Comment by fooker
12 hours ago
Neutrons were first definitively observed in 1932.
First nuclear reactor was 1942, and bomb was 1945.
Once the science is established, we have smart engineers to make a short work out of it.
Fusion energy is really the only counterexample in history, which makes me think we are still missing some crucial physics about how it works, for example in stars. Specifically the particle physics view of how it's reliably triggered with minimal energy.
The antiproton decelerator at CERN has been operational for 25 years, and they have plenty of smart engineers there. Unlike in the 1940s, the underlying physics has been well understood for many decades. I would argue that nuclear fission is the counter example that happens to be surprisingly easy to do.
CERN is trying to do fundamental physics, not trying to weaponize antimatter. If/when it comes to that, the pace will pick up.
Also, 25 years to the breakthrough discussed in the article seems like a reasonably good pace.
All experiments at the AD are strongly limited by the low rates. If there was a straightforward way to improve this by many orders of magnitude, they would have done it a long time ago.
> Fusion energy is really the only counterexample in history, which makes me think we are still missing some crucial physics about how it works
This is magical thinking. We know how fusion works in great detail. And “reliably triggered with minimal energy” is essentially not a thing, unless by minimal energy you mean something like 10 million times the energy of an air particle at room temperature, for every particle in a reactor.
What we’re trying to do is recreate the conditions at the core of a star - which is powered by gravity due to hundreds of thousands of Earth masses. And since we don’t have the benefit of gravity anything like that, we actually have to make our plasmas significantly hotter than the core of a star. And then contain that somehow, in a way that can be maintained over time despite how neutron radiation will compromise any material used to house it.
The reality is, we still don’t know if usable fusion power is even possible - there’s no guarantee that it is - let alone how to achieve it. The state of the art is orders of magnitude away from even being able to break even and achieve the same power out as was put into the whole system.
> at the core of a star - which is powered by gravity
That is what I meant, I doubt we really understand what 'powered by gravity' means. You could win a Nobel prize or two by discovering all the details involved here. You would also win a Nobel prize by definitively proving that nothing special happens, you just have high temperatures and high pressures.
The way we are trying to study fusion is like rubbing larger and larger rocks to produce more fire.
The processes involved in solar fusion have been well understood since the 1930s [1,2]. Hans Bethe won a Nobel Prize for this in 1967. The problem is that one cannot produce stellar densities and pressures in any kind of apparatus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain