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OT: Fusion reaction generates more energy than put into the reaction (but still a long way to go)

RU848789

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Cool science nerd alert...

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (part of the Dept. of Energy) have, for the first time, conducted a thermonuclear hydrogen fusion experiment in which the energy generated from a fusion reaction exceeded the energy put into the reaction, as per the two links below. This is a huge advance in hydrogen fusion science, something I've been following closely since doing a term paper on it as a senior in HS way back in 1980, lol, but we're still likely decades away from any practical use of fusion for producing clean (non-radioactive with no greenhouse gases produced, starting from simple seawater as the H2 source) energy at commercial scale for power plants for several reasons. Still, it's really impressive work and a huge milestone towards truly clean, unlimited energy someday.

https://www.nytimes.com/.../nuclear-fusion-energy...

https://www.sciencenews.org/.../nuclear-fusion...

So, let's get to the caveats. First, the large amount of energy required to create the large amount of energy put into the reaction is not "counted" in the comparison, so even more energy needs to be created by the fusion reaction at any commercial scale. Second, this reaction requires football field sized laser array to bombard the pellets of hydrogen "fuel" to heat them to millions of degrees F to initiate the fusion reaction, which is highly impractical for any commercial facility. And third, this fusion reaction lasted far less than one second, so obviously, scientists and engineers will need to find a way to sustain such fusion reactions in a controlled, safe manner to extract the energy liberated from the reactions in order to convert that energy (heat) for use in power plants, which could provide limitless clean power for all.

As an aside, for those curious, thermonuclear fusion mimicks the sun, where hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium atoms, liberating incredible heat/light/energy, given that the mass of the helium products are slightly less than the mass of the hydrogen reactants, such that, as per Einstein's E=mc2, mass is being converted into energy - the one big difference is that the sun uses its immense gravity to drive fusion (which cannot be duplicated on Earth), while fusion experiments use immense amounts of energy to drive the fusion reaction (lasers in this case vs. other facilities, which use heat combined with magnetic capture of charged particles in tokamak reactors).
 
Dumb it down for me. Is it like what Doc Ock was trying to do in Spider-Man.
sorry, never saw the film...basically this is step 397 out of maybe 5000 steps it will take to develop commercially available clean fusion power capable of providing just about all of our energy needs at far less cost than current energy sources and with no need to destroy the environment extracting the fuel (seawater is the energy source) and essentially no pollution generated from the fusion reactions. It is the Holy Grail of alternative energy. Hard to imagine this being available in less than 25 years though, but that doesn't mean it's not a hugely important step along the way to limitless clean energy. And that 25 year guess is just that - a guess.
 
Credit for tempering your enthusiasm with some realism. I've been saying that fusion has been said to be 50 years away fit the last 50 you years. Maybe this time it's true.
 
Cool science nerd alert...

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (part of the Dept. of Energy) have, for the first time, conducted a thermonuclear hydrogen fusion experiment in which the energy generated from a fusion reaction exceeded the energy put into the reaction, as per the two links below. This is a huge advance in hydrogen fusion science, something I've been following closely since doing a term paper on it as a senior in HS way back in 1980, lol, but we're still likely decades away from any practical use of fusion for producing clean (non-radioactive with no greenhouse gases produced, starting from simple seawater as the H2 source) energy at commercial scale for power plants for several reasons. Still, it's really impressive work and a huge milestone towards truly clean, unlimited energy someday.

https://www.nytimes.com/.../nuclear-fusion-energy...

https://www.sciencenews.org/.../nuclear-fusion...

So, let's get to the caveats. First, the large amount of energy required to create the large amount of energy put into the reaction is not "counted" in the comparison, so even more energy needs to be created by the fusion reaction at any commercial scale. Second, this reaction requires football field sized laser array to bombard the pellets of hydrogen "fuel" to heat them to millions of degrees F to initiate the fusion reaction, which is highly impractical for any commercial facility. And third, this fusion reaction lasted far less than one second, so obviously, scientists and engineers will need to find a way to sustain such fusion reactions in a controlled, safe manner to extract the energy liberated from the reactions in order to convert that energy (heat) for use in power plants, which could provide limitless clean power for all.

As an aside, for those curious, thermonuclear fusion mimicks the sun, where hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium atoms, liberating incredible heat/light/energy, given that the mass of the helium products are slightly less than the mass of the hydrogen reactants, such that, as per Einstein's E=mc2, mass is being converted into energy - the one big difference is that the sun uses its immense gravity to drive fusion (which cannot be duplicated on Earth), while fusion experiments use immense amounts of energy to drive the fusion reaction (lasers in this case vs. other facilities, which use heat combined with magnetic capture of charged particles in tokamak reactors).
Is this OT, or a proposal for a new offensive identity for Rutgers football?

