- cross-posted to:
- physics@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- physics@mander.xyz
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Excluding all the ancillary services, including the lasers that maintained the plasma, which was the principle part of this latest test.
Factoring everything in, they’re at about 15% return.
This is still very good for this stage, but the publications are grossly misleading.
That’s what I came to the comments to find. Thank you. Would have been much bigger news if it was net energy positive.
15% return is still net energy positive isn’t it? Or is that not 15% above the input?
I can’t read the full article (paywalled for me) but it references the National Ignition Facility so the way it goes is super lasers blast a tiny hydrogen thing and that creates a tiny bit of fusion that releases the energy. The energy of the laser blast is what’s being called the input and the fusion energy released the output. What is misleading is that a greater amount of energy was used create the laser blast than the laser blast itself outputs. If you consider the energy that went into creating the laser blast the input (rather than the laser blast itself), then it’s usually not a net positive energy release.
What other energy are you referring to? Like warming up the laser?
pixelscript@lemmy.ml got it, but basically lasers are pretty inefficient. The article I just found said (in a different run of this facility) they put 400MJ into the laser to get 2.5MJ out of it. So that makes the whole firing system what, 0.6% efficient? Your fusion reaction would have to give more than 400MJ to truly be in the positive for this particular setup/method, but again this facility is a research one and not meant to generate power - there isn’t even a way to harness/collect it here.
Oh so the laser’s generating mostly heat and a little coherent radiation, and they’re only referring to the coherent radiation as the “energy input” to the process.
Hmm. Kinda sketch.
Especially because that’s not trivial. If we have no way of obtaining laser light other than that process, and the laser is the only way to feed the fusion reactor, then that’s 100% on the balance books of this process.
but the publications are grossly misleading.
I think you’re only referencing the headline, the article itself clearly states what you said
Is the headline not part of an article?
When one says a publication is grossly misleading, it certainly implies the entire publication
“article” vs “publication”
Two different things.
The link takes you to an article. Publications are in actual scientific journals, not intended for popular consumption.
Why have we accepted the standard of misleading headlines? “Oh well you didn’t read the article, I guess you and 90% of eyeballs get to be fundamentally misinformed” is an unhinged take.
I never said a misleading headline was acceptable. I said the publication is not misleading and that it covers the criticisms dude up above was leveling.
The headline is part of the publication though.
No, this is a popular science article, not an actual publication.
Maybe one day we will produce a civilization capable of using technology as it comes out instead of one that decided to call it quits decades ago. Oh sure we got cellphones but we are still burning coal. Because nuclear is scary.
I think nuclear energy is a great idea in theory, but I have absolutely zero trust in companies handling nuclear waste responsibly. It’s not like they have a great track record.
That being said, pretty excited about this if it’s as safe as they say.
So nationalize them. Problem solved.
Do you trust our current governmental structures to manage something with that much potential for harm when it goes wrong? I sure don’t. Sure, it might go great for a long while, but then you get one far-right administration that wants to cut regulations.
I trust them far more than greedy corporations run by greedy billionaires, absolutely. For many reasons, not the least of which is the elimination of the profit motive.
You’re acting like we don’t already have these. This isn’t new and we have tons of prior experience to learn from.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are.
Lol if only you knew how wrong that statement was.
If companies can’t be trusted to dispose of coal waste properly, what’s the likelihood they’ll dispose of nuclear waste properly? And reactors that don’t produce dangerous waste, don’t produce enough energy to be worth the cost unless you add the cost of proper disposal of the waste. And since they don’t have to do that, they just store it in temporary storage pools indefinitely, the cost is much cheaper to stick with current tech. So fission will never be safe.
I don’t think companies can do that actually. It is very regulated area. Also I think there is a lot of nuclear scare going on. Nuclear is not at all dangerous as it most people think, it just sounds scary.
At present we have oil and coal companies that are responsible for a lot of deaths and burning the planet. Nuclear is in no way near ammount of damage coal and oil are making right now. So even with nuclear accidents(sounds scary yea) it’s better than coal and oil.
If you think companies care, you haven’t been paying attention. Nuclear waste will continue to pile up and will exist until the Earth is gone. You think we’ll store it safely that long? Keep replacing the containers. Protect it from natural disasters or wars. There is not safe place to put it that won’t eventually end up in the ground water and eventually evaporate and become airborne except deep inside the earth and we don’t have the tech and even if we did it would be way more expensive than just investing in new battery tech and renewables.
I don’t think companies care, I said > I don’t think companies can do that actually. It is very regulated area.
What I’m arguing for in favor of nuclear power sources is that is cleanest source of energy we have from all and least deadly from all. But the reasons we can’t have it on the entire world scale are in short, capitalism. Politics + oil/coal lobby.
We’ll probably be able to harvest solar power from space then beam it to Earth in a practical way first, than nuclear fusion becomes practical.
There is a very efficient way to beam solar power from space. It is called light.
It’s not efficient, a huge amount of it gets diffused or absorbed
Wow, you’re right! We should just build a Dyson sphere around the sun. 100% efficiency achieved. What could possibly go wrong?
Did you understand the person you respond to as saying its inefficient because the sun shines in other directions than the array proposed?
I’m pretty sure the person talked specifically about the beam from the array to earth being inefficient.I was joking, but apparently nobody picked up on my snarky sarcasm. Disregard.
It doesn’t need to be efficient. Capture all the light that hits earth for 5 minutes and that’s the world energy demand for a year.
How would you store it though?
solar george
Firstly, the energy output falls far short of what would be needed for a commercial reactor, barely creating enough to heat a bath. Worse than that, the ratio is calculated using the lasers’ output, but to create that 2.1 megajoules of energy, the lasers draw 500 trillion watts, which is more power than the output of the entire US national grid. So these experiments break even in a very narrow sense of the term.
It’s so refreshing to see an article at least mention the way these tests are measured are based on the energy just in the laser itself and not the total energy used.
I agree it’s good that the article is not hyping up the idea that the world will now definitely be saved by fusion and so we can all therefore go on consuming all the energy we want.
There are still some sloppy things about the article that disappoint me though…
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They seem to be implying that 500 TW is obviously much larger than 2.1 MJ… but without knowing how long the 500 TW is required for, this comparison is meaningless.
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They imply that using more power than available from the grid is infeasible, but it evidently isn’t as they’ve done it multiple times - presumably by charging up local energy storage and releasing it quickly. Scaling this up is obviously a challenge though.
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The weird mix of metric prefixes (mega) and standard numbers (trillions) in a single sentence is a bit triggering - that might just be me though.
Electricity stuff is funny because it combines metric and imperial units sometimes to make bastard measurements
Huh? Whatchu talkin bout Willis?
Watt is a Joule per second
Volts, Amps, kWh, MJ… These are all metric.
Sssch don’t tell the Americans or they will try to wrangle in BTU in nuclear power plants
WE INVENTED IT AND BUH GAWD, WE WILL MEASURE IT IN MURICA UNITS!
Ignore how nonsensical BTUs are: Gonna shove energy and weight into a single measurement and it changes based on the initial temperature of the water.
Y’all do know what BTU stands for, right?
British Thermal Units. It’s the energy needed to heat 1 lb of water 1 degree F.
The bad part is that no one bothered to set the starting temp of the water so there’s 5 separate standards for what the hell a BTU actually is, which makes it a really bad standard.
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Should quit wasting time with this tech that’s always 30 years and many billions of dollars away and focus our efforts on building as many new fission plants as possible.
Fusion reactor SLAMS surprised scientists with it’s INCREDIBLE output
