Still uses more energy in than out. But the out is a higher than it was.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.
This particular experiment didn't do that but that likely wasn't the goal... They managed a 69MJ output over five seconds... the NIF experiment was less power but over "a few billionths of a second".
69MJ over five seconds is 13MW which is a very usable amount of power. About on par with the typical output of a real world utility power generator, compared to the old one which was similar to a small lightning strike - impressive but not useful. It's not enough to power an entire city, but you kinda don't want that anyway since a city should have redundancy. Several 13MW generators could power a city with enough excess production to take one or two of them offline for maintenance. If you combined this with solar/wind(*), you could have two or three fusion reactors for a large city.
The tech is still not ready of course, but it's getting closer and seems to be accelerating too - those two breakthroughs were a year apart. This generator is right in the sweet spot, now they just need to improve efficiency / reliability / reduce costs.
(* I seriously doubt fusion is ever going to be cheaper than solar / wind / hydro - but it could be more reliable making it a great "baseload" option - enough to keep the lights on, fridges cool, etc)
NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn't hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.
And it's still 40 years away to becoming a reliable power source since they started experimenting with it in the 1950s.
Joking aside I don't think I'll be able to see a working fusion power plant in my life time.
Tbf most things "always 20 years away" is usually that way because of funding reasons.
If fusion got the funding it deserved from the beginning things would be a lot different now. But, ya know, big oil and old rich fucks :/
Big oil didn't stop solar panels from becoming a working technology. Sometimes a technology is just hard, there's no need for a conspiracy.
Stop it? No, but they were successful in slowing it down by decades. Just like with fusion. And they pretty much stopped traditional nuclear power, the fear mongering they put out about it is still persistent
i'm not trying to diminish the importance of this achievement, but for the next decade or two, pretty much every achievement in fusion will be record-breaking in one way or another. that's sorta the point of making progress while developing this tech which is in its very early stages.
still, very exciting!
Going from "Yeah nothing yet" for decades to "milestone, milestone, milestone" is definitely giving some people whiplash but I'm all for it.
TLDR: tokamak type reactor, produced a lot of energy (69 megajujes - nice!) but still net negative.
How much is a megajuje to a megajoule? /s
69 megajoules is about half a gallon of gasoline
1.21, I think. You'd have to ask Doc Brown.
That's awesome, do you have any take on helion's approach to cracking fusion?
Not like I’m an expert on the topic lol. But I happened to watch a Nebula video series on Helion’s approach from Real Engineering and I really hope they manage to crack the efficiency barrier. The idea of truck container sized reactor that makes it’s own fuel and produces energy directly from electromagnetic impulses (not from heat via turbines) is almost too good to be true.
Of course! Was just nerding out. It does seem like they have a lot of barriers to a net positive reactor but it definitely seems like one possible way we could do it!
Very nice!
I’m so tainted by Borat.
But do you have clock radio?