"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper.
It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant.
Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges.
It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%.
And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually.
There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
In the 1940s - cities smelled like sh!t, were so polluted you almost never wanted to go outside, healthcare was still largely snake oil, the average person was still working 10 hours a day 6 days week, human rights outside of straight white christian men were questionable, AND we were in our second world war in 20 years - at the advent of the nuclear bomb.
Look at where we are now.
If you don't see progress, and if you can't see how people back then thought the world was surely coming to an end, and you think it's worse now, I'm honestly amazed.
At no point in time, was progress a up and to the right with no impediments. Every advance we've had, people have worked HARD for. So thank your lucky stars so many people get up every day and keep working for it.
Because it isn't easy. But it's what we do. Always have. Always will.
Eventually, we will reach the physical limits of how good technology can get. But we are laughably far away from that point in so many major aspects of life, that we've got a long way to go before the 10 & 20 year future might not be better.
Renewable optimists consistently under-estimate the storage problem by orders of magnitude. We don't have enough batteries on Earth to hold one single day's worth of electricity. And for us to actually rely on solar, we would need to store multiple months of electricity to survive the winter.
Solar is cheap because you're comparing a generation source that works on occasion with a generation source that works 24/7.
I'm not anti-solar at all. But I am realistic about what we can and can't do with it. The thing that will make a solar grid practical _today_ is focusing on variable loads. When the sun is shining, we should be cranking the AC of every home and office, smelting aluminum, filling dams, etc.
No one is ignoring it. We're rapidly deploying both technologies all over the place. It's exciting that real money is flowing into the industry. Fusion has speculator money, and Fusion gets extra attention because it's sold as basically, the cure to all energy problems, forever and ever.
When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
Sadly incorrect. You can see the variation of wind and solar we get here in the UK at: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
As you can see, fossil fuels are about a 1/3rd of power and we expand renewables by maybe another 30% before we start getting excess power. After that point, you start to have excess power while no longer reducing CO2 by much as you still need the Nat gas for the cloudy and still days.
In practice you might be able to get to 75% non-fossil fuels before you're firmly into the realm of diminishing returns without a big storage breakthrough or a doubling/tripling of electricity costs (its triple to go pure wind and current tech energy storage because you need up to weeks of storage to not have blackouts, but with a nuclear power expansion youd only need a doubling).
Most of the public can't grasp the mathematics of compounding change.
We won't even focus on storing much of it but just build more and more.
Solar and wind cannot be used in this role and at this scale due to their massive variability
Some can't be reasoned with.
Also population growth has declined more rapidly than predicted and in places where it wasn't expected. Which brings it's own issues most of which have to do with finance and sustainability of rentier capitalism, but not being able to feed and house people.
Partly due to policy makers fuckups around the 2008 financial crisis birth rates in US dropped. Which means today's 14 years olds are going to enter the best job market in three generations.
Wind power requires an enormous amount of epoxy and the windmills wear out and then you have to throw an enormous amount of epoxy away and it is not green.
Storing energy using batteries from the above sources requires an enormous amount of nickel and cobalt mind out of the Earth by third world countries and is not green.
Fusion power requires mining lithium and is not green.
Nuclear power requires changing people's minds and when it does fail it causes two-headed fish. While perhaps green, it is not politically feasible at this time.
Here's an idea. Take public transit instead of using that Tesla that required a bunch of imported rare earth minerals from sweatshops in China and microchips from Taiwan -- which may or may not be available to us in the future in this geopolitical climate -- and lithium and cobalt from death trap mines down in Peru and Africa.
Burn natural gas in your stove instead of electricity which is generally coal-fired, or if it isn't coal fired, it comes from so solar and wind and is therefore not green.
My point is that the original paragraph stands. It's going to get worse before it gets better and no one wants to believe this.
Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed.
"fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.
~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~
as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs
this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times
the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs
"In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665
It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.
In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.
Physicists are no exception.
