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Question for you, when you say that we've accomplished fusion, do you mean fusion that produces more power than took to generate it? Or simply the act of fusing atoms together in a reactor (vs the uncontained fusion present in thermonuclear bombs)? If it's the former, then like, holy shit, that's actually been accomplished‽ Like, I know NIF had their whole thing with breakeven fusion a couple of years ago, but that was only counting the energy that made it to the hohlraum, not all the energy that was lost powering the lasers and shit. When you factor all of that in (like you'd need to for realistic power generation) then it's very far away from breakeven generation. It's still an incredible breakthrough and will help us figure out fusion energy, but it's not a practical means of energy generation at this time. Did something else happen that I missed‽
If it's the latter, then we've actually been fusing atoms together in reactors since the 1950s. In fact, there's a community of people who build small fusion reactors as a hobby! I learned about this a few years ago when a 16 year old made the news by being the youngest person to build their own reactor. The main site I know of is https://www.fusor.net/
Previous commenter may have been referring to this, where Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced producing more energy than the laser energy put into it https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition
I appreciate the link!
I forgot bout this achievement in 2022!
Yes, net-positive fusion was achieved in August of last year:
Scientists achieve net energy gain breakthrough with nuclear fusion
Of course, this is going to take a decade or two to scale up to commercial energy production, but net-positive fusion is real and does exist.
Ah, okay, that's what I was referring to with NIF. They absolutely have generated more power than they put in, but only in a way that is scientifically interesting. If you only consider the energy flowing into the hohlraum, then more energy was produced, which is crazy cool! They also achieved true ignition which is great. We've never been able to get things hot enough and squozed enough for long enough to be able to directly observe that in a controlled setting. The fact that they can now just do that means they can experimentally probe where the boundaries are and find the cheapest way for us to get to ignition.
However, they got the energy to the hohlraum using lasers. Those lasers (and all of the equipment around them) required (I think) three orders of magnitude more power to generate the laser impulse that triggered fusion. A productive fusion reaction did occur, but it absolutely wasn't productive enough to make up for all the power required to generate the laser pulse. Making lasers that can output at the required power levels and frequencies without all of the waste (i.e. 2.5 MJ of electricity to laser results in 2 MJ laser output) is a Hard Problem™ and is probably impossible with our current understanding of physics.
When you made your comment, I wondered if someone had achieved breakeven using a tokamak or some other form of magnetic confinement setup. Inertial confinement fusion is great for research but not practical for power generation, whereas magnetic confinement fusion is probably where the future is.
ICF is really good at putting the squoze on stuff, because the things you want to fuse are all stuffed in a tiny hohlraum and you're zorching it with a shitload of giant friggin lasers. Magnetic confinement fusion used in tokamaks occurs much more gradually by magnetically heating and containing plasmas. The nice thing about tokamaks is that they just constantly generate heat. With modern superconducting magnets, the infrastructure efficiency is also pretty decent, giving them a chance at truly generating more power than they use when you take the entire reactor into consideration.
Jesus that's a lot of words. I should go do my damn job instead of distracting myself talking about fusion. Sorry for the brain dump.
I apologize— my intent wasn’t to be misleading, just highly optimistic about the future.
No worries, I didn't think you were trying to mislead! I'm also very hopeful for fusion and I like to read about it. I don't know if magnetic confinement systems will be able to reach the temperatures and pressures required for ignition (versus those just for fusion) soon, but technological progress certainly has a tendency towards jumping forwards unexpectedly!
“Magnetic confinement”… just hearing the term in real-world use get me all excited that Star Trek and real life are finally starting to cross over.
Although Star Trek also predicted that the next 30-50 years are gonna suck the hard one.
Edit: at least we’re not trying to screw around with matter/antimatter power production. There was an entire episode of Star Trek: Voyager about how that is an absurdly, ridiculously dangerous technology for power production on a planetary scale, even in the 24th century.