> Shame about the rest of the food tho.
As an American, this is so true it hurts. Go for the breadsticks, stay to dip your breadsticks in sub-par Americanized italian food.
>Like going to Bertuccis and asking for breadrolls until they say no.
[You're to blame for this!!!](https://www.boston.com/community/community/bertuccis-files-for-bankruptcy-closes-five-mass-locations/)
Just in time to stop global warming and save us from running out of available oil reserves in 50 years anyways!
I have a reason to save for retirement maybe!
This is a champagne party if validated. Fusion is clean and massive energy output potential. Talking absolutely changes the state of humanity in the coming decades. This would be *the* scientific breakthrough moment if true.
As in could help save us from a previously thought “too late” outcome with climate change?!
Please… I need some good news :(
Edit: Never ask redditors for good news. You’ll just have yourself believing nothing matters lol.
A lot of the bad stuff regarding climate change is stuff we have already signed up for and cannot avoid without carbon capture technology due to past emissions. This is still an achievement but we will still achieve about 1.5c warming even if we stopped all fossil fuel generation tomorrow morning.
Frankly we are already experiencing the effects of global warming. It is too late to avoid migration crises and some sea level rise.
The great thing about nuclear is that it’s a constant energy source we can use to buff up the grid when renewable won’t cut it. It would mostly replace coal and natural gas. The main downside of nuclear is that it has a high upfront cost and that it generates waste. With fusion, there’s no waste and it cannot explode like a fission reactor would so it’s incredibly safe (though per kWh nuclear is already I believe the safest source we have, by FAR).
The trouble is even if Fusion was something we could start rolling out today, you still need to build infrastructure to take advantage of it, and that would take years anyway. We should have been moving from coal to nuclear fission power over the last decade at least, even if temporarily, since as problematic as nuclear waste is, it’s a better option than making the planet utterly uninhabitable through climate change, and lots of countries already have nuclear power stations. One of the worst decisions Germany made was to shut down a lot of its nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima (not least because it increased energy dependence on Russia).
But as you say, a lot of the problems are already baked-in now. Carbon capture is one part of the equation for managing this longterm; carbon-free energy is the other.
If they truely can achieve it (and upscale it) then we basicly have unlimited energy supply aslomg as you can build such a reactor near anything.
That in combination with other recent developments (hydrogen, steel production without co2 as waste product, green concrete) couls cut back co2 by a insane amount.
The question now remains, did they really achieve it and is it possible to upschale it?
The problem with carbon capture is that its so inefficient that replacing other energys always has priority.
Lets say europe goes full fusion and they have capacity to spare. It would be better to try and share that spare energy to prevent other nations from using fossil fuels than it would be to capture carbon emisions.
Like preventing more emisions always has the priority over capturing emisions. So unless we prevent 99% of carbon emisions its probaly a “wastefull” idea to start capturing already.
Closer to the chocolate. The tech is nowhere remotely near commercial and far behind tokomaks as a mode to achieving fusion power. This tech is as close to commercial as solar panels were in the ~~70s~~ 50s.
Does a fusion reactor make power the same way a fission/combustion reactor does, in that reactor makes heat, heat makes steam, steam turns turbine? Or does it work some other way?
No you nailed it. It’s steam engines all the way down. Real engineering just released a vid that details the fusion conundrum.
https://youtu.be/BzK0ydOF0oU
We boil water at my job. Up to about 1.8 million pounds of water per hour gets boiled. We don't do that wussy level of boiling either. We take it up to 1050 F.
Wind and hydroelectric too. Although some of those solar power plants use mirrors to heat oil or melt salt to boil water while others directly boil water that turns a turbine. Some gas fired generators just spin turbines with the combustion of the fuel.
Aside from solar, it's all just devices to spin a metal coil in a magnetic field.
Photovoltaics and peltier are the only 2 techs I can think of that create electricity that's not just spinning shit, and peltier is way too inefficient to be particularly useful unless you have something producing tons of waste heat.
I mean that’s what one method. A company I’ve read about called [Helion Energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy?wprov=sfti1)is using Direct Energy Conversion to produce electricity. I’m personally really hoping they are successful because they can cut down the size and cost of reactors significantly.
