“ Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power. Last year on a December morning, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) managed, in a world first, to produce a nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it used, in a process called “ignition.” Now they say they have successfully replicated ignition at least three times this year, according to a December report from the LLNL. This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. For decades, scientists have attempted to harness fusion energy, essentially recreating the power of the sun on Earth.
After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated.
Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the “robustness” of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied.
Each experiment also offers an opportunity to study the physics of ignition in detail, Appelbe told CNN. “This provides valuable information to the scientists in addressing the next challenge to be overcome: how to maximize the energy that can be obtained.”
Unlike nuclear fission — the process used in the world’s nuclear plants today, which is generated by the division of atoms — nuclear fusion leaves no legacy of long-lived radioactive waste. As the climate crisis accelerates, and the urgency of ditching planet-heating fossil fuels increases, the prospect of an abundant source of safe, clean energy is tantalizing. Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and other stars, involves smashing two or more atoms together to form a denser one, in a process that releases huge amounts of energy.
There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder’s outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat.
The energy produced in December 2022 was small — it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy.
Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy — their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. “These results demonstrated NIF’s ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels,” the report said.
There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, US climate envoy John Kerry launched an international engagement plan involving more than 30 countries with the aim of boosting nuclear fusion to help tackle the climate crisis.
“There is potential in fusion to revolutionize our world, and to change all of the options that are in front of us, and provide the world with abundant and clean energy without the harmful emissions of traditional energy sources,” Kerry told the climate gathering. In December, the US Department of Energy announced a $42 million investment in a program bringing together multiple institutions, including LLNL, to establish “hubs” focused on advancing fusion. “Harnessing fusion energy is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of the 21st Century,” said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a statement. “We now have the confidence that it’s not only possible, but probable, that fusion energy can be a reality.”
Ella Nilsen and René Marsh contributed to reporting
I know this is probably tongue in cheek, but I genuinely thought the same until recently. There’s a company called Helion which is developing a really cool fusion process that doesn’t use steam as an energy transfer mechanism. Obviously it has its own set of drawbacks and roadblocks, but still really cool tech in the making.
Here’s the video I saw going into detail on it if anyone’s interested:
I hope this actually pans out, but I am suspicious that it won’t. Mostly just because of they way they have this air of tech bro hype around them; hopefully I just learned about it through poor sources because it would be freakin cool if it worked
Yep, this was pretty much my exact reaction as well. I haven’t really dug into it since, but it was an interesting twist on fusion that would be sweet if it made some progress!
Honestly I don’t have high hopes, they believe their next model will solve the shortcomings they face with it’s size, but that could reveal a whole other set of issues.
Same, expectations are definitely in check, but cool none the less! I feel like there are a lot of hiccups here that would need to be smoothed out before this would become anything remotely feasible.
Since everyone else gave a joke answer I'll take a stab in the dark and say the upper limits would be the availability of hydrogen and physical limitations in transforming heat output into electricity. The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels. After that, it would be how well you can scale up turbines to efficiently convert heat to electricity.
If you have fusion energy, creating H2 from water via electrolysis is a joke. You can do it at home. It only requires a lot of energy. But with energy from fusion it will become super easy, barely an inconvenient
In the news, 5.000 years later : “Scientists warned that our mass extraction of hydrogen may produce global salinization, but no one wants to reduce its energy consumption.”
The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels.
I’m not expert either, but I don’t think most of that 96% of hydrogen is a candidate for the fusion we’re doing today. NIF (like the OP article) uses Deuterium (Hydrogen with 1 neutron) and Tritium (Hydrogen with 2 neutrons) is what is squashed together to produce energy. The more neutrons make the fusion “easier” to produce energy.
Naturally occurring Deuterium isn’t crazy hard to find. Its in sea water, but you have to go through A LOT of sea water to pull out the rare atoms of Deuterium. Naturally occurring Tritium is much more rare with having to find very small amounts in ground water.
Humanity is also able to make Deuterium and Tritium as byproducts of nuclear fission.
In a perfect world, NASA was always funded like Humanity depended on it since after WW2, and by 2010 a unified global space organization supplanted the need for any militaries because we’re too busy building fission plants on the moon to bind with that sweet HE3 to power the Space Mobile Homes affordable for all because of course we researched fusion without profit motive until it worked.
Kinda my preferred alt-world, now someone please fire up all of the world’s particle accelerators on high at once, that’ll get us there right?
