US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved the feat using lasers to fuse two atoms
This means we'll need capture efficiency technology above 66% for this to be a net positive in terms of power generation.
For current fission nuclear power plants: "Nuclear power plant efficiency averages around 33%, which is comparable to other fossil fuel-based generation units. This means that 77% [sic, should be 67%] of the energy produced by a nuclear plant is lost and only 33% is converted into electricity. Some modern nuclear plants may be able to achieve 45% efficiency."
This doesn't mean anything, as it's not actually overall net positive. It just makes for a nice headline. But it's just that more energy than the late deposited into the pallet came out of it.
But more energy than to run the lasers or the entire facility? Far, far, far from it.
I’d say this reactor design has best chance of reaching high efficiency vs the “Lithium Blanket”.
Still used orders of magnitude more energy to perform the experiment than the experiment output - plus they have no way to harvest that energy, and they're mainly a nuclear weapon research facility. I guess the publicity for fusion power is good.
Still used orders of magnitude more energy to perform the experiment than the experiment output
The article literally explains that is not true. All you have to read the first paragraph.
they have no way to harvest that energy
Yes because it's a research reactor. The first theoretical nuclear reactors also did not have any way to retrieve the energy. That's what happens in production systems, not research systems. Adding in all of the equipment to capture the energy makes it harder to iterate on the design. It really is not a valid criticism of the research being done.
You are being somewhat disingenuous do not think.
In the 1st paragraph is a link to the previous article of the same experiment a few months ago, that has some more details mentioned:
researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.
the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.
The article is misleading by leaving out critical details about the amount of energy actually used in the test.
That said, progress is progress.
*Edit: OK, so this article is missing a bunch of vital context. Here's a better one: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/physicists-achieve-fusion-net-energy-gain-for-second-time/
The key words are "delivered to the target". They use WAY, way more power than they deliver to the target, so if you take the energy generated divided by the total energy used, the number is WAY, way below 1. Probably a fair bit below 0.1 too.
The laser energy. All the energy to make the situation happen is significantly higher. It's sneaky.
That's pure laser energy, not whole system energy. Yeah, they got a slight gain from the fusion output, but nowhere near what the whole experiment used.
I thought China already accomplished this last year?
Yes but these are freedom scientists!
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US scientists have achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the second time since a historic breakthrough in December last year in the quest to find a near-limitless, safe and clean source of energy
Scientists at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory repeated the breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on 30 July that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said.
The approach, which gives rise to the heat and light of the sun and other stars, has been hailed as having huge potential as a sustainable, low-carbon energy source.
In December, Lawrence Livermore first achieved a net energy gain in a fusion experiment using lasers.
The Energy Department called it “a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.”
Fusion energy raises the prospect of plentiful clean power: the reactions release no greenhouse gases or radioactive waste byproducts.
Is the assumption that the experiment takes place in a vacuum, including no external energy outside the energy introduced by the laser?
Yes. Not taking into account anything except the output of the laser verses the output of the reaction.
A spherical vacuum consisting of free government money.