Nuclear Fusion: Rapid Progress for Inertial Confinement

Nuclear fusion by inertial confinement has seen some dramatic progress in the past year years. After their big headlines in 2022, the National Ignition Facility has managed to pretty reliably reproduce ignition, and more recently, First Light Fusion collaborated with Sandia Labs on a remarkable experiment.

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#sciencenews #science #technology #tech #technews #nuclear

[briancampbell]

For a long time, fusion energy was half a century away. It looks like they’ve now narrowed it down to just 50 years.

[Arashmickey]

Inertial confinement is how I treat myself when I get home from work at the end of the week.

[peep]

Years ago I knew a guy that worked for US DOE on the inertial confinement fusion project. We used to play Starcraft, and then Warcraft together

[jimmy]

Thank you for mentioning the inefficiencies of the supporting equipment! The media tend to leave this out to make fusion research sound more exciting and closer to commercialization.

[keithsquawk]

Ah, the BFG
only nowit's 'friendly'

[ReductioAdAbsurdum]

The joke at 3:40 is freakin' brutal. I love Sabine. 😂

[bournechupacabra]

Good coverage! I work on high pressure physics and I collaborate with a lot LLNL scientists.

One small note in case anyone is confused: the lasers are fired at the gold cylinder and not directly at the pellet to produce a more spatially even drive. When the lasers hit the gold, it creates a bath of X-rays that are much more spatially uniform than the lasers are, which leads to a more symetric implosion. Other places study direct drive which is a bit more efficient in terms of laser energy to pressure, but it's much harder to avoid big instabilities forming.

[edwardlulofs]

I bet you already know why they use quartz, but what you said was more entertaining.

Piezoelectricity is
Electric charge generated in certain solids due to mechanical stress.

So the voltage output depends upon the pressure.

I used to use that method to alter the shape of the object for my atomic force microscope to see individual atoms and push the atoms around.
The most famous example is when IBM moved some atoms into the shape of the letters. Then they scanned the surface to see the letters. Fun stuff for physicists.

[shugucchi]

I actually applied to first light fusion about 5 months ago when they were first starting up in Oxford, I didn't get the job but I can't believe how quickly they have made progress. Good on them!

edit: I have no idea what tf happened in the comments.

[robertlehnert]

"If you ignore all the energy you put into the lasers..."

"Aside from all that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?"

[richardjuergens]

Yep, BFG stands for “big friendly gun”. 😂🤣

[ivarwind]

We've been able to produce net power (not just ignition) from fusion since 1952 - the problem isn't to get more power out than we put in, but to *continuously* get more power out than we put in. I don't see how any of the current inertial confinement results bring us any closer to that, than Ivy Mike did.

[VeritasPraevalebit]

All fusion concepts share a common problem:
Every fusion reaction consumes one tritium atom.
The reaction also produces one neutron which can be used to produce a tritium atom.
But this can not be done with 100% efficiency and therefore it is very difficult if at all possible to make a fusion reactor self-sufficient regarding tritium production.

[Rxke]

FLF has always been my favourite startup. Their long format presentations are awesome.

[andersnilsson]

Now it is only 20 years away! Thats great progress, since it has been 30 years away in the last 60 years.

[steveschaps]

Thanks for the really good news. We've had really good news about nuclear fusion yearly since 1950. Maybe we should have a really good news holiday. I could celebrate that.

[ispamforfood]

😲 Fusion news! My favorite! Thanks, Sabine! 🙂
I really hope I live to see how fusion changes the world... 🤞

[racookster]

Even back in the 1970s, I read popular articles that suggested inertial confinement showed more promise than magnetic confinement. I wondered then what I still wonder now: how do you scale it up? How do you manufacture and deliver tiny fuel pellets to the reactor, and how do you harness the energy that comes from blasting them?

[adb]

Hard to imagine how one would scale up inertial confinement to grid production levels.

[ujccchp]

Thank you for all the science and education, I love hearing your thoughts on things. Mr. X