Scientists repeat nuclear fusion net gain in significant step toward clean energy

[Daniel Sims]

Why it matters: Nuclear fusion – often a central element of science fiction stories – has been considered a virtually unattainable free-energy fantasy for many years. Recent experiments in the field have shown some promise, although we may still be many decades away from widespread sustainable implementation of the process.

Researchers have successfully replicated a fusion experiment performed late last year that produced the first recorded net gain from a nuclear fusion reaction in a laboratory. The results will stoke further interest in the potential of a holy grail of renewable energy.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced the initial achievement last December, which produced 3.15 megajoules of energy from an input of 2.05 megajoules. The second experiment – completed late last month – created a larger yield. Although the researchers haven't released the precise details yet, the results help solidify what could be an early step toward a near-limitless source of clean energy.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers stars like our sun, in which intense pressure fuses hydrogen nuclei into helium atoms, releasing energy due to the difference in mass. Researchers attempting to recreate the phenomenon artificially have long struggled to receive more energy than they put into each attempt. If successful, they could create enormous amounts of power without carbon emissions or pollution.

The California lab achieved its results by using lasers to heat a chamber to millions of degrees Celsius, making X-rays that fuse the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. Any practical use of the method would have to work at a considerably larger scale, and one of the primary obstacles facing such an effort is supplying power for the lasers, which currently need hundreds of megajoules of energy.

Most experts believe we're decades away from seeing wide usage of fusion power plants, if it happens at all, but one company thinks it can create one before the end of the decade. Washington-based startup Helion Energy has another method of producing fusion energy, and Microsoft is optimistic enough to enter a binding agreement with the company.

Helion's method involves a 40-foot "plasma accelerator" that heats deuterium and helium-3 atoms to 100 million degrees Celsius and then fuses them with powerful magnetic fields. The company says its machine can "electrically recover" all the energy it used to create the fusion reaction, potentially solving the LLNL's main obstacle. Time will tell whether either method proves successful.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99711-scientists-repeat-nuclear-fusion-net-gain-significant-step.html

 

[Manoa]

The problem is not with the method proving successful, the tests already proove that it is
tritium and helium-3 don't grow on treas, that is the problem
this is hot fusion, and these 2 specific materials are very hard to come by
I think that a real energy solution would come from cold fusion...or if scientists can come up with a way for hot fusion to not depend on rare resources

 

[Mark Fuller]

Manoa said:
The problem is not with the method proving successful, the tests already proove that it is
tritium and helium-3 don't grow on treas, that is the problem
this is hot fusion, and these 2 specific materials are very hard to come by
I think that a real energy solution would come from cold fusion...or if scientists can come up with a way for hot fusion to not depend on rare resources
[/QUOTE]
From what I've always heard and read about cold fusion, I think its just an exercise in wishful thinking.

 

[Endymio]

The problem is not with the method proving successful, the tests already proove that it is
tritium and helium-3 don't grow on treas, that is the problem
this is hot fusion, and these 2 specific materials are very hard to come by

This is D-T fusion: it doesn't use He-3. It does use tritium-- but tritium is extremely easy to produce.

The real problem with inertial confinement is that, while just the fusion portion itself has reached breakeven, the lasers involved are consuming nearly 100X more energy than they're focusing on the target. So we're still a great ways from feasibility.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Article should point out what type of Fusion LL is using. Their are three main types using Tokamaks (IMO will never be viable), Stellarators (what Helion is using and shows good promise) and inertial confinement using lasers targeting a fuel pellet, which is what LL is using. Vastly different tech.

 

[MSIGamer]

Limitless. You just need fuel. And a huge amount of initial energy. And very expensive very complicated machinery. And an enormous amount of time to reap the rewards.
Sounds like a winner to me! /sarcasm

 

[Endymio]

Limitless. You just need fuel. And a huge amount of initial energy. And very expensive very complicated machinery. And an enormous amount of time to reap the rewards.
Sounds like a winner to me! /sarcasm

Exactly how all past sources of energy began, eh? Luckily, others see the potential in technological advances.

 

[Mark Fuller]

Exactly how all past sources of energy began, eh? Luckily, others see the potential in technological advances.

It takes a lot of time and energy to cut enough firewood to keep warm. If you get anything more than it took to produce anything then you've come up with a winner.

 

[wiyosaya]

The real problem with inertial confinement is that, while just the fusion portion itself has reached breakeven, the lasers involved are consuming nearly 100X more energy than they're focusing on the target. So we're still a great ways from feasibility.

