Fusion Foolery

This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others:<p>&quot;In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly.&quot;

The key point about NIF is buried <i>way</i> down in the article:<p><i>But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density.</i><p>NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)

Everyone mildly interested in the topic knows about what&#x27;s written in the article. There are popular scientists making youtube videos about what is Q, etc.<p>It&#x27;s the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not important.

The article mentions that the reaction had a 4% yield with lasers that are 0.5% efficient.<p>The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy.<p>Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction.<p>In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc<p>Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array.<p>I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.

This guy is a pretty doctrinaire &quot;doomer&quot; with anti-civilization tendencies. Everything he writes is going to go through that lens. Check the other posts.<p>I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I&#x27;ve seen his stuff before. Summary: &quot;Everything is futile so give up now.&quot; He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to &quot;do the math&quot; with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it&#x27;ll never work.<p>Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2&#x2F;3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient.<p>Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can&#x27;t be done in a reactor, and given that it&#x27;s a path to effectively infinite clean energy it&#x27;d be stupid to not keep working on it.

This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific.<p>For sure a lot of people don&#x27;t know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don&#x27;t know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn&#x27;t cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.

I think there is an important missed point: research funding is rivalrous, and not infinite. NIF is such a dead end that there is a huge risk that the positive result sucks the air out of a crowded room and <i>de facto</i> takes away resources from &quot;societal&quot; fusion energy projects that have a shot at actually being useful.

Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There&#x27;s a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and the energy being produced as a result.<p>Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.<p>I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it&#x27;s very likely it&#x27;ll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.

It&#x27;s been actualized recently, but there&#x27;s a sort of vaporware bermuda triangle within physics of revolutionary holy grail advancements that repeatedly garner an enormous amount of hype and press, but almost always fails to materialize into anything useful.<p>It consists of<p><pre><code> * Room temperature semiconductors * Useful fusion power * Quantum computers something anything useful outside of a simulation </code></pre> It&#x27;s a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty years away for forty years. I wouldn&#x27;t go as far as saying any of these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.

The whole purpose of this lab is to do nuclear weapons research.<p>Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a nice side effect, but don&#x27;t confuse it with the existence purpose of the lab.

I get the feeling the article preaches to the choir.<p>The serious sources have always portrayed NIF&#x27;s work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types.<p>Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details.<p>This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.

I lived with somebody who worked on NIF --- back in the early days, before anything was built (they did theory modelling on the laser&#x2F;holraum interaction). They said the entire project was really just busywork to keep american scientists from working on other country&#x27;s defense projects. And also predicted that while NIF might eventually break even, it was never a design that would be useful for power generation, and was only slightly useful for stockpile stewardship.

I live near the University of Rochester&#x27;s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (aka The Laser Lab) and took a tour one day. They have an enormous bank of huge capacitors (think refrigerator-sized) that they charge off the power grid since there&#x27;s no way in hell they can get sufficient energy directly. Laser fusion is one of those things that&#x27;s <i>possible</i> but seems unlikely to ever be <i>practical</i>, though something may useful still come from it.

NIF was never made to generate power. NIF uses lasers which are less efficient, but were cheaper to build. We have better lasers. What is important about NIF&#x27;s result is that they demonstrated &#x27;burning&#x27; plasma. The yield might be increased by adding more fuel.<p>The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim cryogenic targets won&#x27;t stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don&#x27;t need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short.<p>Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rsta.2020.0053" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rsta.2020.005...</a>

Every few years we get an order of magnitude or two closer to efficacy. It is not ridiculous to celebrate that.