You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?
It’s near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. … But to be honest, the ‘unlimited energy’ thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That’s even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn’t the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it’s a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.
That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It’s not complete garbage green-washing (unlike “carbon capture and storage”, which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it’s some holy-grail of unlimited power is … well … basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.
There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.
D-D fusion converts about 0.1% of mass to energy (4 MeV / c^2 / 4 Daltons). E=mc^2. So we have 4.2E30 (420E28) Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 485 billion years of fuel.
Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.
It’s good to see some progress in this area. It’s something people have been working on for a very long time. I just wish they wouldn’t keep pitching it as a ‘solution to climate crisis’. It isn’t.
Fusion power is not currently viable. Progress is being made, but a lot more research is required before actual usable power plants can be designed; and then a lot more time will be required to actually build them. And even then, we’re only guessing about how good these power plants might be. They could be really great and clean, but currently they don’t exist at all. People have been working this this technology for a very long time, and it is yet to succeed. So the claims about problems it will solve are just hopeful speculation.
Climate change was once a distant future problem for which fusion power sounds like a good answer, but that was a long time ago now. Today, climate change is a right now problem and fusion power is still a distant future technology. We must not gamble the planet we all live on for a bet that fusion power is just around the corner and will somehow fix all our power needs. That would be a really bad bet to make. Delaying actual meaningful action in the hopes that future fusion will save the world… would be a mistake. So lets not think of fusion as a solution to climate change.
Indeed. And we are getting better at that. A lot better. Improvement in solar power have been happening a lot faster than fusion power. It’s far better than it use to be, and has the advantage that it is already very good today.
Yes, the goal should be improving solar, wind, and fission until fusion is ready, which might be two decades from now, or never, but advancing beyond fossil fuels should always be a combined effort in multiple fields. If nothing else, they’re frequently quite synergistic.
Only for a significant majority of humanity. And species in general. You just gotta hustle and get that bunker built and you’ll be all good. Climate change is a hoax anyway, I saw a picture once of the ocean in the 50s, and a recent picture with no reference to tides, and the water levels were the roughly the same from about 500 metres away.
I think the problem is that climate change isn’t a problem yet. Most people are merely inconvenienced by it. When it gets to be a real problem, it will be too late. That is why it is hard to rally people around the cause with more than words.
It is also about the philosophy of many people who are focused on fusion as the future. If we just had unlimited cheap power that would solve alllll of our problems…. which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really the crisis here.
I wonder what sort of problems having near-unlimited energy at our disposal would bring. Like, light and noise pollution are already bad enough. But would people be even more careless with that? And if we manage to automate most things and energy isn’t an issue, how would we live and occupy ourselves? How would that change industries and the world? How would that change things like war and power struggles in general? What about science and electronics?
Yup. The rich will use it to consolidate power and wealth, while the poor still have to go to work and grind for 50+ hours a week just to scrape by. Nothing will change, because the issue isn’t a lack of resources; The issue is resource distribution.
Yeah, I meant more along the lines of what those unknown problems could look like. For example, whales get very disturbed by sound pollution in the water and I can just imagine that a lot of other animals do as well. Not to mention that we ourselves apparently risk mental health from all the noise in the city. How would that change if we have more electronics at our disposal? Or maybe it’ll be the opposite and we can build more quiet EVs.
Unlimited for our current needs or on a planetary scale, but nowhere near enough at the scale of a solar system of galaxy. I doubt it would be enough energy to for example open a wormhole or accelerate a spaceship to even 1/3 of light-speed. Not only is the amount important, but also the ability to sustain the output.
We’ll just be on the first rung of the Kardashev scale. Of 3. However, the jumps between the rungs are huge (logarithmic). Complete control of planet, star, galaxy.
Thinking of the hypothetical scenario where in a short timeframe energy would become near unlimited and almost free:
On the positive side: with no energy limitations, Direct Air Capture technology could be scaled massively. That’s one really promising technology that can take carbon off the air and use it for other things (like sustainable air fuels) or removing it altogether.
Also this would accelerate the transition to electric cars and well, electric everything: why pay for fuel for your car, your stove or boiler, when they can be almost free? That has a potential for good effects on the environment too.
On the negative side: this opens the door for more, cheap transport. If people don’t have to pay for fuel, they’d be more willing to take the car everywhere. This would mean more roads, more infrastructure, more destruction of ecosystems, less space for pedestrians… A trend that is already too difficult to reverse in a world of expensive fuels.
