Comment by antonvs
12 days ago
> The fusion power breakthrough of 2022 by Lawrence Livermore National Lab would still dominate the news.
If our society were sane, rational, advanced, it would recognize that that "breakthrough" was a minor, arbitrary improvement in reaction efficiency, that realistically brings us no closer to commercially viable fusion power, and doesn't prove anything about the possibility of that.
That reaction still consumed something like 100 times the power that it produced, and the "power" that it produced was just heat energy, which would still entail losses when converted into usable form.
On top of that, the nature of the Livermore reaction is not one that's even intended or suitable for commercial power production.
At this point, we simply don't even know whether controlled, commercially viable fusion will ever be able to produce more power than it consumes. There's no guarantee that it will.
If you're not aware of what I'm referring to, this article is a starting point: "Why the nuclear fusion ‘net energy gain’ is more hype than breakthrough": https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-...
While this might all seem like an irrelevant aside to the point being made above, it's relevant because it shows how pervasive misinformation is, even when coming from supposedly scientific sources.
The announcement was correct and precise. I am not sure what misinformation you are describing here.
Regarding your 100 more energy claim. It overlooks key facts about the NIF breakthrough. The fusion reaction itself achieved net energy gain, producing 3.15 MJ compared to 2.05 MJ of input laser energy - far from consuming "100 times the power it produced." While the total facility power usage was indeed higher due to laser inefficiencies, this misses the crucial scientific achievement. This was basically humanity's first controlled fusion reaction producing more energy than was directly input to the fuel. Dismissing this as a "minor, arbitrary improvement" understates its significance. This wasn't just about efficiency metrics - it demonstrated fusion ignition was possible, a fundamental physics milestone that had eluded scientists for decades. Though challenges remain for commercial fusion power, the breakthrough proved a critical theoretical concept that many thought impossible. Many critics before that were referring to this point as the reason why it isn't worth it to keep researching. And they were proved wrong.
Trying to redefine the announcement and experiment result to mean something else so that you can attack is a dishonest behavior.
Nobody ever doubted that fusion ignition was physically possible. It happens in stars all the time, and people have achieved it in thermonuclear weapons.
This was the first time fusion ignition was achieved in a laboratory setting, i.e. in a controlled fashion. Is that seen as a fundamental physics milestone? To me it seems more an incremental engineering achievement.
> The announcement was correct and precise.
"The" announcement? There were several announcements, with varying degrees of scientific rigor.
Here's one typical example: https://www.llnl.gov/article/49301/shot-ages-fusion-ignition...
Quote: "...achieved fusion ignition — creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process."
That is not "correct and precise." In fact, without any mention of the additional context that at least 300 MJ of power was used to produce 3.15 MJ of not directly usable heat energy, it's incorrect, imprecise, and misleading at best.
It's also misleading because it doesn't tell you that NIF's definition of "ignition" is significantly different, in essential respects, from the term's use in other fusion contexts. For example, ignition at NIF doesn't mean that a self-sustaining reaction has been achieved. As such, the use of this term at all is dubious. It has no fundamental meaning here, it's just a name being used for an arbitrarily defined efficiency target.
Realistically, the term is being used to try to connect what NIF is doing, in a facility ostensibly intended for nuclear weapons research, to what fusion power research efforts are doing. It's a hype-driven word game, it's not meaningful.
Back to the quote above: it's carefully worded to sound as though it's saying something that not true. No layperson without prior knowledge of nuclear fusion issues is going to correctly understand that statement - and indeed, most of the initial press about this didn't, i.e. the journalists reporting it didn't understand what it meant, which is what the article I originally linked to was responding to.
That brings us to the main point: I didn't say anything about an announcement. I responded to someone who was talking about what our society would do if it "were sane, rational, advanced".
I'm saying that it's extremely unfortunate that our society is too scientifically illiterate to correctly report on and understand what ultimately was a somewhat routine scientific achievement, reaching a defined efficiency target that has no particular fundamental meaning in the context.
> The fusion reaction itself achieved net energy gain, producing 3.15 MJ compared to 2.05 MJ of input laser energy - far from consuming "100 times the power it produced."
It used at least 300 MJ of power to drive the lasers[1]. 300 / 3.15 = 95. But that factor of 95 would just be to reach a break even point with the heat energy produced, it's not directly usable energy.
For actual usable energy, according to a 2023 presentation at the LLNL High Energy Density Science Seminar[2], "For a power plant, gain would need to be increased ~1000x relative to current NIF performance."
None of the announcement about this so-called "ignition" event mentioned any of this, and nor did most (any?) of the mainstream press about it.
The reality here is that in order to maintain public interest in nuclear fusion, and keep getting funded, it has to be presented as though fusion power is just around the corner - "5 years!". What I was pointing out is that "if our society were sane, rational, advanced," we would not need to play such games. We would not need to continually mislead the public, we would not need to pretend that facilities being used to do nuclear weapon "stockpile stewardship" research have some relevance to fusion power, and so on.
I also found it ironic that the commenter who wanted a "sane, rational, advanced" society appeared themselves to be a victim of the misleading hype around the NIF event, saying that it should "still dominate the news." It simply wasn't that significant.
> This wasn't just about efficiency metrics - it demonstrated fusion ignition was possible, a fundamental physics milestone
This is incorrect, as explained above. "Ignition" here is a term defined by LLNL to apply to their particular weapons-oriented fusion facility. There's nothing "fundamental" about it. It's a defined target for experimental efficiency, that's all.
> ... that had eluded scientists for decades
And still does, at any facility that's trying to achieve nuclear power generation, and not just a weapons research facility blasting a pellet with 300 MJ from 192 lasers. The NIF result is simply not transferable to any other fusion scenario.
> Trying to redefine the announcement and experiment result to mean something else so that you can attack is a dishonest behavior.
It's not clear that you yet understand the full extent of the deception that you've been subjected to, so you're trying to shoot the messenger.
[1] https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2022/national-ignition-facility-achi...
[2] https://heds-center.llnl.gov/sites/heds_center/files/2023-03... (bottom of 59th slide)
As a fellow scientist, I will go and read the details from the research paper that the group published [1]. Anything else is nonsense for me. it gives a clear view on the goals, physics and what was done. Including all the details you would get that. I will quote the first paragraph from the paper summary
> In summary, the December 5, 2022 experiment on the National Ignition Facility, N221204, was the first time that fusion target gain was unambiguously achieved in the laboratory in any fusion scheme. The demonstrated level of target gain on N221204 of 1.5 times is a proof of principle that controlled laboratory fusion energy is possible
And they specifically mention that it is not overall facility-wise net gain in the next paragraph
> Notethat G_{target} > 1 does not imply net energy gain from a practical fusion energy perspective, because the energy consumed by the NIF laser facility is typically 100× larger than E_{laser}. The NIF laser architecture and target configuration was chosen to give the highest probability for fusion ignition for research purposes and was not optimized to produce net energy for fusion energy applications.
So you don't have to go and claim a deception. You want to claim it wasn't significant which is your opinion but that is not what the actual scientific community in the field (who know more than you) would agree.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...
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Nice to see all this discussion. That was kinda my point in the OP, taking only LLNL as an example. Whether or not the result is significant isn't the main thing; main point is: an advanced society would have so much interest in fusion power, it would be front-page news, beyond or on par with sports or celebrity news. How to make it happen, challenges, how to help, and so on.