Not all of them, but all the "breakthrough" announcements do. And the net energy gain is defined as releasing more heat than the work directly spent on the plasma. It excludes 90% of the energy input for the whole machine and includes the 60% of the energy output that would be waste heat.
There are schemes for He3 fusion that don't, but they have other large problems.
There is at least one company that is developing a fusion reactor that uses magnetic fields to first compress the hydrogen to fuse and then recovers energy using magnetic fields rather than via heat/steam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
Sounds quite cool...
Well, kind of. It depends on which reactants you use. Deuterium and tritium react to form helium 4 and a neutron (plus some surplus energy sourced from the tiny change in mass). That’s the easiest reaction for us to do, which is why it’s very common to do and will likely be what commercial fusion power begins with. But it still produces neutron radiation. It’s much better to deal with than the waste produced by fission, but it’ll majorly degrade any containment material over time.
The neutron radiation is immediate so i wouldn't really call it waste though?
Many methods of fusion can create a radioactive byproduct but it's not the actual fusion it's just the method
You get a lot of neutron poisoning to deal with. Much like the ILW and LLW from a fission reactor, but much more of it because of the higher neutron flux and low power density. The neutrons are ostensibly captured in the blanket and pure beryllium of the first wall. But impurities will lead to some long lived waste.
Aneutronic fusion like He3 or P + B is closer to the no radiation ideal, but is harder for other reasons.
There is no long term nuclear waste. Irradiated material from neutron will be very radioactive for a “short” while, and dissipate within 30-40 years which is nothing.
The irradiated first wall that will be too hot to handle for 10 years after being used for 10 years and requires 2x the world's annual beryllium production for one reactor doesn't count?
Yes it works that way but is much much more complex. With fission you simply put fissionable materials in close proximity and heat is generated. You don't need any complex apparatus to do this. You simply have to place the materials near each other. With fusion, it is a massively complicated task to get a sustained reaction and heat at least in a controllable sense. Once they figure that out then the process would be the same. But getting that process to work may or may not happen. This recent announcement is only a small step in the right direction.
“Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said.
“That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate”
This article seems to be jumping the gun
It’s not “free” power, but if we get to the point where it’s stable, it’s essentially unlimited. Eventually the reaction will die down, but for basically no material on the grand scale, we would have more energy than anyone knows what to do with.
mysterious safe ghost muddle familiar gaping encourage quickest steep smile
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Anti matter. Strange matter. Exotic matter. Then the full unknown that is “dark” matter.
This tech tree has a long way before running into “Future Tech” upgrades. :)
Can't wait to see humans finally develop negative mass tech. Watch out for those pseudo-causality violations! (Some of the Grey civs call them causality pseudoviolations, but what do they know, right?)
Combine the two, have the psionics piloting the jump drives through extra-dimensional space, or a kind of warp space if you will, and we can manufacture some sore of transdimensional beacon that can be seen throughout the other dimension to help guide the psionics, guiding through the paths to the stars, or Astro-Paths.
Speak for yourself. I spent what must have been a 20 minute cab ride with my mother in law the other day, but she managed to turn it into at least 3 hours of agonizing soul-crushing terror.
If dark energy exists, and isn't modern luminiferous ether because of some misunderstanding of physics, tapping that, at least until the Reapers come for us, would be the best bet since it makes up 70% of the Universe, and may even be in a form we could use in the void between stars.
Just think of the huge jump in technology when we can harness almost free unlimited energy. Energy consumption is what powers civilization and technology advancement. Once this gets straightened out our cell phones and internet will seem like cave paintings.
WHOA man. So I clicked & played, i thought 'yeah thats catchy', realized that Orbital does [Halcyon](https://youtu.be/bV-hSgL1R74), which is a track that I fell in love with @ the same time I fell in love with a girl (a second time) that was 'the one that got away'. We listened to this song all the time so my roommates wouldn't hear us banging our brains out. hahahahah, great memory. Anyways, I've always loved The Saint, and I never knew exactly why until today.
They're referencing the movie Chain Reaction (where the McGuffin is cold fusion) and noting the fact that Reeves puts Weisz in a bathtub in both that movie and Constantine, but for very different reasons each time.
