Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
It’s silly to blame a facility not designed for power production for using inefficient lasers.
This is an important and necessary step to getting resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would’ve been to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily available literally at the push of a button. But for some odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on electricity instead...
Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in answering that question and providing the necessary context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem ecstatic about the possibilities.
You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.
But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.
Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss. We previously only knew how to achieve an inertial confinement based fusion reaction with a positive Q factor by first setting off a fission bomb, and this was only done for the neutron generation to increase the amount of fissionable material exploded (which is why they are called fission-fusion-fission bombs).
We can now generate fusion energy in a way that is obviously confine-able. That's a major step, and it's not THAT hard to imagine many mechanisms of turning a hot droplet into energy. For example the hohlraum itself in an indirect system will obviously be heated by the reaction and could be used to generate steam. Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
This four sentence post is a perfect example of OP's point. No insight, no though process, just a pithy negative reply.
Only an order of magnitude off, but yeah, physicists and spherical cows and all that.
> Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss.
A little sense of humour is lost on so many bitter souls these days, it's kind of sad. Lighten up, mate!
> Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
You do realise that the fusion reaction we're talking about lasted for less than a trillionth of a second in a miniscule area, while other practical designs are aiming for continuous operation in the half hour range to examine practical engineering challenges of particular reactor configurations?
A high Q-factor may be completely useless if the underlying concept doesn't work for actual power generation and one might be easier to achieve than the other (i.e. getting a continuously working reactor first and tweaking it to improve Qp). The question therefore becomes, what's the actual value of the result. The article doesn't even touch on that, while even some C-grade online publications provided context like that.
Didn't we get to that milestone when they detonated a fusion-based bomb back in 1952?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
Anyway, I'm not sure it's a significant milestone. It's just a number along a scale. If you were to tell me they've achieved a _sustained_ reaction which yields more energy than goes into it, for a period of, say, a day or so - then you could claim a significant milestone has been reached.
And even with that, some people argue that given how there's basically no sustainable source of tritium for large-scale electricity generation, the whole exercise is pointless unless the process uses other combinations of elements.
These may seem like tiny steps forward, but once the genie is out of the bottle it's going to be nuts.
Also this laser tech is ancient, once there's a major economic driver behind it I expect they'll rapidly advance.
My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias is against.
Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea?
I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there _is_ something going here other than that?
Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before substance, and raising expectations for something that's still essentially just basic research.
This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source, why even bother taking any publication serious anymore? It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their work.
It's a critique of the media preventing the public from actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up.
I will try to be really positive here. The researchers managed to achieve ignition on an area less than the width of a human hair for 100 trillionths of a second.
The resulting fusion may have gotten scientific break-even (again - no officially published results yet). This is great progress in terms of basic research, for sure.
On the other hand, we have experiments like Wendelstein 7-X, an experimental reactor that already can hold a stable plasma for seconds and is planned to go up 30 minutes of continuous operation early next year (construction is already finished).
The researchers state that they want to test, whether continuous operation is possible, how the plasma can be handled, how the materials and magnetic fields can be optimised and whether their approach is practical.
So on the one hand we have a theoretical result that may or may not be a scientific break even and is hailed as a major breakthrough that will open the door for commercial fusion reactors and lasts for trillionths of a second within a miniscule aera. No continuous plasma, no work on practical reactor design, just good old fashioned basic research at its best.
On the other hand we have working, practical fusion reactor experiments that are already able to hold a stable plasma for seconds and are tackling the engineering challenges of actually producing electricity. Some are designed for engineering break-even and Qp > 1 (e.g. ITER) and not ready yet, while others "simply" examine the practicality of a particular design (e.g. Wendelstein 7-X) and actually worked and continue to improve by orders of magnitude (in terms of operation time), pushing continuous operation time up to 30 minutes.
Now that I gave some context, how much of a breakthrough are we talking about? I don't know. All these experiments are important, of course and are required for the end goal of achieving economically viable stable power generation using nuclear fusion. I'd just like to wait for an official publication and a proper subsumption by other experts in the field.
Maybe we are just arguing about semantics and what constitutes a breakthrough but in my mind, the hardest challenge of fusion has been getting scientific gain over 1. There are still OTHER hard problem like continuous operation, capturing energy, but ultimately, getting scientific gain over 1 is/was the most challenging. You can say it isn't but the fact is, none of the MCF concepts have achieved a scientific gain over ~.64 and have not improved since the 1990s (JET). Look, if the 7-X or ITER or JET achieves a similar scientific gain, they will get similarly applauded.
I'm not saying that fusion will become a economically viable power source now. It is just that NIF de-risked the hardest challenge of fusion from a pure physics standpoint: more energy out than in.
It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.
15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.
The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic...
It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?
A few years back I read David McCullough's biography of the Wright Brothers which told the same story: https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1...
This site cites a couple of the pre-Wright naysayers: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...
I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even.
Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself says the data is still being analysed and the actual results aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet.
So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.