But the NIF was never “about” societal energy. Its primary purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the nuclear test ban treaty means we can’t just go around detonating nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF allows study of matter at extremely high energy density.
NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons research and development lab established during the Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733
""" The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile. """
Anyway, in recent years at JET they have been doing a new round of deuterium-tritium experiments. The interior of the reactor has been refurbished with tungsten and beryllium inner surfaces, like ITER will have, and they have been testing longer reaction pulses. Sounds promising https://physicsworld.com/a/fusion-energy-record-smashed-by-j...
Isn't this wrong? LLNL was an 1952 off-shoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which in turn was founded in 1931. LLNL was not established during or by the Manhattan project, which ended in 1946.
> [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response to the detonation of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb during the Cold War. It later became autonomous in 1971 and was designated a national laboratory in 1981.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...
> [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Berkeley_National_Lab...
> Although the Manhattan Project ceased to exist on 31 December 1946, the Manhattan District was not abolished until 15 August 1947
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#After_the_wa...
They have delayed the announcement of the delay, but it's expected to be another 5+ years.
It's the most complicated machine ever built, with each part built by a different firm in a different country for political reasons. The first vacuum vessel sector installed was corroded. Korea used steel that didn't meet the specifications. 8 more sectors from four different nations to go, each one could bring its own 5 year delay. Or maybe they don't find any issues on the inspections but only find a leak after the whole machine has been assembled.
Isn't the research basically done, as in "we can build big enough bombs to annihilate whatever we want"?
Existing nukes degrade due to various factors such as the natural radioactive decay of the uranium and plutonium they’re made of. Supercomputers are used to simulate this and make predictions about reliability, remaining lifetime, etc…
When it comes time to refurbish old bombs, ideally they should have the cores reprocessed into new, modern designs with better safety, reliability, and less fallout when they go boom (better efficiency).
All of this requires measurements, simulations, tests, etc…
In the past it was done with experiments on complete bombs, now it’s done with experiments on just small subsets that don’t go boom in the desert.
How do you know it's not the other way around:
That they're using the gigantic piggy bank of the military to fund actual fusion research?
I agree that ICF doesn't seem like a winning strategy. But surely it's not complete waste, either, right?
But you can achieve plasmas of equivalent density and temperature to those you get in an H-bomb explosion, which is invaluable to weapons researchers if they're not allowed to actually detonate any bombs.
I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him. I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic assumptions and then conclude it'll never work.
Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort way to seem prescient.
Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep working on it.
The blog post author seems to be concerned about the time and attention spent on something that is not likely (i.e. as his post states is off by several orders of magnitude at least) to realistically help with alleviating the urgent problems of planetary climate change and resource exhaustion. I agree with that concern.
Faced with finite resources and a time limit, prioritization is essential to ensure the best chance of success. Technologies like fusion detract from finding and implementing more realistic approaches that could help with long-term civilizational sustainability.
I also really dislike back-to-hunter-gatherer primitivism. It's an ideology of extremely privileged people who have never actually lived "close to nature" a.k.a. poor. It's a reactionary fantasy of a lost golden age that never existed and belongs in the same category as American right-wingers glorifying the 1950s or neo-medievalists glorifying the 1500s.
It's a brutally tough problem and it's likely that we already have dialed in a certain amount of climate change we will have to deal with, but it's not futile unless of course we just give up.
Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable pastime, which society could certainly use more of.
> Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical reason why ...
True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested enough...
Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with massively negative ROI's.
Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is "Do the Math" and his arguments are based on the math. If you can contribute a single example where his math is wrong, I'd be more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to ignore your future comments.
> Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."
I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote anything like that.
That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's WAY more feasible.)
We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when 100% successful, are still failures.
That being said, sometimes technology can do surprising things. If some other line of research somewhere yields, say, lasers that are multiple orders of magnitude more efficient then suddenly things might change and ICF would become a viable path. The massive inefficiency of lasers is the largest single problem.
