US scientists reach long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough, source says
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If we read more on that we find that they wont say anything else because they want to verify the results.
Gee let's thank them for the conclusive jump for another stupid publicity stunt.

To sum up with this paraphrase:
"We finally achieved greater than 1 energy output vs energy input using fusion! Finally we have something to show for all the money and effort!"
"Next, we will verify the results".

<insert GIGANTIC chuckle here> ha ha

That's the problem with today's internet articles. Claim, claim, claim, prove sometime in the future.
They often use words like "might" and "could" in reference to something that was 'found' after a long time trying. But they dont even state it like that then get even more misleading about it.
"The search for aliens is over! They might have found aliens!"
Gee thanks for the wonderful find there, now i know for sure that they may have found aliens, somewhere.
So first they make the claim, then seemingly verify it with a conditional statement that actually reduces the claim to just a guess again.

What i fear now is that next they will start claiming and just never producing.
"We now have useful fusion power. We proved it today and everybody agrees it works".
But then never deliver. Possibly some time down the road if we are lucky, "We made a slight miscalculation, sorry".
I fear that may be coming next in the great reach for more eye catching "wowie zowie" news.

Maybe they are trying to condition the public to stop reading the news?
I find myself reading less and less of these extraordinary claims lately knowing full well that they probably will end with a
"... but we cant be sure just yet".

I think i am about done with reading all that garbage.

 

 

A completely novel tech that I hadn't heard of before. I truly hope it eventually pans out:

 

A completely novel tech that I hadn't heard of before. I truly hope it eventually pans out:

https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_DKirtley/1_9p8c7d85

So do I but the track record is the typical one.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/helion-energy-takes-in-106m-for-fusion-energy/

Many believe the world is at least decades away from fusion power, but Helion Energy executives have said the company could build a useful reactor in the next three years.

That was in 2015. Like many others I think they are in need for some additional funding soon. It's pretty old technology from the 50's.
https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/project-sherwood-and-magnetic-fusion

Livermore’s CTR Program, which was part of the Atomic Energy Commission’s “Project Sherwood,” began when the Laboratory opened in 1952. Over the first few years, the Livermore team explored many different devices and methods with researchers eventually settling on the magnetic mirror approach, in which hot fusion plasma would be confined in a cylindrical region by a uniform magnetic field with intensified fields at the ends.

Over CTR’s first six years of existence, fusion research under Project Sherwood had remained classified. However, according to Post, by the late 1950s “it was recognized that the problem [of achieving fusion] would be long and difficult and that all would benefit from a free flow of information.” In 1958, the weekend before the opening of the second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (“Atoms for Peace”) in Geneva, the United States and Great Britain announced an end of secrecy in their CTR efforts. The Soviets subsequently proclaimed that they had built the world’s largest fusion research device, a doughnut-shaped machine called a tokamak, and declassified their research as well.

 

A completely novel tech that I hadn't heard of before. I truly hope it eventually pans out:

[SARCASM ON]
Wow that's interesting, i have been experimenting with nuclear fusion for years now and am just on the brink of getting more energy out than i put in.
Send me $100 USD and i just MAY get it working by next year. See pics of my prototype control circuit and waveform of initial ignition (ha ha).
[SARCASM OFF]

Ok the stuff i read about recently sounds promising, but then it always did. I guess we all just hope it works out sooner than later.

On some kind of final, practical success, a different question comes up.
That is, what happens when everyone on the planet can get as much energy as they want for very low cost.
As we all know, there is no 100 percent efficient device, or at least that can be used for anything practical, and that means that there will still be heat generated in every device we use. That goes for every single person on this earth. Where is all that heat going to go. I would say it's going to eventually get into the atmosphere where it will heat up the planet, so do we end up with another problem there.

 

On some kind of final, practical success, a different question comes up.
That is, what happens when everyone on the planet can get as much energy as they want for very low cost.

I don't know why everyone thinks that fusion is going to mean free energy (free as in no-or-very-little cost). Fusion plants are going to be extremely expensive to build, operate, and maintain. It's not a matter of running a pipe in from a river and turning on the valve and then walking away. It's very analogous to a hydroelectric dam.