Its even worse than that. That 1% efficiency is for the fundamental output wavelength. These lasers employ harmonic conversion to the third harmonic at 355nm.

EDIT: only 50% of the power of the fundamental is left after harmonic conversion https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/how-nif-works

 

[wiyosaya]

Article should point out what type of Fusion LL is using. Their are three main types using Tokamaks (IMO will never be viable), Stellarators (what Helion is using and shows good promise) and inertial confinement using lasers targeting a fuel pellet, which is what LL is using. Vastly different tech.

There's a major Tokomak initiative in progress - https://fusionforenergy.europa.eu/iter/

 

[Arbie]

So for hundreds of megajoules of energy input, they got 1 megajoule out. Which is major progress from the half-megajoule last time... wowser! At this rate they might reach parity before the Sun explodes, if we keep funding them.

If you suspect that this, like the Large Hadron Collider, is another infinite money sink / rice bowl / gravy train for academics - you may be making an actual discovery.

Anyone interested in objective and extremely knowledgeable analyses of stuff like this should see Sabine Hossenfelder's excellent YouTube channel and her blog. Can't be bettered.

 

[Endymio]

So for hundreds of megajoules of energy input, they got 1 megajoule out. Which is major progress from the half-megajoule last time... wowser! At this rate they might reach parity before the Sun explodes

They got 3 megajoules out, actually, at a gain rate on the fusion reaction of 50%. And Europe's ITER tokamak produced 59 megajoules.

Man spent a couple thousand years attempting to learn how to fly. Imagine if we'd given up entirely in the year 1880.

 

[Mark Fuller]

I don't know if any technological advances will lead to an efficient enough system to warrant the publics attention, maybe so, but I remember failures like the 8 track tape deck and GPRS. Although the public spent a lot of money on these, they were abandoned after only a short time. And only God knows what kind of money will be required to spend on the very complicated machinery that would be required to make such a system work. Somehow the output would have to exceed the input by a great enough margin to make it practical.

 

[wiyosaya]

I don't know if any technological advances will lead to an efficient enough system to warrant the publics attention, maybe so, but I remember failures like the 8 track tape deck and GPRS. Although the public spent a lot of money on these, they were abandoned after only a short time. And only God knows what kind of money will be required to spend on the very complicated machinery that would be required to make such a system work. Somehow the output would have to exceed the input by a great enough margin to make it practical.

The idea is that you start the reaction by putting energy into the reactor from an external source. Then you keep feeding it fuel and that fuel is ignited by the energy in the reaction. If the technology is developed to that point, the reaction becomes self-sustaining as long as it is continually fed fuel. This means that you can turn off whatever was used to start the reaction in the first place.

Think of it like this: In this LLNL experiment, the laser (which uses an enormous amount of energy to start the reaction) is like a match starting a wood fire. As long as you keep feeding the fire more wood, the fire keeps burning. Same idea with feeding a fusion reaction fuel pellets after the reaction is started by the laser (or whatever).

BTW - 8-track tapes were not developed with public funding. They were developed by a company and they became a commercial product on which people spent money. IMO, there is no comparison between the development of fusion and the development of 8-track tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge

 

[gamerk2]

The idea is that you start the reaction by putting energy into the reactor from an external source. Then you keep feeding it fuel and that fuel is ignited by the energy in the reaction. If the technology is developed to that point, the reaction becomes self-sustaining as long as it is continually fed fuel. This means that you can turn off whatever was used to start the reaction in the first place.

Think of it like this: In this LLNL experiment, the laser (which uses an enormous amount of energy to start the reaction) is like a match starting a wood fire. As long as you keep feeding the fire more wood, the fire keeps burning. Same idea with feeding a fusion reaction fuel pellets after the reaction is started by the laser (or whatever).

Pretty much exactly this: The entire point is you get a reaction that, once started, will continue so long as you provide the required input fuel to keep it going. So while the reaction itself only produced a tiny fraction of the energy required to initiate it, it's still progress. Especially when you consider that a net gain on "just" the reaction itself is something that has only been accomplished a handful of times in the 75 years researchers have been trying.

