Breakthrough in Fusion! More energy released than input at the US National Ignition Facility 🔥

The US Department of Energy announced on Dec. 13, 2022, that the National Ignition Facility's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction on Dec. 5, 2022, that produced MORE energy than went into it. This is possibly the most important scientific achievement thus far in the 21st century, as it proves that human technology is capable of using nuclear fusion as a potential power source, something which until today was only hypothetical. But when will fusion power come to us? How soon can we get rid of fossil fuels?

Read the article from the National Ignition Facility here:

#fusion #fusionpower #nuclearfusion

🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:

📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks:

🦂 Support my work on Patreon:

☕️ Support my work with PayPal:

And if you like, do consider joining this channel:

🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons:

👨‍🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons:

🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel for content in Latin, Ancient Greek, & Ancient Egyptian)

🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio:

🌍 polýMATHY website:

🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram:

🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast:

👕 Merch:

📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon:

Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart

[skullruss]

My mans out here bringing us history, pronunciation critiques, and news. 10/10

[philosophygeek]

Not only do you have a brilliant mind Luke, you have a great voice - really mellifluous. I could watch and listen to your videos all day! Keep up the good work my friend. 😊

[DearDoggins]

They did what?!

Lawrence Livermore is 30 minutes from where I live. I am passing it on my way to work tomorrow. I thought they were a biochem lab...

This is amazing, and I will be following this discovery, thank you for sharing it. Please keep the scientific content coming, its fascinating and exciting.

[whothefluff]

Most people don't realize that a lot of geopolitical problems are caused by a lack of access to energy. Having the ability to create virtually infinite energy could change the world in many aspects and I really wish I could see it happen

[karenbaily]

Thank you so much for bringing us this content. My brother-in-law was a physicist working on fusion. I wish he were still alive to see this!

I would love more science content! 😊❤️👍

[jakubolszewski]

I think, that discovery of somekind of a drug that lengthens our lifes, give us visions of future and smells like cinnamon, will be greater moment.

[leugim]

👏 great synopsis, would love more of these type of videos..

[wuuglyv]

0:05 not quite. The announcement said more energy than was delivered by the laser not more than went in to create it. Also it only happened for a billionth of a second. SO like it has been for the last 70 years, fusion power is always 20-30 years away. Also fusion happened in the lab before bombs to produce new elements.

[Corwin]

I'm so used to ignoring news about fusion power as a real idea that I was shocked to see you mention it actually moving forward. Even then I didn't quite believe it til I talked with my friend who works in electrical engineering with experience is space tech.

I'm also loving all the content in areas I didn't used to see in this channel. Unless I just missed it before, I only started noticing many videos in various topics for the last year, maybe less. I feel like I'm getting more of the full polymath watching experience and all of it has been great.

[chitlitlah]

I hope I get to see the first practical fusion reactor within my lifetime. I've given up on seeing a lot of sci-fi technology, but if I could see a fusion reactor, at least I could die knowing humanity had reached the beginning of the end of the energy crisis.

[jopeteus]

Honestly, you are my favorite youtuber

[Jonas-Bastian]

I am usually a big fan of your videos but here you made a mistake: While it is true that they put 2.05 MJ into the reaction and got out 3.15 MJ they still need 300MJ to pump the laser. That means they did not achieve an energy gain of 150 percent, bur rather an energy LOSS of about 99 percent. So sadly a working fusion reactor that would solve humanities energy problems is still decades away. But you are not the only one getting it wrong though. The whole press coverage on that topic has been very misleading so far.

[MrGustavier]

I love the way you put it, and it is very optimistic, and I hate to do this, but there's a huge issue of the form of the energy, if the energy is in a form of a bombardment of neutrons and occasional protons (and a shit load of photons), then how do you convert it to anything useful ? In fission reactors (in all power plants really) we boil water to drive turbines, and in this process we loose more than half of the energy...

[jamesconnolly]

What I look forward to in the Jetsons future is blocky robots delivering handwritten letters through the snail mail.

[javiercmh]

Awesome!! I'd like to hear more about that!
Do you think you could do this in Latin??

[ommsterlitz]

Omg i can't wait for the starting of ITER ! 🤯

[broadsword]

Brilliant! Wonderful! Exciting! But can we repeat the experiment and confirm the measurements several more times before we get too carried away..?

[LucasDimoveo]

Didn’t expect another science video from you! Subscribed!

[eckligt]

While this is a very welcome advance, I think science communicators, and the media that rely on them, should all chill out a little bit. The National Ignition Facility[*] have achieved break-even for a very specific definition of break-even. There are other definitions, which are more relevant for the general public and decision-makers. It all depends on how much energy you include in the denominator (i.e. energy input) when you state the ratios of output to input. These ratios are given the symbol Q, with a subscript to denote what definition you are using: The announcement today was that Q_plasma > 1 had been achieved, which means that the energy put into the actual plasma (i.e. the tiny pellet bearing Tritium and Deuterium) was surpassed by the amount of energy released by the fusion process. For a laser-based inertial confinement, this is equivalent to saying that the amount of energy _deposited_ on the pellet was exceeded by the amount of energy the pellet itself then _generated._

Another definition of break-even, denoted by by Q_total, includes all the electrical (and otherwise) energy used to power the lasers. By this more useful definition, they fell far short of break-even. I heard one physicist in the local media where I live state that while they got 3 MJ out, they spent 300 MJ powering these lasers. So they are still off by a factor of 100: Q_total roughly equals 0.01.

You may wonder where the difference between 2 MJ and 300 MJ went. This probably all became heat in the lasers, capacitors, et cetera, due to various inefficiencies along the way.

For industrialization of any fusion technology, it is thought that Q_total would need to be around 10, because not only does a fusion power plant need to power the systems it relies on to create or maintain a plasma (lasers, magnets or something else), it also needs to have enough left over to cover its other operational requirements, indeed even enough to offset the energy used to construct the power plant in the first place, and after all this it needs to have enough energy left over to make it economical to sell this on the wholesale electricity market.

I highly recommend the following two videos that explain the inappropriate (imho) focus on Q_plasma in more detail:


[*] best named research institute in all of science?

[noblewilbert]

Hey Luke, have you tried ChatGPT? This seems to be a formidable tool for learning Latin or any language. I think a video about this would be really interesting.