The human cost matters. Guess who is sitting on a ton of these minerals and hence ended up with endless warfare, partially imposed from without…
One day we’ll learn that fucking up our planet endlessly by stripping it bare is not a great way to fun our planet. I just hope that we figure that out before our civilization collapses… 
They really did NOT announce a net gain in energy, and the reporting on this as been so damn misleading.
Somewhere in the last decade press releases and news reporting took to reporting on Q-plasma, instead of Q-total. That is, the ratio between the energy that hits the plasma and what comes out, vs the total energy you put into it and what comes out.
The fact is that they used 50 kWh of energy and produced 0.7 kWh of energy.
If you mess with the statistics, you can say "well, in this tiny part of the reaction we got more out than in, but it doesn’t change the fact that the only thing changed after this latest result is a Q-total of 0.014, while before it was something like 0.012. Sure, that’s a step along the way. Or rather, a couple thousandths of a step.
And it’s not just an “engineering challenge” away now. Going the rest of the way from 0.014 to >1 isn’t in the cards at Livermore for decades and decades, if that.
I’d love fusion to save us all as much as the next person, but this kind of reporting doesn’t help. If anything, it gets governments to put more money into fusion now, and each dollar going there instead of into cheap solar which is available today is another pound of CO2 in the air.
So, yeah, your analysis is very right. They need to improve the energy output from this particular machine by a factor of like 100 or so for this be an energy source, or make dramatic improvements in laser efficiency, or something. Meanwhile, tokamak and other designs like stellerators seem far far ahead, are much closer to real break-even, and operate in a continuous way that seems more suited for real energy production.
So this is science, not energy production.
What I’m wondering though, is what kind of science. This really seems like it’s a way of doing weapons research without testing weapons. Because fusion that occurs in a weapon is also x-ray induced, not confinement-induced, and a lot more similar to what’s going on in this particular experiment than it is to what’s going on at ITER.
I am not a physicist so that’s my amateur speculation there. Looking forward to any better informed comments on that thought.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Winner winner chicken dinner.
“Welfare for physicists” is how some people have described NIF.
honest question, what’s wrong with welfare?
( edit: other than it not paying enough i mean )
It’s not my opinion that this project is considered “welfare”. I worked briefly as a contractor to LLNL on target fabrication development (so I was a direct beneficiary). Some people I worked with used that phrase, noting if we don’t keep the physicists with the knowledge of how these weapons work, they’ll “go somewhere else” with that knowledge.
I was agreeing with @Fefelo, that this project has very little (if anything) to do with clean energy and is primarily about finding alternative paths to study the physics of nuclear weapons.
There are also huge amounts of lithium in sea water. Far more than we could ever use even if everything on earth ran on batteries. Currently we don’t have a cost effective extraction method for it, but we haven’t spent much effort trying since other methods are easier for now.
Safe to say we’ll never run out of lithium. It’s one of most common elements on earth.
yeah, it’s a common phrase i think. and one that i think should be shown the boot. it’s easier to just say what it is “weapons research” plus or minus “wasteful” if that’s the intention.
oto, a well administered welfare program is the opposite of wasteful because it’s helping people be full members of society. the alternative: paying the associated costs of emergency medical care, homelessness, or even addiction or crime - that’s the truly wasted money
a stich in time saves nine
Exactly. This is decades away from being on an engineer’s professional radar.
Not an expert either, but my feeling is … no? They already know how to get substantial energy release in an uncontrolled fashion (boom). With this experiment, they’ve achieved fusion ignition in the most non-bomb way possible - it’s controlled, limited, and requires a ton of very non-portable (and won’t be portable for decades) infrastructure. I might be looking at this wrong, but it seems like the worst bomb ever. Very open to correction if I’m wrong.
Spot on. Every word you wrote.
Fusion is great but the press on it is a big distraction. We run the risk of people thinking it’s going to save us and thus we don’t have to do anything but wait for it.