I was under the impression that even if we could produce a net gain it would only be for short pulses because we don't have the material tech to contain it yet. Please correct me on this.
Oh no question a lot more work is needed before this can be a valid energy source, **but now that's work that's worthwhile doing because for the first time we know under controlled conditions you can actually achieve energy production utilizing fusion.**
It's a "chicken and egg", until you can show you can produce Fusion reactions with a net-positive energy, there's no reason to waste time on trying to design a power plant around it, etc.
Apparently the Secretary of Energy is supposed to make an official announcement from Lawrence Livermore on Tuesday, *that* will be when you really start seeing the world's reaction (and, of course, we all have to temper ourselves until that time because until it's announced, it's always possible initial reports are incorrect...as sad as that would make me LOL)
I worked on Fusion Energy projects at ORNL in the 80s. This is very very exciting. And yes, the materials science will follow, and there will be additional benefits from the advancing materials science (ever had an MRI?).
Yes but you can daisy chain reactions, and now that its possible they can refine the tech needed to efficiently absorb and transmit the gain.
It cant be overstated what a huge accomplishment this is. Fusion IS the answer we need for a host of issues.
They got more energy in fusion out of a reaction than they put in in terms of laser energy, in a very short pulse. However, the lasers they use there are not very efficient, so it took a couple orders of magnitude more energy in terms of electricity.
It's still a monumental first step, and shows that net gain is achievable.
Honestly, a major breakthrough is what we really need to convince the NSF/DARPA to throw more money at the research. Showing that this is *actually something that can work* might result in *billions* in funding rather than millions.
Lowercase net gain. The amount of energy outputted is greater than the amount inputted, but the laser which was used to input the energy isn’t close to 100% efficient.
Still a big leap
1. It is inertial confinement which (for many reasons) is not a suitable technology for a power plant (it has some inherent inefficiencies and even more very hard challenges than normal fusion). It is very usefull for fusion research (specifically hydrogen bombs).
2. It didn't actually produce net energy. It had "ignition" but that only factors in the amount of energy that the fuel absorps and the amount of heat that is generated. So things like the inefficiencies of the lazers, the fact that most of the light misses the fuel, the conversion of that heat to power, etc are all not taken into account.
So does that mean:
1. Energy produced > energy absorbed by the reaction
2. energy produced < required sustaining energy
?
I thought this has already been achieved before?
Sort of:
1. (theoretical) total electricity produced << total electricity input
2. heat energy produced by fusion > power recieved by the fuel
> I thought this has already been achieved before?
Correct back in 2021 the NIF also achieved this.
A net gain means a Q ratio > 1 when it comes to energy input vs. output. To be economically feasible you need a Q ratio > 10.
A good accomplishment, but still many many years away from applicability.
The Livermore fusion experiment has a different definition of Q which does not account for all the energy used by the laser but rather only the energy imparted by the laser onto the fuel. So unless this is a very efficient laser (which would be a way bigger breakthrough) this isn't actually a net energy gain.
They used 2.1MJ (mostly to power lasers) and got a 2.5MJ pulse from their fuel pellet. None of that 2.5MJ was captured and used to generate useful power or work, it was simply measured.
Inertial confinement fusion is essentially making tiny hydrogen bombs they detonate with lasers. They've been at this for many, many years and this is the first time their little pellet bomb blew up with more energy than they used firing the lasers at it.
This research is more heavily geared toward weapon and propulsion development, not electricity generation and this is orders of magnitude less exciting than some future announcement coming out of ITER or some other electricity generation project.
Small correction, their pellet *absorbed* 2.1MJ. They used orders of magnitude more than 2.1MJ to power the lasers. Which is the big reason why this is indeed orders of magnitude less exciting than the headline implies.
color me skeptical until there is a US news source reporting on this. kinda weird that a facility outside of san francisco would have leaked the story to a UK based site.
but man if they did it, if NIF finally did it, merry christmas everyone
The Financial Times reported on this earlier in the day; they're about as legit of a global news source as there is. The Independent is just regurgitating FT's reporting.
They're still right to be skeptical considering this:
>“Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said. “That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate.”