The main reason magnetic containment is so much better than ICF is that huge electromagnets are more efficient than lasers plus inertia at confining the plasma.
That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to hunter gatherer en mass.
He does have qualms about whether "effectively infinite clean energy" would do us any good right now. Look at what we've done with a temporary surfeit of very cheap (but not clean) energy. We are kicking out the legs of the stool we're sitting on. Human beings perch precariously at the apex of a massive biological edifice, the foundation of which is fundamental to human life, but we have the unfortunate habit of thinking all we need is technology and ingenuity. Far more than new technology, we need the wisdom to apply our tools for the long term flourishing of earth-borne life, of which humanity is a part.
From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.
It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean it's not important.
And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive - wonderful traits in students - are likely to do).
In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in their own designs.
It consists of
* Room temperature semiconductors
* Useful fusion power
* Quantum computers something anything useful outside of a simulation
I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally amazing, possible, future technologies.
So there's a lot of money and glory at stake if you can demonstrate you're making headway toward any of these goals.
There's a parallel to alchemy in all this. Before we knew it wasn't impossible to create gold through chemical processes, it seemed like a very appealing quest indeed. You have figures like Newton spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to figure it out.
Artificial intelligence. By a gigantic margin. Fusion would be very expensive and likely not competitive with fission, due to vastly more complex and expensive reactors. So effectively useless. Quantum computers: Nobody knows what they would be practically useful for, not even experts like Scott Aaronson. (No, cracking RSA is not useful.) Room temperature superconductors: The most realistic example I have heard about them is ... smaller MRI machines. Great.
"So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even at 100% efficiency, we’d get just 25 times more energy out, or 75 MJ. That’s still not enough to pay for the price of admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
Also, this one should be shouted louder for those in the back.
> "Many in our culture truly believe in “the amazing future,” uncritically extrapolating our fossil-fueled joy ride into ever-more impressive innovations and technologies."
The computer was in the same category 50 years ago, as was the ball point pen 100. Just making aluminum cheap, was a miracle.
And before you think aluminum isn't a biggie, it revolutionized so many industries. Including airflight, missles, and more at the time.
Things impossible, became possible. And now these things are trivial.
The only question is, when it becomes cheap and easy to use fusion power, will it be the optimal power source at that time?
Scientific advancement comes from exploring every path at once, quickly pruning failed paths and doubling down on successes, with enough stochastic jumps to keep us out of ruts for too long.
For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you. Most news about commercial fusion is ‘X had a big investment round’ or ‘Y made a really hot plasma’, and if we were in the world where a startup's tokamak hit ignition (we're not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even end to end.
The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy.
Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead of 400MJ for the reaction.
In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc
Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested - larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but would require a more powerful laser array.
I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If anything, we are closer than we think.
Nowhere in this article does it mention the gains from using more efficient lasers, instead treating the 400MJ input as a constant. Bad reporting.
Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.
The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets.
The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).
For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212
And someone linked a podcast of a interview with the director (in german, http://alternativlos.org/36). And after listening, I do became convinced that with the Stellerator design, a working Fusion plant is possible.
Maybe still not in 20 years, because it is hellish complicated, but some day.
(till then I would bet on harvesting more our existing very big fusionreactor called the sun)
In either case, controlling fusion is awesome technology and research, with lots of potential applications and deserves further funding. But yeah, please more of civil projects like Wendelstein and less disguised weapon research.
Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a nice side effect, but don't confuse it with the existence purpose of the lab.
The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer types.
Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical details.
This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than recognizing intellectual achievements.
The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to residual heat from the walls can be very short.
Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed are unnecessary.
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...
Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons.
I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for their research. That's all.
Solar, in particular, is our future.
And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries we have.
This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2].
[1]: https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/...
[2]: https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-refiner...
Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you push boundaries of science and make progress.
And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology / mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/
Note that the wikipedia article about this company is policed by skeptics and has been in dispute for more than a decade.