The concept of generating more energy than put into the plan sounds fantastic. Better than plays that fizzle out with no useful product of reaction.
 
I always hoped the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (located in Plainsboro) would get it done, but alas...

I know a guy who was an engineer at the original Tokamak at PPPL ages ago. He shared some great stories over the years.
I almost went to work there after getting my PhD, as I was (and still am) very interested in alternative energy technologies and they wanted Chem E's.
 
Credit for tempering your enthusiasm with some realism. I've been saying that fusion has been said to be 50 years away fit the last 50 you years. Maybe this time it's true.
I think being an engineer and thinking about how difficult it can be to turn amazing scientific breakthroughs into practical products (having worked on things like that over the years - not fusion obviously, but in the pharma/chem industry) helps temper enthusiasm.

However, we've also seen some amazing progress in many scientific fields over the last 20 years resulting in mass-produced products that probably surprised people (battery powered cars, cancer immunotherapies, various vaccine technologies, and, of course, smart phones) that might mean 20-30 years is doable for this, but my gut tells me this one will be harder.
 
Is this OT, or a proposal for a new offensive identity for Rutgers football?

The concept of generating more energy than put into the plan sounds fantastic. Better than plays that fizzle out with no useful product of reaction.
Does not having "OT" in front of a thread with this detailed of a title really matter?
 
I always hoped the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (located in Plainsboro) would get it done, but alas...

I know a guy who was an engineer at the original Tokamak at PPPL ages ago. He shared some great stories over the years.
When I lived in S Brunswick my next door neighbor worked there doing some next level stuff that I could never understand when he tried to explain it to me. Guy was incredibly smart but his yard looked like crap
 
Does not having "OT" in front of a thread with this detailed of a title really matter?
I actually like the concept for a new offensive identity, but I am willing to bet a mod will slap an OT on it before the clock strikes midnight.

To your reply above to mdk01- I see the end result (or perhaps the "middle" result) of scientific breakthroughs in writing patents. Much of what we do goes into commercial products or processes/machinery that produces commercial products. But I am not privy to how many breakthroughs do not make the patent stage.
 
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Dumb it down for me. Is it like what Doc Ock was trying to do in Spider-Man.

Think Doc from Back to the Future 2(?), Mr. Fusion in the flying deLorean. Except as big as a warehouse using the power of a city.

My reading of this says they were able to generate more power than required to run the lasers. But that doesn't include the total power which includes lots of other things to generate that power - like the superconductors that keep the plasma contained. Also they did not capture a single watt of the power they generated as far as I know so there still lots of work to do.

But hey if this is a step forward it's a step forward. Good for them.
 
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I always hoped the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (located in Plainsboro) would get it done, but alas...

I know a guy who was an engineer at the original Tokamak at PPPL ages ago. He shared some great stories over the years.

I met a guy form there one time sitting in a bar. Real interesting guy. Offered to take me for a tour. I didn't go.
 
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A hydrogen bomb uses a fusion reaction. An atomic bomb is used to produce the temperature high enough for fusion to take place.
 
Think Doc from Back to the Future 2(?), Mr. Fusion in the flying deLorean. Except as big as a warehouse using the power of a city.

My reading of this says they were able to generate more power than required to run the lasers. But that doesn't include the total power which includes lots of other things to generate that power - like the superconductors that keep the plasma contained. Also they did not capture a single watt of the power they generated as far as I know so there still lots of work to do.

But hey if this is a step forward it's a step forward. Good for them.
Party pooper

I had a chance to visit the tokamak at PPL in HS the mid 80’s. It was very cool, but I was most impressed with the giant flywheel used to store energy to fire the thing off so they didn’t dim the lights in the county. I never really worried about having a nuclear reactor in town trying to replicate the sun. They weren’t there yet.
 
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Party pooper

I had a chance to visit the tokamak at PPL in HS the mid 80’s. It was very cool, but I was most impressed with the giant flywheel used to store energy to fire the thing off so they didn’t dim the lights in the county. I never really worried about having a nuclear reactor in town trying to replicate the sun. They weren’t there yet.

Wow a flywheel for energy storage. That's cool. That I would like to see. But I imagine it just looks like a tank.
 