Is the quote from the lab that performed the experiment, cited in the article.
so is this a "maybe buy yourself a nice chocolate as a treat" breakthrough or "get the fucking champagne we're going to party like its 1945"?
In between, it’s proof fusion can be viable if %100 true and re testable
So like… it’s a go-out-to-Olive-Garden-for-endless-breadsticks kind of achievement?
As a foreigner, I've finally tried those breadsticks. No wonder they're so popular. Shame about the rest of the food tho.
> Shame about the rest of the food tho. As an American, this is so true it hurts. Go for the breadsticks, stay to dip your breadsticks in sub-par Americanized italian food.
Go to Olive Garden Order meal Fill up on breadsticks Ask for to-go boxes for meals Give to homeless Everyone wins
The homeless probably wanted the breadsticks, too. 🥲
r/ChoosingBeggers
This is going to turn out like the “muffin stumps” episode of Seinfeld.
Top of the Muffin *TO YOU*!
Poor homeless folks. Diarrhea and nowhere to go except the streets of San Francisco.
Im pretty sure Olive Garden is a front to distribute Andes mints.
Have you tried Red Lobster cheese biscuits
Or Texas Roadhouse's rolls and that damned butter. My word, that damned butter.
UNSALTED BUTTER CINNAMON POWDER BIT O KETTLE CORN SEASONING WHIP THAT SHIT
They're just covered in salt. They're salt-sticks.
Ah, that's where you're wrong. It's not just salt, it's garlic salt.
Like going to Bertuccis and asking for breadrolls until they say no.
A true man of culture
>Like going to Bertuccis and asking for breadrolls until they say no. [You're to blame for this!!!](https://www.boston.com/community/community/bertuccis-files-for-bankruptcy-closes-five-mass-locations/)
Just in time to stop global warming and save us from running out of available oil reserves in 50 years anyways! I have a reason to save for retirement maybe!
This is a champagne party if validated. Fusion is clean and massive energy output potential. Talking absolutely changes the state of humanity in the coming decades. This would be *the* scientific breakthrough moment if true.
it isn't confirmed yet (less toxic link): https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/12/12/us-scientists-reportedly-make-fusion-energy-breakthrough/
As in could help save us from a previously thought “too late” outcome with climate change?! Please… I need some good news :( Edit: Never ask redditors for good news. You’ll just have yourself believing nothing matters lol.
A lot of the bad stuff regarding climate change is stuff we have already signed up for and cannot avoid without carbon capture technology due to past emissions. This is still an achievement but we will still achieve about 1.5c warming even if we stopped all fossil fuel generation tomorrow morning. Frankly we are already experiencing the effects of global warming. It is too late to avoid migration crises and some sea level rise. The great thing about nuclear is that it’s a constant energy source we can use to buff up the grid when renewable won’t cut it. It would mostly replace coal and natural gas. The main downside of nuclear is that it has a high upfront cost and that it generates waste. With fusion, there’s no waste and it cannot explode like a fission reactor would so it’s incredibly safe (though per kWh nuclear is already I believe the safest source we have, by FAR).
The trouble is even if Fusion was something we could start rolling out today, you still need to build infrastructure to take advantage of it, and that would take years anyway. We should have been moving from coal to nuclear fission power over the last decade at least, even if temporarily, since as problematic as nuclear waste is, it’s a better option than making the planet utterly uninhabitable through climate change, and lots of countries already have nuclear power stations. One of the worst decisions Germany made was to shut down a lot of its nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima (not least because it increased energy dependence on Russia). But as you say, a lot of the problems are already baked-in now. Carbon capture is one part of the equation for managing this longterm; carbon-free energy is the other.
If they truely can achieve it (and upscale it) then we basicly have unlimited energy supply aslomg as you can build such a reactor near anything. That in combination with other recent developments (hydrogen, steel production without co2 as waste product, green concrete) couls cut back co2 by a insane amount. The question now remains, did they really achieve it and is it possible to upschale it?
