E=MC2
There is an old joke that “fusion is only 20 years away and always will be.” The mantra was true until today.
According to an announcement by the Department of Energy, scientists have – for the first time, managed to create atomic “fusion” with less power put into reaction than the power released. And that is the end of all carbon-based power, and perhaps even the end of solar and wind, if the process can become efficient such that the power is basically limitless. It will take a couple of decades to get the engineering such that it’s really useful, but our children have a fantastic future. As said, this is the holy grail. According to the Financial Times:
US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.
So, how do they do it? It is actually fairly easy to explain (And I love quantum mechanics and study the philosophy of QM and cosmology for fun). You take two special molecules of hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium, (found in regular seawater), and you use lasers to smash their protons together, creating a new nucleus with two protons (Helium, harmless). And here is the cool part, the resulting new molecule weighs less than the two that you started with. You lost mass in the process, and that is because the “mass” was converted to energy. E=MC2. To make it even better, you’ll note that the mass you lost is multiplied by the speed of light squared, so you get one hell of a lot of energy.
So what took them so long? The technology to make lasers efficient enough to do the fusion with “less energy” than was released didn’t exist. One has to be absorbed in this stuff every day to know how long they’ve sought this “holy grail” and the future it portends. Remember Star Trek? Right, fusion powered the hyperdrive.
Fusion is not nuclear “fission” – which is what we have in our nuclear reactors. Fission is extremely efficient but also extremely dirty in that it requires radioactive products going in and out. The power came from neutrons leaving the nucleus and converting to energy. But fusion uses the same process as that which powers the sun, converting hydrogen into helium. And the “waste” product is nothing but an isotope of harmless helium.
This is a BFD and is all over the news.
“Landmark achievement:” U.S. scientists announce fusion a “major scientific breakthrough” Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars. #fusion #energy #science #technology https://t.co/S0pNxLh1tx
— John Gravois (@Grav1) December 13, 2022
U.S. Scientists Confirm Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Energy https://t.co/Ok5DyBo5QV
— Moody Stories (@storiesmoody) December 13, 2022
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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, Substack: Much Ado About…
It’s a long way from this announcement to actual usable fusion power.
The science was always the hard part, though. Applications are far easier after you get THAT part worked out.
Of course, you’re right, PJ.
But if they can have a significant footprint in 20 yrs, that goes a LONG way of no fossel fuels at all.
In 30 yrs it is possible that there won’t be other power sources, it may be more efficient, less money, etc. than wind/solar. But given it’s so long off, we should continue to pound out more solar and wind power.
What PJ said. However, we know we can do it now. It’s an engineering project now. That said, materials scientists are going to b very very busy for the next few decades.
There is no doubt that it’ll be 2 decades to really get any footprint into the grid, but 30-40 years, this earth will never use another power source. We have a way to run on the power of the universe now. Perhaps with climate change looming, world governments will throw a space race full of cash at the problem and implementation bc this is the answer. Even planes will be electric.
You are right, materials scientists/engineers, and the battery engineers, creating more efficient and powerful batteries so that trains, planes, drones, can all run on the power.
But it wasn’t even on the table. It was the “power that is 20 years away, and always will be” until today. The hard part is over. Now it can be done.
This has been my only bright spot today. As you say, the engineering along with take two, perhaps three decades to work out. Once upon a time, as in back during WWII it would have been possible to shanghai all (or most) of the top people into some remote desert location and provide them whatever they needed to work it out as happened with the creation of the atomic bomb. Now? Even if science hadn’t changed and the bulk of them focused as much (if not more) on their legacies and financial enrichment there’s still be the problem of conservatives refusing to allow the kind of spending that would reduce decades to years. It doesn’t help that so much of their money comes from the oil lobby. There will always be a need for oil (stuff requires lubricants after all) but “big oil” would become just another product that doesn’t affect GDP all that much. You can bet the farm they will fight every expenditure of govt. funds to turn this breakthrough into something practical and transformative tooth and nail!
But we are at least on our way. As with fission, working out the theory was incredibly difficult. But once it became an engineering matter, once folks realized it was actually possible all it took was the will to marshal the resources to make it happen. I’m in my mid-sixties and while I can’t remember JFK standing before Congress and brashly promising after Alan Shephard’s Mercury flight to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade but I do have early memories – as far back as Wally Schirra’s mission. When JFK made his promise NASA Administrator James Webb wasn’t a happy camper. He didn’t know how in the hell it could be done, any more than anyone else did. As Bob Gilruth, who listened to the speech with Webb on the radio noted it would take hundreds of thousands of people, in facilities we’d have to build and require material and technology that hadn’t been invented yet.
But somehow we pulled together enough as a nation, and at a time when SO much was going wrong and at great expense (not just money either) got it done. That America, the one where the general feeling was “somehow we can DO this” has been, thanks to conservatives a country of “we CAN’T afford to do this.” But we have to. The world’s climate is already past the tipping point and this could be what mitigates the damage future generations are going to have to live with.
With the rise of renewable energy in the form of solar and wind, I’d argue Big Oil already lost the fight with fusion before it even started. Best they can do is slow it and that’s always a long defeat with only one guaranteed outcome.
I dream of a world without big-money control of virtually everything we can do, always after profit in mechanical/non-human results because they can …
Average people have a steep incline to transverse if they want to introduce new products or ideas that could save using the old oil and coal trains to run America and the planet herself would suffer much less as well …
BUT, maybe there are some other benny’s from using upgrades to Fusion, hopefully before it is too late to save our abused planet … See my comment below …
What they SHOULD do is, instead of holding this up (somehow) is use some of their infrastructure and engineering to be a part of production in this area. They have money to spend on R&D, and a lot of science already, just converting a lot of their new hires. There is no reason at all, other than their obstinance that they cannot start FAST in order to be there leading the way in commercializing this to get on the grid.
Conservatives saying ‘We don’t have enough money’ make me laugh.
The USA is the wealthiest nation that has ever existed on earth.
I guess I may be excited about the other, “product of Fusion”, Helium … until now, Helium was a scavenge product from oil wells, limiting the useful quantities we might use for, “lighter-than-air”, super size, load carriers and of course, “welding gases”, …
There is NO known way to convert Hydrogen into Helium on the books YET … forcing that image of the exploding, burning Hindenburg balloon to mind as the biggest reason we don’t use Hydrogen at that scale … fuel cells and other experimental pressure controlled means could temper the Hydrogen for autos and such … however, a continuous stream of Helium available as a free agent from power stations, could prove valuable to all levels of modern America …
I can’t wait for the self driving cars! After throwing away 1 TRILLION onMars! farce along with decades of time, they have to announce something so they don’t look incredibly stupid.
Let’s go to mars!
There was nothing to be gained by announcing something this extraordinary without extraordinary proof, Oh Cynical One. Was a time people did the same mocking of solar and wind as alternative energy sources and they just overtook the dirtier ones. So kindly curb your snark.