Think Doc from Back to the Future 2(?), Mr. Fusion in the flying deLorean. Except as big as a warehouse using the power of a city.

My reading of this says they were able to generate more power than required to run the lasers. But that doesn't include the total power which includes lots of other things to generate that power - like the superconductors that keep the plasma contained. Also they did not capture a single watt of the power they generated as far as I know so there still lots of work to do.

But hey if this is a step forward it's a step forward. Good for them.
No, as I said above, although perhaps not as clearly as I could have (from the linked articles - not my analysis), the energy generated by the fusion reaction exceeded the energy input from the lasers to initiate the reaction, but this did not include the energy required to operate the lasers, which is pretty big. But even just this step has been viewed as nearly unattainable for a long time, so it's a friggin' huge deal - Nobel worthy, IMO.

Was wondering if he meant Doc Brown from Back to the Future 2 (yes, it was 2)...
 
I actually like the concept for a new offensive identity, but I am willing to bet a mod will slap an OT on it before the clock strikes midnight.

To your reply above to mdk01- I see the end result (or perhaps the "middle" result) of scientific breakthroughs in writing patents. Much of what we do goes into commercial products or processes/machinery that produces commercial products. But I am not privy to how many breakthroughs do not make the patent stage.
It's now OT and before midnight - you can collect your prize at the year end banquet. However, most patents aren't really associated with significant scientific breakthroughs, per se, at least not in corporate America, where patents are more of a way to keep someone else from doing what the patent authors have shown is novel in some way. Serious scientific breakthrough patents are few and far between.
 
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No, as I said above, although perhaps not as clearly as I could have (from the linked articles - not my analysis), the energy generated by the fusion reaction exceeded the energy input from the lasers to initiate the reaction, but this did not include the energy required to operate the lasers, which is pretty big. But even just this step has been viewed as nearly unattainable for a long time, so it's a friggin' huge deal - Nobel worthy, IMO.

Was wondering if he meant Doc Brown from Back to the Future 2 (yes, it was 2)...
When I was about 12 (we're talking 1963 here), I read a very short book about how nuclear energy was the coming thing as oil and gas became depleted. The book talked about nuclear fusion, and said we're all be fine once scientists figure out a way to derive more energy from fusion than the energy needed to start fusion. It's been a long wait, that's for sure!!
 
It's now OT and before midnight - you can collect your prize at the year end banquet. However, most patents aren't really associated with significant scientific breakthroughs, per se, at least not in corporate America, where patents are more of a way to keep someone else from doing what the patent authors have shown is novel in some way. Serious scientific breakthrough patents are few and far between.
I agree with "significant," but depending on the technology and the company, some companies and inventors would make you think every one of their inventions fall into that category. The other function of patents in some large corporations is not about prevention, but about having a stack of patents to use as leverage in negotiation and cross-licensing. As for your last sentence, maybe I would use "major" in place of or in addition to "serious," but we agree. Some might conclude most patents are quite worthless. I can't opine on that, because any of the ones I wrote are extremely valuable. 💪
 
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I agree with "significant," but depending on the technology and the company, some companies and inventors would make you think every one of their inventions fall into that category. The other function of patents in some large corporations is not about prevention, but about having a stack of patents to use as leverage in negotiation and cross-licensing. As for your last sentence, maybe I would use "major" in place of or in addition to "serious," but we agree. Some might conclude most patents are quite worthless. I can't opine on that, because any of the ones I wrote are extremely valuable. 💪
I have three patents, all of which were novel chemical processing innovations, but nothing that unusual for the industry in the big picture. They were all executed in order to protect the intellectual property space against future generic manufacturers to make it harder for them to make the final active ingredient, since they wouldn't be allowed to make it the way we did when the drug went off patent (our process patents typically file several years after the drug, itself is filed), possibly delaying their ability to launch the generic version. I was involved in a patent infringement suit over one of my patents. Never got called to testify, but was subjected to intense questioning by our patent folks in their efforts and was prepared to testify, but a settlement was eventually reached - like you said - leverage.
 
Or, isn't it possible that at that scale they incorrectly attributed the energy input and energy creation? How could fusion be theoretically possible without a force massive like gravity to drive it?
 
Party pooper

I had a chance to visit the tokamak at PPL in HS the mid 80’s. It was very cool, but I was most impressed with the giant flywheel used to store energy to fire the thing off so they didn’t dim the lights in the county. I never really worried about having a nuclear reactor in town trying to replicate the sun. They weren’t there yet.
Very cool that you got to see it 👍 I never got the chance, as my friend changed careers before we met. Having a nuclear accelerator a mile away never "worried" us, but I always wondered if it ever uhh...lost containment...would it look like that scene from Ghostbusters. They did ramp it up to 1,000,000 degrees while I lived over thataway, which is pretty amazing.
 
