Nuclear Fusion World Record Smashed in Major Achievement::undefined
Still uses more energy in than out. But the out is a higher than it was.
That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.
This particular experiment didn’t do that but that likely wasn’t the part of the task they were trying to work on… this one had 69MJ of output. It was also over five seconds… the NIF experiment was “a few billionths of a second”.
69MJ over five seconds is a usable amount of power. About on par with the out put of some real world power stations. The tech is still not ready but it is getting closer to being ready.
NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn’t hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.
TLDR: tokamak type reactor, produced a lot of energy (69 megajujes - nice!) but still net negative.
That’s awesome, do you have any take on helion’s approach to cracking fusion?
Not like I’m an expert on the topic lol. But I happened to watch a Nebula video series on Helion’s approach from Real Engineering and I really hope they manage to crack the efficiency barrier. The idea of truck container sized reactor that makes it’s own fuel and produces energy directly from electromagnetic impulses (not from heat via turbines) is almost too good to be true.
Of course! Was just nerding out. It does seem like they have a lot of barriers to a net positive reactor but it definitely seems like one possible way we could do it!
How much is a megajuje to a megajoule? /s
1.21, I think. You’d have to ask Doc Brown.
Very nice!
I’m so tainted by Borat.
But do you have clock radio?
i’m not trying to diminish the importance of this achievement, but for the next decade or two, pretty much every achievement in fusion will be record-breaking in one way or another. that’s sorta the point of making progress while developing this tech which is in its very early stages.
still, very exciting!
Going from “Yeah nothing yet” for decades to “milestone, milestone, milestone” is definitely giving some people whiplash but I’m all for it.
And it’s still 40 years away to becoming a reliable power source since they started experimenting with it in the 1950s.
Joking aside I don’t think I’ll be able to see a working fusion power plant in my life time.
Tbf most things “always 20 years away” is usually that way because of funding reasons.
If fusion got the funding it deserved from the beginning things would be a lot different now. But, ya know, big oil and old rich fucks :/
Big oil didn’t stop solar panels from becoming a working technology. Sometimes a technology is just hard, there’s no need for a conspiracy.
Stop it? No, but they were successful in slowing it down by decades. Just like with fusion. And they pretty much stopped traditional nuclear power, the fear mongering they put out about it is still persistent