It’s also fuel for people resisting nuclear fission. We absolutely need traditional nuclear power to save us from climate change. We have no other viable alternatives to replace coal and gas base load. Wind and solar can’t do it because we have no solution for grid storage at the scale required, nor any viable prospects on the time horizon we must have to prevent 2°C warming.
The rational thing to do is invest heavily in grid storage research and build more nuclear plants right now while we wait for that research to pan out.
The choices are traditional nuclear power or catastrophic 2°C warming. Lots of folks don’t like those choices, but those are the choices.
Agree, and I’d also add energy reduction to the current needs that focusing on silver bullet technologies takes attention from. There are many areas that we can reduce consumption today without reduced quality of life. For instance, the US consumes about twice as much energy per person as do European countries with similar (or higher) quality of life.
Replacing 100 million cars with energy efficient public transport, updating tragically maintained power grids, and redesigning cities to reduce travel could all eliminate fossil fuel consumption without needing to wait on any advancements in fusion or power storage. I agree we should be heavily investing in grid storage research
You got that part right. However, let me explain…
Everything needs to be tested to know that it works and to make improvements in it. However, we can no longer test nuclear weapons (test ban treaty). So how do we know that any of our nuclear stuff works? Over the past couple of decades, I’m sure that LNL has spent billions of dollars on supercomputer simulations. But this is another way to do a similar thing, which is to see how x-ray induced fusion releases energy and neutrons in various conditions. Which is exactly what’s going on in a bomb.
For this experiment to “break even” it needs to generate 100x more energy. But for it to be a power source, remember, there are also significant losses in converting thermal energy to electricity, plus it needs to be economically viable. They really need to get the power output from this up by 1000x for this to be an energy source. And my non-physicist intuition is, that’s impossible, never going to happen, and they all know it.
I also noticed that in all the articles about this, they say almost nothing about the fuel pellets themselves, other than they are small and use gold as the container. They don’t even mention what’s in the fuel, other than saying “hydrogen”, which it most certainly is not. I’m guessing that the design of these fuel pellets is a pretty important issue. If this were energy research they would be a lot more open about that.
So your non-physicist intuition is that they’re completely lying about doing fusion at all, or that they’re doing fusion with something other than hydrogen? Because the only other plausible fuel for that is helium-3. What on earth makes you think it’s something else? 
In every very complex and involved field, there are folks who think that they can “intuition” a truth deeper than the folks who spend their lives studying and perfecting their understanding of it. I am going with the statements of the scientists doing the research and the ones who have the background to interpret it.
Call me crazy, but if I were doing secret military research, I just wouldn’t say anything to the public instead of making up extremely notable claims that some random non-physicist can somehow see through. 
So because the popular press on something doesn’t happen to contain one piece of information you feel is relevant, you immediately jump to Dark Conspiracy To Test Weapons? Oh, honey.
There are three flavors of hydrogen: protium, deuterium, and tritium
This experiment likely used deuterium and/or tritium
Well, in the context of fusion announcements, they tend to be pretty clear on what they are using. Deuterium and tritium are the relevant isotopes. Could be just journalistic simplification to call those “hydrogen” even though it makes a huge difference in this context. Most fusion research uses Deuterium only until they get the plasma results they are looking for, before they add tritium. For example, ITER plans to de deuterium fusion only for the first TEN YEARS of operation before they add tritium, so it really is a key distinction. Again, journalistic simplification is possible.
But the other non-hydrogen fuel they could go with is… 6LiD. Something which is used in all thermonuclear weapons, but is not used in any energy research AFAIK. They leave things really vague.
According to Wikpedia the principal responsibility of the LLNL is “ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering, and technology.”
So saying that I suspect they are doing weapons research at LLNL is like saying I suspect they are cooking hamburgers at McDonald’s. Ehh… not exactly a dark conspiracy.
Look at LLNL’s cool physical defense plans! Yes, they do weapons research there.
Exactly, or possibly as I said above, could possibly be something even more exotic and weapons-only.
That’s not what you wrote. You wrote that this research was weapons research, based on zero evidence. LLNL does a lot more than weapons research, including plenty of vanilla energy and laser research. They even do medical research.
