A Nuclear Fusion Feat

Scientists make a breakthrough in their efforts to harness nuclear fusion energy.

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Happy Wednesday! Former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News yesterday the positive response to his new memoir has been a “great source of encouragement” as he weighs a 2024 presidential run.

If you leave one nice note about TMD in the comments, we, too, will think long and hard about mounting a bid for the White House.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday the Consumer Price Index rose just 0.1 percent from October to November, while increasing at an annual rate of 7.1 percent—a noticeable decrease from last month’s year-over-year rate of 7.7 percent, and the lowest such measure since last December. Declining energy, travel, and meat costs contributed to the slowing, while the price of some food and household items continued to escalate. The Federal Reserve is set to announce its next round of interest hikes later today, and yesterday’s inflation data likely solidified the central bank’s plan to implement a 50-basis-point increase rather than a 75-basis-point one. Stocks climbed on the news.
  • The Justice Department announced Tuesday a federal grand jury had indicted FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations. Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged Bankman-Fried had misappropriated customers’ deposits to his cryptocurrency platform, using their funds to pay off the debts of a sister and make illegal political contributions. Bankman-Fried was detained in the Bahamas this week, and denied bail prior to his likely extradition to the United States early next year. 
  • Chinese authorities sent 18 nuclear-capable military jets into Taiwan’s air defense zone, the island’s authorities said Tuesday, a record-setting show of Chinese military force in the buffer airspace.

Shooting for the Stars: Researchers Make a Fusion Breakthrough

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announces a major scientific breakthrough in the field of nuclear fusion. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP)

In the wee hours of December 5, scientists at a government lab in California fired a whole lot of laser beams at a very small target and hit the ultimate bullseye: fusion ignition. The self-sustaining, energy-gaining fusion reaction is a major step forward in the quest to turn fusion into a clean, plentiful energy source.

This has made for a lot of happy researchers. “The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity,” lab director Kim Budil said at a press conference Tuesday announcing the success. “Achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people.”

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  1. Gadgetmann

    Despite its brevity, the discussion of the LLNL announcement was good. This video discusses a process being pursued by Helion. It also highlights some significant limitations of the Tokamak design being pursued in France.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

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    Jerry McKamy

    My rating would be about a 5. Until the fusion energy out exceeds the total energy required to power the lasers, including all efficiency losses, no actual net gain has been achieved. Notice that all those lasers were powered by a carbon-heavy electrical grid! The article rightly mentions all the herculean engineering that stands in the way of making this reliably commercial. My experience in the government tells me they are always a factor of about 3 or 4 too optimistic on these things. So if they're saying 3 decades, count on about 9 or more.

    Until then, this will likely serve to distract from the more pressing need to replace carbon based electrical sources with clean sources, including nuclear fission reactors. We must have more fission reactors online now and in the next 2 decades to slow down global warming and make time for any possible fusion technology to mature.

    Don't let the perfect keep us from doing good enough!

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  3. Jack O. Zentrist

    If you can, see yesterday's CGTN take on this fusion breakthrough. A consultant for its "Razor" program explained very well in layman's terms what happened. He said it may take "twenty more years" for anything truly remarkable to come about...My own takeaway was that the President himself prompted this "breaking news" for short-term political gain.

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  4. Larrylegg.671946

    I’ll give it a 3. Although interesting, it is a long way from being something that can wean us off of fossil fuel. The long and winding road to something practical that will ready help mankind is still so far off that it renders this achievement less than exciting. Most of these scientific “breakthroughs” are released with so much hype for the primary purpose of securing funding for additional research. But that’s not a bad thing.

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    Todd Pedlar

    I'm with several who commented that from the perspective of the basic physics, something like 5 or so - it's an interesting development. In terms of practical application, for me this is a 1. They'll need to increase the efficiency by a factor of several hundred to be able to put this into any kind of practical production mode. The buried fact in most of these stories is that while the energy output from the cell was 1.5 times the light energy incident on the cell from the lasers, the lasers themselves consumed 300 times that excess that was produced. It's great that the input energy on the cell was exceeded by the fusion energy produced... but I'm quite skeptical that a working power plant is coming anytime before I've shuffled off this mortal coil. Not only do they have to make massive increases in the amount of energy extracted from fusion pellets by factors of several hundred, but they'll need to find a way to deliver this at scale. That's many decades off (and I think practical clean energy production needs to rely more on conventional fission, and solar/wind/hydro with much improved energy storage. Practically, that's a much quicker route, even if it's less sexy scientifically).

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  6. Aaronrc

    In terms of scientific interest, 5; in terms of practical application, 2 at best; in terms of propaganda that does more policy harm than good, 10. And no, I don't expect to see commercial fusion in my lifetime, absent a fundamental paradigm shift from, say, large tokamaks to compact fusor designs.

    In our energy mix, the global community has spent trillions of dollars in building intermittent generation sources, the effect of which has been negligible in terms of trying to actually reduce carbon emissions. The overwhelming share of reductions have been due to natural gas displacing coal, with some reductions attributable to more efficient technologies (LED lighting, for example). To achieve the pipe dream of net zero with intermittents, hundreds of trillions of dollars would have to be spent to build sufficient turbines, panels, and most importantly in that mix, batteries in order to try to end up with a stable grid. Doing so would consume something on the order of half of the world's aluminum output, and significant shares of many other resources.

