"U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’ Scientists hit a key milestone in the quest to create abundant zero-carbon power through nuclear fusion. But they still have a long way to go."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...-breakthrough/

 

Saw that this morning my self. Very exciting times ahead.

 

I want some more details. Fusion is what goes on inside the sun -- and that's the conditions they pretty much have to create to get it to go. Up till now, they've had 'record setting runs' of tiny fractions of a second before it all went south. And at that, they have yet to get more out than they're putting in.

Could they have something -- would be nice, but the field is famous for being '20 years out' from whenever they talk about it. Maybe they have actually gotten to 10 years out, but I need to see a few details.

Not saying it's NOT true - I just want a little more info.

hj

 

I agree I too wish they included more details in the article. But according to the article they're supposed to release a statement today with more information. I hope they follow through on that.

 

From what I heard "they" are saying having this developed to a useful source of energy is about 30 years out. I'll also look forward to news of this simply out of curiosity.

 

30 years sounds about right. Most people will still be alive so the implication is that it will be in their lifetime, but it's noncommittal.

If they're serious, there's no reason to not use the technology available today to our own benefit. U.S. oil, nuclear, etc. I'm anxious to see where this goes.....

 

Oh man, it'll render all of our EV (save the world) cars obsolete!

 

Yes the time is a bit frustrating but at least it would seem to be a light at the end of a very long fossil fuel tunnel. Plus who knows, that 30 years out is based on today's technology. In 5 years something could come along that could bring the timeline down to 10 years. It's all guesswork at this point.

 

Here is the addition information that was released today.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nucl...et-energy.html
Pretty much sums up to 2MJ of energy in and 3MJ out.

 

That is a first, but transferring it to something practical is somewhat problematical. Temperature was 1.8 million of the good old US fahrenheit degrees. No mention of the run time, but historically it's been fractions of a second.
So hooray, that is something -- Unfortunately there's not much chance that I'll see 30 years. Good luck to them.

hj

 

That's a million degrees Centigrade. Using either scale, none of us can truly imagine the insane temperature involved.

Recall from history that when the U.S. was developing the hydrogen bomb, the same basic technology except in bomb form, there was a lot of work put into being able to "prove" that the thing wouldn't light off the atmosphere and destroy everything on the planet's surface.

Kinda makes me wonder if we aren't literally playing with fire.

 

There was a bit more on popularmechanics.com
First, they mentioned that the output power just produced would power a microwave for about an hour. I did some rough calcs -- joule is a watt second, so if you divide their output by 3600, it's in the kilowatt hour range.

Then they gave the rest of the story. There was a net power gain compared to the laser power applied. Unfortunately, the input power to the lasers was something like 400 megajoules. So, there's work to be done there. Also, they had to be cooled for hours afterwards.

The material used was said to be about the size of a peppercorn. I looked that up -- something like 3 to 5 mm across -- and, I suppose, pretty ,much a sphere.

Interesting stuff,

hj