 

I don't know why everyone thinks that fusion is going to mean free energy (free as in no-or-very-little cost). Fusion plants are going to be extremely expensive to build, operate, and maintain. It's not a matter of running a pipe in from a river and turning on the valve and then walking away. It's very analogous to a hydroelectric dam.

Well hopefully speaking, low cost.
Maintenance costs, security personnel, size scaling, etc.
But it will provide energy in many places that now dont have any or reject nuclear. May also be gov subsidized.

 

In just a few years ...

 

I just love Sabine, she's an authentic and objective skeptic, sincere in her pursuit of truth. Thanks for posting.

 

Bill Gates and other investors pump $29 million into a 'twisty' nuclear reactor

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Christofer Mowry, the former CEO of General Fusion and senior adviser on fusion at BEV, will join Type One Energy as CEO. “Type One Energy represents a special opportunity. This team’s knowledge and credibility give Type One the unique ability to integrate recent global advances in stellarator-relevant technology and to deliver a fusion power plant without another costly, large-scale science validation machine.”

 

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technolog...-magnet-coil-additive-manufactured-components
https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organization/type-one-energy

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/en...peat-fusion-power-breakthrough-ft-2023-08-06/

That experiment briefly achieved what's known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target, the Energy Department said.

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/en...peat-fusion-power-breakthrough-ft-2023-08-06/

That misleading breakthrough hype again.
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/one-step-closer-to-fusion.117133/post-1784857

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/en...peat-fusion-power-breakthrough-ft-2023-08-06/

Hi,

Yeah, I read about that "another step".
One thing that strikes me though is that they NEVER say just how small those steps are.
It's turning into one step, then another step, then another step, then another step, etc., etc.
Just how long is this staircase going to be (ha ha).

 

It's Confirmed! Laser Fusion Experiment Hit a Critical Milestone in Power Generation

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The researchers also report results from one of those more recent experiments, from mid-2023, which generated 3.88 MJ of energy from the same 2.05 MJ energy input – about 1.9 times the energy injected, which is the highest yield to date.

 

How much energy was used to create the environment?

 

What needs to be reminded when 1.9 above input also the input itself is recovered for the overall net. Even though we are still in the dark ages it is steps forward.

For me maybe not, for the future who knows, baby steps.

kv

It's Confirmed! Laser Fusion Experiment Hit a Critical Milestone in Power Generation
​

 

This type of hype driven misinformation is not helpful.

"These devices did not demonstrate the production of a single Watt of power. Rather, it lost 99.2 percent of the energy it consumed"

https://news.newenergytimes.net/202...nition-in-historic-nuclear-fusion-experiment/

The Question of Energy
Before we talk about laser fusion as a possible source for energy, it’s crucial to know that the primary purpose of NIF is to test nuclear weapons materials in an enclosed space rather than for fusion energy research.

So what is the likelihood that the NIF device might ever demonstrate that laser fusion can be a source of energy? “Zero chance,” Hurricane wrote. “The NIF was never designed for net energy production since it’s just a research facility.” Here’s the math for the overall device gain, normalizing the electrical input energy to thermal energy based on a 33 percent conversion efficiency:

It’s less accurate, but some people may prefer to compare the electrical input value to the thermal output value. Here’s what that calculation looks like:

 

It's Confirmed! Laser Fusion Experiment Hit a Critical Milestone in Power Generation
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Sounds to me like just another repetition of the long-repeated announcements from people that are looking for publicity at the expense of any degree of credibility. They device a metric that has absolutely no relation to the ability to produce useable power from fusion (though the metric may be perfectly useful for other purposes), and then claim that when they achieve that metric's target, they have made some huge advance in the quest for producing useable power from fusion (because, of course, THAT'S what's going to get the publicity and attention).

 

Where is all that heat going to go. I would say it's going to eventually get into the atmosphere where it will heat up the planet, so do we end up with another problem there.

Even if everyone gets all the energy they can use, (say 1kW average for 8.1billion people giving a total of 8.1E12 watts) it will still be only 0.018% of the sun's average 340 watts/m² or 4.4 x E16 total watts that falls on the earth every year.
(It's amazing to me that we can get that amount of power from a heat source that's 93 million miles away.)
Of course, It's not the energy we put into our environment that's causing global warming, it's the gaseous green-house gases created from creating that energy.