In terms of economics, I could see this accelerating the gap between countries. Those who could benefit from semi-free energy first would have an immense competitive advantage and also lower their manufacturing costs, leaving worse-off countries in a position where they can’t compete because of technology nor because of cheap labour.
Honestly, we won’t likely see cheap energy in our lifetimes. A fusion powerplant could come online that is able to power the entire eastern seaboard of the US with some leftover for millionths of a cent per kW and we would still be getting charged just as much if not more for it. The general populace will never see the benefits of nearly infinite, nearly free power because the company that owns it will just see it as a higher profit margin. Sure, they may underbid fossil fuels or other renewables by just enough that they can’t operate, but it will still be orders of magnitude more than we should be charged. The only way the population sees the benefit is if the reactor is publicly owned and the government is prevented from converting it over to privatization because that has ever gone well for us.
I agree with you, prices will still be market driven. However I was replying to a comment about a hypothetical scenario, which I think is useful to explore however unlikely it might be.
While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?
I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.
I mean I assume you have to start somewhere to be able to improve, right? Like breakthroughs with TVs, no one would realistically use a vacuum tube when you can make an OLED display. But if we didn’t start with the vacuum tube we wouldn’t know what to improve on.
IMO the current best bet on who builds an actual fusion plant first is Proxima Fusion, a spin-out of the Max Planck institute. They’re planning on building a large Stellerator by 2030 based on their experiences with Wendelstein-7X, which exceeded all expectations (as in: It behaved exactly as predicted), proving that the concept scales without issue. Still some kinks to figure out but those are about economical efficiency, not achieving power output.
The NIF generally does research on nukes. I have a hard time believing them talking about civil applications is anything but marketing.
Yes, and the reason why they are good is that they are using high-temperature superconductors for their magnets, which makes it as efficient as currently possible. The tokamak models of the US are doing the opposite, they use even more energy for their magnetic field.
Tokamaks also use superconducting magnets, there’s really no feasible way to get the necessary field strengths without superconductivity. What makes the two approaches different is that ions want to follow magnetic lines naturally in a spiral which Stellerators lean into and allow (hence the lovecraftian geometry) while Tokamaks try to make them fly straight by inducing a current into the plasma creating a secondary magnetic field, creating turbulence which then has to be brought under control.
The net effect on plasma stability is that with a small Tokamak you’re balancing a column of three tennis balls, when you make it bigger you get additional balls to balance. With Stellerators you’re balancing a tennis ball in a salad bowl. The reason early research favoured Tokamaks is because people thought designing the coil and field geometries necessary for Stellerators wouldn’t ever work out but then Supercomputers came along (Wendelstein 7-X was computed on a Cray) and, well, as said, the real thing behaves exactly as computed. A thing Tokamaks can only dream of with all their tennis balls.
I mean that the startup uses high-temperature superconductors and hence uses even less energy for their cooling. Wendelstein 7-X uses “normal” superconductors, and hence requires more energy for that. And a tokamak uses an order of magnitude or so more energy for the magnetic field, than a stellarator does.
But yeah, no idea how much more energy a higher power tokamak magnet picks up from the reaction chamber compared to a lower powered stellarator magnet. But surely the less cool high-temperature superconductors are more tolerant to this than the “normal” ones, since they have more temperature tolerance to work with. Hence, for building a reactor that generates a gigawatt or so of heat, this approach seems really the best that we have now.
Must’ve missed that “high temperature” before superconductor when reading. Wendelstein 7-X uses Niob-Titanium, very much not high temperature at 10K but as I understand it’s the standard for applications because metals, much unlike ceramics, aren’t a bugger to deal with. If there’s some suitable new materials (it’s been 23 years since W-7X started getting built) I doubt they’ll use it unless they know it won’t be an issue, just not the right thing to bet the project on. Looking at Wikipedia things >77K are still either ceramics or need >150GPa which is insane for an industrial application. Or, wait… yep there’s people who use “high temperature” to mean things other that “can be cooled with nitrogen”. That might be it, 20K can be done with hydrogen.
Yeah pretty much my understanding as well, I don’t think anyone has a notion of what it would take to generate power from inertial fusion and whatever if it would be practical.
The first step is always the hardest. You have to start somewhere. You don’t start by having something fully scalable right away, you have to work towards it.
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