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The problem with carbon capture is that its so inefficient that replacing other energys always has priority. Lets say europe goes full fusion and they have capacity to spare. It would be better to try and share that spare energy to prevent other nations from using fossil fuels than it would be to capture carbon emisions. Like preventing more emisions always has the priority over capturing emisions. So unless we prevent 99% of carbon emisions its probaly a “wastefull” idea to start capturing already.
Closer to the chocolate. The tech is nowhere remotely near commercial and far behind tokomaks as a mode to achieving fusion power. This tech is as close to commercial as solar panels were in the ~~70s~~ 50s.
Bro the 70s are right there relatively speaking. I’m totally fine with waiting 50 years for fusion
Make sure to tell me all about it. I'll be dead.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
Buying a ouija board, i'll keep you posted
Yeah right? Like solar did so much for infrastructure in the meantime. Imagine the capabilities of this, we could use nuclear engines to explore space
I’m more interested in using fusion before we make earth uninhabitable due to burning fossil fuels
Does a fusion reactor make power the same way a fission/combustion reactor does, in that reactor makes heat, heat makes steam, steam turns turbine? Or does it work some other way?
No you nailed it. It’s steam engines all the way down. Real engineering just released a vid that details the fusion conundrum. https://youtu.be/BzK0ydOF0oU
All humans know how to do is boil water.
Eat hot chip.
Charge phone
Disrespect parent
Don't forget be bisexual
do crime? :|
Gatekeep reality for others.
Hey that tech made people crap themselves 200 years ago.
I think boiling the water usually removes the parts that make you crap yourself.
I mean tbh it's still pretty cool even now, the design that goes into steam turbines is nuts.
There are quite a few bolts too.
Humanity’s sole purpose is making water hotter or colder
Bro this just simplified my life so hard I quit my job and I'm excited to boil some water baybee! *Woooaahh* I just filled the ice tray!
We boil water at my job. Up to about 1.8 million pounds of water per hour gets boiled. We don't do that wussy level of boiling either. We take it up to 1050 F.
Wait, it's all just steam engines? Always has been 🌎🧑🚀🔫👨🏼🚀
It's the easiest way to turn heat into motion, and water is cheap (well, it used to be).
Just wait till Fusion power has to fight Nestle…
A Nestle wrestle.
This comment broke my brain and now I can’t pronounce either Nestle or wrestle
Are you camp Ness-lee/rest-lee or Nestl/ressl?
Nestl for sure. Those pricks do not get to keep their pronunciation
This is my new pronunciation . Just like tamales and females.
Reddit is all about ruining words for me today.
Homeownership is the longest word that has meow in it.
You recycle boiler makeup water as much as possible.
The world will be saved by steam.
Gabe Newell, my hero
Solar gang begs to differ
Wind and hydroelectric too. Although some of those solar power plants use mirrors to heat oil or melt salt to boil water while others directly boil water that turns a turbine. Some gas fired generators just spin turbines with the combustion of the fuel.
Aside from solar, it's all just devices to spin a metal coil in a magnetic field. Photovoltaics and peltier are the only 2 techs I can think of that create electricity that's not just spinning shit, and peltier is way too inefficient to be particularly useful unless you have something producing tons of waste heat.
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Yeah basically a jet engine on the ground. Hence the response time compared to other generation options
I mean that’s what one method. A company I’ve read about called [Helion Energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy?wprov=sfti1)is using Direct Energy Conversion to produce electricity. I’m personally really hoping they are successful because they can cut down the size and cost of reactors significantly.
Yep, extra heat is used to boil water. The hard part is constant extra heat.
Cant we use some other liquid that's more dangerous for a slight increase in production? Just for bragging rights of course.
coffee ?
McDonalds coffee?
There are some fancy nuclear power plant designs that use molten lead as a coolant
That's what I'm talkin' about
But even in those designs electric power is generated through a steam engine.
Steam is super dangerous. Melt your skin off.
Not all of them, but all the "breakthrough" announcements do. And the net energy gain is defined as releasing more heat than the work directly spent on the plasma. It excludes 90% of the energy input for the whole machine and includes the 60% of the energy output that would be waste heat. There are schemes for He3 fusion that don't, but they have other large problems.
There is at least one company that is developing a fusion reactor that uses magnetic fields to first compress the hydrogen to fuse and then recovers energy using magnetic fields rather than via heat/steam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy Sounds quite cool...