    In the meantime, nuclear fission has been demonstrated as a safe and effective way to generate large quantities of 24/7/365-steady low-carbon energy (lower than solar and wind, in fact, taking full resource consumption into consideration). At the prices the UAE paid KEPCO to build its new 4-reactor, 5.38 GW facility, the United States could replace its entire grid with nuclear plants for about $3.5 trillion in construction costs - less than what we appropriated in COVID response, and far less than what we're estimated to spend chasing the solar and wind boondoggle.

    But fusion is always dangled out there as the perfect solution that's just around the corner, serving as the enemy of the perfectly good fission power solution that's available to us today.

    And all that does is cement the status quo.

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    1. Just Dean

      Do you have a reference for the claim that renewables will consume half of the world's aluminum? Wind turbines contain hardly any aluminum, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-materials-are-used-make-wind-turbines . They are mostly steel and composites.

      I happen to like nuclear as part of the solution to getting to carbon free energy. Every plan I see for the US wants to see the existing plants stay online as long as possible and many studies include the use of nuclear power for firm, dispatchable power sources. DOE is funding half of the Terrapower, re: Bill Gates, demonstration plant that is scheduled to come online in 2028, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/bill-gates-terrapower-builds-its-first-nuclear-reactor-in-a-coal-town.html . DOE is also sharing the cost of developing the Xe-100 reactor from X-Energy, https://www.science.org/content/article/department-energy-picks-two-advanced-nuclear-reactors-demonstration-projects .

      As for the solar and wind boondoggle, renewables are on track to become the world's largest source of power by 2025, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewables-are-on-pace-to-beat-coal-as-the-largest-power-source-by-2025/ .

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      1. Aaronrc

        LMGTFY:

        https://www.sciencealert.com/solar-panel-boom-s-demand-for-aluminium-is-a-big-carbon-problem#:~:text=The%20booming%20solar%20panel%20market,ways%20we%20can%20mitigate%20this.

        "I happen to like nuclear ..."

        Good. Then you're liking what, by the numbers, is clearly the safest, lowest-resource-intensive energy supply that's within our current reach.

        But what DOE is spending on nuclear development is vastly dwarfed compared to what the government has spent and will be spending on intermittent generation sources. ("Renewable" is little more than a marketing misnomer.) It's far too little, and very much belated.

        You imply from your final sentence that because intermittents are quickly growing, they are somehow superior, when that's demonstrably not the case; the only reason that intermittents are growing so quickly is because, thanks to various tax credits and incentives, the Federal government is presently paying for almost half of intermittent projects, while nuclear has traditionally gotten nothing but grief.

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        1. Just Dean

          I don't appreciate your attitude with the LMGTFY. I missed it by searching for "solar panel materials." I need to study it further, but I think the aluminum/structural material is solvable.

          Based on what I have been reading, solar and wind are now on among the cheapest sources of energy without tax incentives. I will a find you a reference later.

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          1. Aaronrc

            If you want to actually look at comparisons between technologies, two Substack articles I encourage you to read are linked below. The second one details materials usage per MWh of electric production.

            https://therootsofliberty.substack.com/p/woking-up-to-nuclear-power?fbclid=IwAR3zSXsSzkFA6T6Gjw0RsYGXQtw7LeSl62EZEwHxF1t1zVQRNYU7N9b_5SA

            https://therootsofliberty.substack.com/p/wasabi-green-and-the-snowpiercer

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  7. Dave Thatcher

    I decree this is a nice note so someone has to run. Unfortunately I don’t believe that anyone from The Morning Dispatch crew (Declan and Esther) qualifies due to age (interesting isn’t it that our Constitution It self includes age discrimination. I’d vote for Egger just for the seemingly, and disturbingly, untouched liquor cart, but unfortunately he is neither TMD or age qualified. Jonah, Steve, Sarah, David, Scott, Chris, Nick, Charlotte, Chris, etc. (short for those whose name I can’t remember) also fail the TMD test and also the age test in many cases so we can’t select them. I volunteer to write a piece for TMD, give me a topic. I am older than David and if I wrote a column I’d check the boxes. Long attempt at tongue in cheek humor, likely failed, but I not only value TMD but the entire skiff so thanks

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    Michael Falciani

    I’m just upset they didn’t test this by heating up a house full of corn kernels.

    And that board was no match for me.

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    Normb1442

    No, but about 20 years ago I scoffed at the idea that I would have something in my pocket the could understand spoken English commands, and I have it. The engineering problems are indeed daunting but the guess of 40-5o years seems not unreasonable. After Kitty Hawk, we DID get airlines flying everywhere in about 50 years, once aircraft underwent engineering growth forced on them by the military.

    But never underestimate the power of legacy systems to throw sand in the gears. Don't be surprised if your congressperson begins voting against funding this research because his masters at Exxon tell him to do so.

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    Robert Knudson

    Belated thanks for the FT spy story link. Fascinating stuff. I loved the French series Bureau de Legendes, which it briefly referenced, and am fascinated by the ability of post cold War spying to be both harrowing and mundane.

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