U.S. Announces Fusion Energy Breakthrough

Old_Joe

Scientists hit a key milestone in the quest to create abundant zero-carbon power through nuclear fusion. But they still have a long way to go.

Following are excerpts from a current report in the Washington Post:

By Evan Halper and Pranshu Verma

The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain — a major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.

The aim of fusion research is to replicate the nuclear reaction through which energy is created on the sun. It is a “holy grail” of carbon-free power that scientists have been chasing since the 1950s. It is still at least a decade — maybe decades — away from commercial use, but the latest development is likely to be touted by the Biden administration as an affirmation of a massive investment by the government over the years.

Huge amounts of public and private funds have been funneled into the fusion race worldwide, with the aim of ultimately manufacturing fusion machinery that could bring electricity to the grid with no carbon footprint, no radioactive waste and far fewer resources than it takes to harness solar and wind power. Beyond the climate benefits, promoters say it could help bring cheap electricity to impoverished parts of the world.

“To most of us, this was only a matter of time,” said a senior fusion scientist familiar with the work of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the discovery was made.

The development was first reported by the Financial Times on Sunday. It was confirmed by two people familiar with the research, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting ahead of the official announcement. The department and the lab declined to comment. A lab official said researchers there are still finalizing their analysis and will not be releasing any official findings before Tuesday.

The science of nuclear fusion relies on smashing two atoms together at incredibly high speeds and transforming the energy from that reaction into electricity that can power homes and offices without emitting carbon into the air or dumping radioactive waste into the environment.

In the decades scientists have been experimenting with fusion reactions, they had not until now been able to create one that produces more energy than it consumes. While the achievement is significant, there are still monumental engineering and scientific challenges ahead.

Creating the net energy gain required engagement of one of the largest lasers in the world, and the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense. More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid.

Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process.

And then there is the question of whether the technology could be perfected in time to make a dent in climate change. Even so, researchers and investors in fusion technology hailed the breakthrough as an important advancement.

Over the past several decades, the United States, Russia and various European nations have allocated billions in government dollars trying to master the science, believing that if they could, it would be a boon for the world.

AndyJ

Meanwhile, also from WaPo, more good news on another front: "Renewables to overtake coal as world’s top energy source by 2025, IEA says." Excerpt:

The world is set to add as much renewable energy in the next five years as it did in the past two decades, as a global energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine accelerates growth in renewables such as wind and solar, the International Energy Agency says.

Led by solar, renewables are poised to overtake coal as the largest source of electricity generation worldwide by early 2025, helping to keep alive the global goal of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), according to the Paris-based agency’s latest forecasts.

“Energy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels,” the IEA said in a report on renewable energy published this month.

Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2,400 gigawatts between 2022 and 2027, an amount equivalent to the entire power capacity of China today, according to the IEA report, the latest on the renewables sector. ....

Outside Europe, growth in renewables is being driven by China, the United States and India — all of which are introducing regulatory and market reforms faster than anticipated to combat the energy crisis. China alone is expected to account for almost half of new global renewable power capacity over the next five years, under a blueprint released as part of its five-year plan in June.

Crash

"...no radioactive waste..." If they can play around with nukes and create zero radioactivity, then fine. Otherwise, I'll continue to wear my fraternity's T-shirt. The logo proclaims:

"MUTANTS FOR NUKES!" With a smiley-face with one ear.

Sven

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Old_Joe

@Sven- let's wait until we see what the Department of Energy has to say before we jump to hasty conclusions. They would be pretty stupid to do a scam.

Sven

Totally agree. I delete my post above. We should get the full from the original source. Lawrence Livermore Lab should release their findings. Science reporters often don’t report detail information. Reuters also reported that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will hold a briefing on Tuesday at 10 am EST.

I remember the episode of “cold fusion” well while the news broke.

Crash

Yes, me, too. I recall a "breakthrough." Was it Univ. of Utah?

carew388

Yes-University of Utah 1989. Now Utah is known for something more provable-like beating USC in football twice this year! Big props to Utah on their season !

Sven

It is crucial that the LLL’ experiments and data are verified by other DOE labs independently to ascertain the result; a full announcement can then be presented to the public.

In contrast, Stanley Pons (Univ of Utah) and Martin Fleshiman of Cambridge announced their findings prematurely back in the 80’s on “cold fusion”.

University of Utah President Chase Peterson – convinced that his school had a gold mine – immediately began pursuing patents. The Utah Legislature jumped in with an investment of $5 million, which was spent on patent lawyers and on opening the National Cold Fusion Institute at the U.’s Research Park.

In the end, it was a fiasco. While a small number of laboratories claimed to reproduce the experiment, the major players in academia and industry could not duplicate it. And with the university refusing to give details to protect potential patents, the conversation turned toward incompetence and fraud.

The scientists left the university to work in France with funding from Toyota, but that project ended in 1998, also without success. Fleischmann died in 2012, and Pons reportedly stayed in France and became a French citizen. Peterson died in 2014.

No patents were ever granted, and the National Cold Fusion Institute closed in 1991 without ever having reproduced Pons and Fleischmann’s results.

No patents were ever granted, and the National Cold Fusion Institute closed in 1991 without ever having reproduced Pons and Fleischmann’s results.

https://sltrib.com/news/2022/12/13/energy-nuclear-fusion-utah-has/

Old_Joe

Fusion breakthrough is a milestone for climate, clean energy

Hee are edited excerpts from a current report by Associated Press. It's important to note that this achievement does not involve so-called "cold fusion".

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists announced Tuesday that they have for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it — a major breakthrough in the decades-long quest to harness the process that powers the sun.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved the result, which is called net energy gain, the Energy Department said. Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day offer nearly limitless, carbon-free energy and displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said the announcement marked a significant advance nonetheless.

Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Lab, said there are “very significant hurdles” to commercial use of fusion technology, but advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in “a few decades” rather than 50 or 60 years as previously expected.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.

The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.

It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. The fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold... containing it is a challenge.

The achievement of net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of the progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.

But, he said, “that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone.”

One approach to fusion turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.

Last year the teams working on those projects on two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.

Note- text emphasis was added.

Sven

Think they call this “hot fusion” now. Nice advancement that potentially can produce truly green energy. The plasma condition will be the next technical hurdle to overcome in order to produce electricity sustainably as in a power plant. Good for mankind !

Crash

So, this is REAL, though in its infancy. As long as it's truly "clean," I'm glad.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/13/important-day-us-celebrates-fusion-energy-breakthrough

Sven

Here is an article from NPR that provides more details on the laser-induced nuclear fusion experiment.
https://npr.org/2022/12/13/1142208055/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-climate-change

It is important to understand how to translate a single experimental success into a power plant. Perhaps revisiting nuclear fission process would help to see the engineering design and safety requirements would be necessary for producing electricity.