 

[MakeMSGreatAgain]

Funny how everyone is getting all bent out of shape over energy going in versus gained... this is a net positive, those are rare. We aren't getting a net positive on lithium batteries in a Tesla. Sure it is about 90% efficient but you're still losing some. If we go to the firewood analogy already mentioned, if you spend two hours falling a tree, limbing it, and cutting/chopping it up into blocks of wood for your stove but you get a 20 hours of heat out of that wood that is a net gain.

From what I understand deuterium and tritium are not super difficult to obtain so the scientists just need to figure out how to scale this up and fine tune the equipment to make it worth the effort. Sounds like we are a long way away from that but they are heading in the right direction at least.

 

[Mark Fuller]

The idea is that you start the reaction by putting energy into the reactor from an external source. Then you keep feeding it fuel and that fuel is ignited by the energy in the reaction. If the technology is developed to that point, the reaction becomes self-sustaining as long as it is continually fed fuel. This means that you can turn off whatever was used to start the reaction in the first place.

Think of it like this: In this LLNL experiment, the laser (which uses an enormous amount of energy to start the reaction) is like a match starting a wood fire. As long as you keep feeding the fire more wood, the fire keeps burning. Same idea with feeding a fusion reaction fuel pellets after the reaction is started by the laser (or whatever).

BTW - 8-track tapes were not developed with public funding. They were developed by a company and they became a commercial product on which people spent money. IMO, there is no comparison between the development of fusion and the development of 8-track tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge

I'm just saying that not everything that's made by technology whether publicly funded or not becomes a success. I'm not saying that it's not possible to build a viable nuclear fusion reactor either If it is done it will take a lot of capital investment and some really complex technical machinery to do so.
BTW, what do we do about the likes of a Jane Fonda and her kind while all of this is going on.

 

[Arbie]

They got 3 megajoules out, actually, at a gain rate on the fusion reaction of 50%. And Europe's ITER tokamak produced 59 megajoules.

Man spent a couple thousand years attempting to learn how to fly. Imagine if we'd given up entirely in the year 1880.

That's right: they got out 1 megajoule more than the 2 they pumped in - and the pumping took hundreds of megajoules. Putting it simply.

Guess you'd be fine with any amount of money spent on anything because "what if science had stopped in 1880" answers all objections.

Actually, given the current disease of science-denial aka 'do your own research' maybe science will stop. And once our society is 'made great again' by being dragged back to 1880, we won't need it anyway.

 

[Mark Fuller]

That's right: they got out 1 megajoule more than they pumped in, and it took hundreds of megajoules to pump that in. Putting it simply.

Guess you'd be fine with any amount of money spent on anything because "what if science had stopped in 1880" answers every objection.

Actually, given the current disease of science-denial aka 'do your own research' maybe science will stop. And once our society is dragged back to 1880 overall, we won't need it anyway.

The technological advances of our society since 1880 have led to an exponential increase in world population, mainly because of medical and agricultural advances. If we are dragged back to 1880, I don't think we will be able to feed and take care of the now over 8.1 billion world population.

This is what I don't understand about the eco freaks. They complain that the burning of fossil fuels is what causes global warming and it more than likely is. But petroleum and fossil fuels produces about 90% of the whole world's electricity not to mention powers the internal combustion engine which feeds the world. Fossil fuels are finite and will run out some day. But they also decry the development of hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy. What do they think will take care of over 8 billion people when the oil and coal runs out. They,ve known since Santa Claus was born that alcohol is a good fuel for an internal combustion engine, but it hasn't been pursued to develop. I don't understand, unless they do want us to go back to 1880. I guess we'll all buy an axe and like I said cut firewood.

I would like for one of them to use the very technology that makes this website possible, I.e. computers ran by electricity, produced by petroleum, to give me a reply.

I await anxiously.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

There's a major Tokomak initiative in progress - https://fusionforenergy.europa.eu/iter/

I know, the world has spent hundreds of billions on Tokamaks and IMO they have wated their money. It's ridiculously complex and the reactors are gargantuan and will cost so much to build let alone operate they will never be commerically viable unless they price the electricity so high no one will afford it. Stellartors were the original fusion deice and had a lot of work in the early days but were abandoned. Modern breakthroughs in super computing and AI are seeing a renaissance in this far less complex and more stable type of device. Still huge challenges but compared to Tokamaks will be far cheaper to build and can made far smaller as Helion is proposing.

 

[wiyosaya]

BTW, what do we do about the likes of a Jane Fonda and her kind while all of this is going on.

Take her out to dinner and make her a friend instead of an enemy.