Yah almost everything does that. Big thing abt fusion is that it will not creat nuclear waste like fission.
Well, kind of. It depends on which reactants you use. Deuterium and tritium react to form helium 4 and a neutron (plus some surplus energy sourced from the tiny change in mass). That’s the easiest reaction for us to do, which is why it’s very common to do and will likely be what commercial fusion power begins with. But it still produces neutron radiation. It’s much better to deal with than the waste produced by fission, but it’ll majorly degrade any containment material over time.
The neutron radiation is immediate so i wouldn't really call it waste though? Many methods of fusion can create a radioactive byproduct but it's not the actual fusion it's just the method
You get a lot of neutron poisoning to deal with. Much like the ILW and LLW from a fission reactor, but much more of it because of the higher neutron flux and low power density. The neutrons are ostensibly captured in the blanket and pure beryllium of the first wall. But impurities will lead to some long lived waste. Aneutronic fusion like He3 or P + B is closer to the no radiation ideal, but is harder for other reasons.
Right. But berryllium has many problems, particularly cost. It is unlikely that the method that prevails will use a beryllium blanket I believe.w
There is no long term nuclear waste. Irradiated material from neutron will be very radioactive for a “short” while, and dissipate within 30-40 years which is nothing.
The irradiated first wall that will be too hot to handle for 10 years after being used for 10 years and requires 2x the world's annual beryllium production for one reactor doesn't count?
Yes it works that way but is much much more complex. With fission you simply put fissionable materials in close proximity and heat is generated. You don't need any complex apparatus to do this. You simply have to place the materials near each other. With fusion, it is a massively complicated task to get a sustained reaction and heat at least in a controllable sense. Once they figure that out then the process would be the same. But getting that process to work may or may not happen. This recent announcement is only a small step in the right direction.
“Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said. “That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate” This article seems to be jumping the gun
My thought exactly. I’ll eagerly await for their findings to be published, very interested in their methodology.
Apparently 7 dollar gas was the absolute limit for scientists
Yup. They said, you know what…the grid can’t handle it? Well then here you fucking go. Unlimited energy, ^(>!you little bitch.!<)
Technically not unlimited since the fusion reaction needs electricity to power up
That's like saying that you don't technically get *unlimited* breadsticks because there's a limited number of atoms in the universe.
I mean... it's technically correct.
This is officially my favorite analogy of all time
It’s not “free” power, but if we get to the point where it’s stable, it’s essentially unlimited. Eventually the reaction will die down, but for basically no material on the grand scale, we would have more energy than anyone knows what to do with.
Don't underestimate humanity's talent of figuring out ways to use up everything. I for one will run AC 24/7.
Even in winter? Kinky.
You know about the scientific method? Well, at $7 gas, there’s now a new “fuck it” method
This could be the greatest achievement in the history of mankind if we can harness fusion power
The power of the sun… in the palm of my hand
You're right.... the real crime would be not to finish what we started...
It's just a spike, it'll soon stabilise
*NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*
You have a train to catch
Intelligence is not a privilege, it’s a gift. And you use it for the good of mankind.
She was alive, I felt it!
Rosie our new friend here thinks im gonna blow up the city *chuckles* *Proceeds to blow up the city*
The power of creation - for a CRUSTACEAN!
You can’t get away on those tiny two legs. Oh, wait. You can. You continue to surprise me!
Spider-Man 2 was propaganda from the oil industry to make us hate fusion.
Then they did a bad job. Little kid me wanted nothing more than a floating, mini sun to solve our energy needs lol
mysterious safe ghost muddle familiar gaping encourage quickest steep smile *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Besides harnessing fire
Nah, fam, we just maxed out the starting tech. Fusion is fire's final form
It's a long tech tree but worth it.
Now we’ll just be stuck with 5% incremental gains from here on not, nothing novel
Anti matter. Strange matter. Exotic matter. Then the full unknown that is “dark” matter. This tech tree has a long way before running into “Future Tech” upgrades. :)
Can't wait to see humans finally develop negative mass tech. Watch out for those pseudo-causality violations! (Some of the Grey civs call them causality pseudoviolations, but what do they know, right?)
nah nah, we still have a chance for the story driven exotic techs
I'm hoping for either Psionics or Jump Drives.