A hydrogen bomb uses a fusion reaction. An atomic bomb is used to produce the temperature high enough for fusion to take place.
Yep. Making an uncontrolled reaction go BOOM we're good at. Keeping it safe, under control, and having the ability to harness that liberated energy is the hard part. Just keep chopping.
 
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Producing greater energy than required to create it is likely a misguided notion, try as we might--even the sun will burn out and cease producing energy in its present form. The idea is better framed not as producing more energy than required to generate it, but energy that isn't harmful to carbon-based life (i.e. cleaner on an ongoing basis). Energy output will not exceed the input, even (or perhaps especially) in a localized environment such as in a man-made reactor on planet earth, where entropy may be greater than naturally occurring in stars, for instance. A reactor will need an initial source of energy to build, then an ongoing source to maintain the output, all of which, if properly accounted for, will likely exceed the input. We have to try, I get that part, but the better framework to set the expectations more aptly is to present the idea as a replacement of fossil fuels. So if the energy produced from a new technique, whether hydrogen or otherwise, is less harmful to humans and other carbon-based species, that's a good thing.

But I'm not sure energy output will ever exceed input. The caveat to this is that if entropy is greater in some segments of the universe, it suggests that there is greater order in others, and perhaps we will find that order in hydrogen reactors. Given my sense of the human experience, we will likely fvck that up and immediately have every Rutgers player transfer out.
 
I almost went to work there after getting my PhD, as I was (and still am) very interested in alternative energy technologies and they wanted Chem E's.
But you sold your sold to the Penn State of pharma! LOL.
 
When I was about 12 (we're talking 1963 here), I read a very short book about how nuclear energy was the coming thing as oil and gas became depleted. The book talked about nuclear fusion, and said we're all be fine once scientists figure out a way to derive more energy from fusion than the energy needed to start fusion. It's been a long wait, that's for sure!!
Yup, controlled fusion is the holy grail of science. If mastered, it will solve all of the world's energy problems. However, as mentioned above, "experts" have said it is 20 years away for the past 40 years (at least). Perhaps someday?

But we are able to use fusion in a bomb, so that's cool! :)
 
"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a federal research facility primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy"

I wouldn't believe anything they say
They are probably setting the table for a heist/boondoggle
 
Or, isn't it possible that at that scale they incorrectly attributed the energy input and energy creation? How could fusion be theoretically possible without a force massive like gravity to drive it?
Superconducting magnets
 
No, as I said above, although perhaps not as clearly as I could have (from the linked articles - not my analysis), the energy generated by the fusion reaction exceeded the energy input from the lasers to initiate the reaction, but this did not include the energy required to operate the lasers, which is pretty big. But even just this step has been viewed as nearly unattainable for a long time, so it's a friggin' huge deal - Nobel worthy, IMO.

Was wondering if he meant Doc Brown from Back to the Future 2 (yes, it was 2)...

I think we're in agreement. Pretty sure that's also what I was saying unless this also included exceeding containment power and I missed it. Either way no biggie.

ETA: I see I used the term run the lasers not laser power. It's what I meant. I was unclear. Not my area by a long shot.
 
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I agree with "significant," but depending on the technology and the company, some companies and inventors would make you think every one of their inventions fall into that category. The other function of patents in some large corporations is not about prevention, but about having a stack of patents to use as leverage in negotiation and cross-licensing. As for your last sentence, maybe I would use "major" in place of or in addition to "serious," but we agree. Some might conclude most patents are quite worthless. I can't opine on that, because any of the ones I wrote are extremely valuable. 💪

I have one patent. It is not significant. Not sure why my company at the time even applied for it. But now I have a nice plaque. LOL
 
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Superconducting magnets

The National Ignition Facility uses bigass lasers shot from every direction. I don't think it's intended for long term reactions. Just studying how to get them started.

Confinement reactors like a tokomak use bigass magnets.
 
This is definitely a good step forward, but there is still a long, long way to go before fusion can become a stable, affordable source of power. Containment is the huge issue, once you've heated the plasma to the point where fusion begins, how do you contain it indefinitely as it produces power? I know the focus has been on magnetic fields for decades, but I don't know if they've reached the point where they can sustain and control a magnetic field "container" to encapsulate the fusion process.
 
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