I know, the world has spent hundreds of billions on Tokamaks and IMO they have wated their money. It's ridiculously complex and the reactors are gargantuan and will cost so much to build let alone operate they will never be commerically viable unless they price the electricity so high no one will afford it. Stellartors were the original fusion deice and had a lot of work in the early days but were abandoned. Modern breakthroughs in super computing and AI are seeing a renaissance in this far less complex and more stable type of device. Still huge challenges but compared to Tokamaks will be far cheaper to build and can made far smaller as Helion is proposing.

The ITER effort is a consortium of multiple countries. There had to have been a reason, or a multitude of reasons, why the Stellerator was abandoned for this project. I don't know what the reason/reasons was/were, however, I would like to think that the reason the group of, presumably, the world's top fusion scientists came to a consensus and decided that ITER would explore the feasibility of the Tokomak design had to be more than "Stellerators are too easy to build and we would be done tomorrow - so we need to protect our jobs and take a more difficult approach."

I'd like to think the ITER group of scientists have enough Integrity to lead the world down what they think is a viable path, and frankly, I think that the idea that such a group would go down what is arguably an important path for the future of mankind by goofing off and only ensuring their income, as some have suggested, is an absurdity.

Controlled fusion, in any form, has yet to be demonstrated as scientifically and commercially viable. If stellerators had been developed to that point, I highly doubt that they would have been abandoned. Controlled fusion, is, beyond a doubt, a highly complex problem and still has many steps to be invented, let alone proven. There are many working on the problem, and those working on the problem are making the baby-steps necessary to bring it to fruition. Here's one such step for the production of fuel pellets. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-technique-mass-production-fusion-energy.html

Lockheed-Martin is also working on a concept, too. https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html
We don't know if any of these efforts will be successful, however, I think giving up on any or all of them would be a mistake - much like the world gave up on EVs in the early 1900s and then, nearly a century later, decided that was a mistake.

Unfortunately, its rare that science makes significant breakthroughs, however without research and science, no breakthroughs would be made at all.

 

[Gigabob635]

I have no idea why the author thinks the NIF experiments have anything to do with commercial fusion. The whole system was designed for military efforts and is a wholly impractical design for any sort of sustained fusion plant. But the notion that fusion can be made to yeild more energy out than put in has been demonstrated with nuclear devices for the past 75 years. So nothing new here. Note, these are one shots, spaced a year apart and unable to cover the total amount of energy consumed for each shot, just the incremental energy of the energy used to power the lasers. It would need a 10x gain to hit breakeven for the actual energy consumed.

 

[Endymio]

I have no idea why the author thinks the NIF experiments have anything to do with commercial fusion.

Because they do. The great thing about science is its wide-ranging applicability. The data NIF is collecting will not only help the US ensure nuclear weapon reliability without testing, but it will also gives us a better understanding of everything from black hole formation to materials science here on earth. And -- according to their own website, NIF will also: " lay the groundwork for a clean, sustainable source of energy."

the notion that fusion can be made to yeild more energy out than put in has been demonstrated with nuclear devices for the past 75 years. So nothing new here.

Incorrect. This is the first time gainful nuclear fusion has been achieved in a laboratory setting. It's rather inconvenient to be forced to set of an atomic bomb any time you wish to generate a fusion reaction, wouldn't you agree?

It would need a 10x gain to hit breakeven for the actual energy consumed.

Closer to a 200x gain, actually. So? The goal of the research is in the name itself -- "ignition". Like igniting an ordinary chemical fire, the goal here is to start a chain reaction, where the heat from the reaction itself generates further fusion.

 

[Mark Fuller]

Because they do. The great thing about science is its wide-ranging applicability. The data NIF is collecting will not only help the US ensure nuclear weapon reliability without testing, but it will also gives us a better understanding of everything from black hole formation to materials science here on earth. And -- according to their own website, NIF will also: " lay the groundwork for a clean, sustainable source of energy."


Incorrect. This is the first time gainful nuclear fusion has been achieved in a laboratory setting. It's rather inconvenient to be forced to set of an atomic bomb any time you wish to generate a fusion reaction, wouldn't you agree?


Closer to a 200x gain, actually. So? The goal of the research is in the name itself -- "ignition". Like igniting an ordinary chemical fire, the goal here is to start a chain reaction, where the heat from the reaction itself generates further fusion.

The problem in this case is to contain the chain reaction and harness it. A fusion chain reaction is not easy to contain.