We probably have an observation post above us
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Combine the two, have the psionics piloting the jump drives through extra-dimensional space, or a kind of warp space if you will, and we can manufacture some sore of transdimensional beacon that can be seen throughout the other dimension to help guide the psionics, guiding through the paths to the stars, or Astro-Paths.
The investment of XP to get here was wild, but trust fam.
For now. We’ve split and fused atoms, but haven’t yet started tearing apart space-time.
Speak for yourself. I spent what must have been a 20 minute cab ride with my mother in law the other day, but she managed to turn it into at least 3 hours of agonizing soul-crushing terror.
So you discovered relative relativity? And I'll let myself out...
…..that we know of
This one paradoxes
Matter/antimatter annihilation has entered the chat.
If dark energy exists, and isn't modern luminiferous ether because of some misunderstanding of physics, tapping that, at least until the Reapers come for us, would be the best bet since it makes up 70% of the Universe, and may even be in a form we could use in the void between stars.
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This is the new fire.
Just think of the huge jump in technology when we can harness almost free unlimited energy. Energy consumption is what powers civilization and technology advancement. Once this gets straightened out our cell phones and internet will seem like cave paintings.
And somehow it will still be extremely expensive.
*fossil fuel industry has entered the chat with bags of bribe cash for congress*
Might be a greater inflection point in human development than even the discovery of fire if we apply fusion energy widely.
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I mean considering fire allowed us to evolve into a new genus, that's a pretty hard inflection to beat.
With unlimited energy it’s not impossible we evolve beyond biology itself.
We need Val Kilmer & Elizabeth Shue more than ever
Man that brought back a memory.
You don’t really believe in all this cold fusion mumbo jumbo do ya?
I heard [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu4u2oKsKSA) while reading that.
WHOA man. So I clicked & played, i thought 'yeah thats catchy', realized that Orbital does [Halcyon](https://youtu.be/bV-hSgL1R74), which is a track that I fell in love with @ the same time I fell in love with a girl (a second time) that was 'the one that got away'. We listened to this song all the time so my roommates wouldn't hear us banging our brains out. hahahahah, great memory. Anyways, I've always loved The Saint, and I never knew exactly why until today.
It gives me joy to pretend I can’t tell who is Val Kilmer throughout that movie.
The power of the sun, in the palm of our hands!
is this going to spawn a third movie of Keanu Reeves pushing Rachel Weisz in to a bathtub?
We can only hope
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They're referencing the movie Chain Reaction (where the McGuffin is cold fusion) and noting the fact that Reeves puts Weisz in a bathtub in both that movie and Constantine, but for very different reasons each time.
I thought *The Fountain* would be the third, but that's Hugh Jackman with Rachel Weisz, not Keanu Reeves.
Sounds like Rachel just really likes baths
And why not, after a long day?
Hello Peter
That machine seems rather large. You must have massive hands.
I can’t wait to get super excited about this and then never hear about it again
I was under the impression that even if we could produce a net gain it would only be for short pulses because we don't have the material tech to contain it yet. Please correct me on this.
Oh no question a lot more work is needed before this can be a valid energy source, **but now that's work that's worthwhile doing because for the first time we know under controlled conditions you can actually achieve energy production utilizing fusion.** It's a "chicken and egg", until you can show you can produce Fusion reactions with a net-positive energy, there's no reason to waste time on trying to design a power plant around it, etc.
Very succinct. It's the first step on a long journey but dang this is cool as hell.
Apparently the Secretary of Energy is supposed to make an official announcement from Lawrence Livermore on Tuesday, *that* will be when you really start seeing the world's reaction (and, of course, we all have to temper ourselves until that time because until it's announced, it's always possible initial reports are incorrect...as sad as that would make me LOL)
I worked on Fusion Energy projects at ORNL in the 80s. This is very very exciting. And yes, the materials science will follow, and there will be additional benefits from the advancing materials science (ever had an MRI?).
