not solve all of our problems, but a huge chunk of them. It has to be discovered and mastered.

[Common Soldier]

What is nice about the Helion approach is that it not trying the same old methods. They are thinking outside the box. Maybe it will work, maybe not, but it is at least worth trying. The traditional approaches to nuclear fusion have not gotten us the results we want, so trying something else is a good thing.

Helion's approach addresses two of the biggest problems with traditional nuclear fusion approaches - creating stable nuclear, and how to capture the energy once you do manage to successfully produce stable nuclear fusion. Helion's pulse approach to nuclear fusion eliminates the need to create stable nuclear fusion, which so far as big the biggest difficulty in the current approach. And it already has a system in place to capture the energy once the fusion occurs.

[Common Soldier]

Is this really going to work?

The American NIF is not trying this method nor is ITER.
Considering the amounts of money that are being directed in that company through the donations of super billionaires, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it is a tax avoidance scheme.

We don't know if it will work. But the American NIF and ITER methods have not worked either, and and many decades and billions of dollarshave been spent on those methods.

Since the traditional approaches have not yielded viable commercial fusion after decades of work, it is time try something different, and Helion is different. Helion addresses the biggest obstacle to nuclear fusion, creating stable plasma for nuclear fusion by not even trying. If you achieve pulses of nuclear fast enough and produce enough output, it could work. Given the potential benefit of fusion, it is worth a try.

And I think it is a good thing that it is being funded by private billionaires. It makes it far more likely a commercially viable product will develop. American NFT and ITER are more like science projects than a commercially viable power source. Even if they succeed at fusion, it will take even more work to make them a commercially viable source of power.
And it it is a tax avoidance scheme, that still cost tax payers less money than the billions of tax dollars that have already been spent for decades on projects that still haven't succeeded. Let's face it, super billionaires are going to find ways to avoid taxes, they accord to pay people millions to save them taxes. I would rather they spent this money on something like this that has a possibility of success.

And I am sure the people at Helion are sincere in their belief they will successfully create nuclear fusion, even if the billionaires are only supporting it as a tax avoidance scheme. Perhaps the people at Helion are overly optimistic, but they would still be better than the people the NIF and ITER. Helion believes it can succeed and create commercially viable fusion, while at the NIF and ITER, they know even if they succeed there would still be a lot more work involved to make commercially viable fusion power plants.

[conon394]

And I am sure the people at Helion are sincere in their belief they will successfully create nuclear fusion

Maybe they are and than again maybe they are as sincere as Theranos and Enron.