I&#x27;m skeptical if commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic. We get tricked by existence of stars but stars actually produce a really low amount of energy per unit mass: 0.2mW&#x2F;kg [1]. It just so happens that stars are really massive (~333,000 times the mass of Earth). Stars can thus solve the neutron problem with gravity.<p>Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that&#x27;s a big &quot;if&quot;), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical of any energy &quot;breakthrough&quot; now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper&#x27;s authors had previously had to restract papers). So many &quot;breakthroughs&quot; are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That&#x27;s all.<p>Solar, in particular, is our future.<p>And while we&#x27;re worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we&#x27;re ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn&#x27;t built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have.<p>This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifeng.lamost.org&#x2F;courses&#x2F;astrotoday&#x2F;CHAISSON&#x2F;AT316&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;AT31605.HTM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifeng.lamost.org&#x2F;courses&#x2F;astrotoday&#x2F;CHAISSON&#x2F;AT316&#x2F;...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journalrecord.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;planned-cushing-refinery-to-have-multibillion-dollar-impact&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journalrecord.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;planned-cushing-refiner...</a>

You can write a same gloomy article about invention of an electric bulb or even a wheel. Imagine cutting down an entire tree that also kills Fred when the tree fell, herculean efforts to then slice it off to create a wheel in which Cole the lost his fingers, and what do you do with that wheel ? Create a claypot ? You could have just used a wooden pot instead. Not to mention the clay pot broke.<p>Scientific &quot;stunts&quot; which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.

The conclusion here veers quite rapidly into scientific endism (we&#x27;ve more or less reached the pinnacle of human science, and no further significant advances are likely to be made) and malthusianism (we lack the resources to do so anyway and are headed for decline as a species).<p>For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost&#x2F;efficiency as being rooted in &quot;we&#x27;re not there yet, and because we&#x27;re at the end of scientific progress, we&#x27;ll therefore never get there&quot;.

To judge by how many Hollywood blockbusters have featured ever-larger-and-flashier Sci-Fi ray guns and robots and space ships and such...I&#x27;m thinking that most humans are quite naturally drawn to &quot;Big! New!! Shiny!!!&quot; things.<p>And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning &quot;blame&quot; (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology &#x2F; mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.

I thought the laser &quot;ignition&quot; was just a demonstrator for being able to create circumstances where fusion occurs, not something that could ever be scaled up to a power plant? But this article talks about repetition rates? Would we theoretically have fusion powerplants where we ignite a plasma over and over again from scratch, using lasers? I thought that&#x27;s what tokamaks and stellerators were for: keeping the fusion reaction going once ignited?

If you have to explain that you aren’t being sarcastic when you congratulate an effort, you know you’ve pushed too hard in the other direction.

Fusion will not come up of this NIF thing. But maybe mini-hydrogen bombs could. And why would that be a good thing? Because project Orion [1] could use them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...</a>

I agree, there is lots of wishful thinking involved with Fusion and I was always a sceptic, but lately there were news about the Wendelstein 7-X<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37092212">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37092212</a><p>And someone linked a podcast of a interview with the director (in german, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativlos.org&#x2F;36" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativlos.org&#x2F;36</a>). And after listening, I do became convinced that with the Stellerator design, a working Fusion plant is possible.<p>Maybe still not in 20 years, because it is hellish complicated, but some day.<p>(till then I would bet on harvesting more our existing very big fusionreactor called the sun)<p>In either case, controlling fusion is awesome technology and research, with lots of potential applications and deserves further funding. But yeah, please more of civil projects like Wendelstein and less disguised weapon research.

Anyone interested in clean energy should know about this device that produces 100s of kW in a novel chemical process.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brilliantlightpower.com&#x2F;suncell&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brilliantlightpower.com&#x2F;suncell&#x2F;</a><p>Note that the wikipedia article about this company is policed by skeptics and has been in dispute for more than a decade.

It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely going to reuse in some arguments.<p>Also, this one should be shouted louder for those in the back.<p>&gt; &quot;Many in our culture truly believe in “the amazing future,” uncritically extrapolating our fossil-fueled joy ride into ever-more impressive innovations and technologies.&quot;

<i>The problem is that such imaginings are not tethered to physical reality. They are driven by ideology, or I would say mythology. The physical reality is that we are living in an ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid ecological degradation and global disruption to the biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-termination of this whacky mode called modernity. It simply does not add up, once the mythology is stripped away. The venture capitalist of nature is about to slam the door on our faces.</i>