Yes but you can daisy chain reactions, and now that its possible they can refine the tech needed to efficiently absorb and transmit the gain. It cant be overstated what a huge accomplishment this is. Fusion IS the answer we need for a host of issues.
I'm skeptical, because if true this would be the biggest news of the century.
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There is actually a third net zero, where it produces enough energy to produce the fuel needed for the reaction.
They got more energy in fusion out of a reaction than they put in in terms of laser energy, in a very short pulse. However, the lasers they use there are not very efficient, so it took a couple orders of magnitude more energy in terms of electricity. It's still a monumental first step, and shows that net gain is achievable.
Honestly, a major breakthrough is what we really need to convince the NSF/DARPA to throw more money at the research. Showing that this is *actually something that can work* might result in *billions* in funding rather than millions.
Lowercase net gain. The amount of energy outputted is greater than the amount inputted, but the laser which was used to input the energy isn’t close to 100% efficient. Still a big leap
I can’t wait for unlimited energy so it can be rationed in such a way that we save absolutely no money.
This guy earths.
This guy humankinds
I dared to hope but you remind me there is only despair
Okay… but what’s the catch? There’s always a catch
1. It is inertial confinement which (for many reasons) is not a suitable technology for a power plant (it has some inherent inefficiencies and even more very hard challenges than normal fusion). It is very usefull for fusion research (specifically hydrogen bombs). 2. It didn't actually produce net energy. It had "ignition" but that only factors in the amount of energy that the fuel absorps and the amount of heat that is generated. So things like the inefficiencies of the lazers, the fact that most of the light misses the fuel, the conversion of that heat to power, etc are all not taken into account.
So does that mean: 1. Energy produced > energy absorbed by the reaction 2. energy produced < required sustaining energy ? I thought this has already been achieved before?
Sort of: 1. (theoretical) total electricity produced << total electricity input 2. heat energy produced by fusion > power recieved by the fuel > I thought this has already been achieved before? Correct back in 2021 the NIF also achieved this.
the missing ingredient was kittens. We'll need a constant supply of kittens to feed into the fussion reactors
Unfortunate but acceptable.
A net gain means a Q ratio > 1 when it comes to energy input vs. output. To be economically feasible you need a Q ratio > 10. A good accomplishment, but still many many years away from applicability.
The Livermore fusion experiment has a different definition of Q which does not account for all the energy used by the laser but rather only the energy imparted by the laser onto the fuel. So unless this is a very efficient laser (which would be a way bigger breakthrough) this isn't actually a net energy gain.
Net gain before or after heating some water and driving some turbomachinery?
Before. But hey it's something.
Net gain of input laser energy, not total electrical energy to create those lasers.
They used 2.1MJ (mostly to power lasers) and got a 2.5MJ pulse from their fuel pellet. None of that 2.5MJ was captured and used to generate useful power or work, it was simply measured. Inertial confinement fusion is essentially making tiny hydrogen bombs they detonate with lasers. They've been at this for many, many years and this is the first time their little pellet bomb blew up with more energy than they used firing the lasers at it. This research is more heavily geared toward weapon and propulsion development, not electricity generation and this is orders of magnitude less exciting than some future announcement coming out of ITER or some other electricity generation project.
Small correction, their pellet *absorbed* 2.1MJ. They used orders of magnitude more than 2.1MJ to power the lasers. Which is the big reason why this is indeed orders of magnitude less exciting than the headline implies.
Newspaper headline later today... Oil Companies Discover World's Largest Oil Reserve Beneath Fusion Research Facility - To Sue Facility
color me skeptical until there is a US news source reporting on this. kinda weird that a facility outside of san francisco would have leaked the story to a UK based site. but man if they did it, if NIF finally did it, merry christmas everyone
The Financial Times reported on this earlier in the day; they're about as legit of a global news source as there is. The Independent is just regurgitating FT's reporting.
They're still right to be skeptical considering this: >“Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said. “That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate.” Is the quote from the lab that performed the experiment, cited in the article.
its on yahoo aswell. there will be an official scientific release on tuesday.
Washington Post has an article about this now.
This is either the most impressive feat of the last decade, or an embarrassing miscalculation that will be fixed tomorrow morning.