Pages in this blog

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Fusion, we have achieved ignition! But why so long, and when will it be practical? [Progress]

Kenneth Chang, Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers, NYTimes, Dec. 13, 2022.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

If fusion can be deployed on a large scale, it would offer an energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy.

Yes! But why has this taken so long? When we set out to create an atom bomb in WWII we had success within a couple of years. In 1960 President Kennedy said we’ll be on the moon within a decade, and we were. A decade later President Nixon accounted an all-out government-funded war on cancer. I suppose we’ve made some progress, but not much, and success is not in sight. Why do some such efforts succeed while others go on and on?

We’ve been working on fusion power since the late 1950s. Why’s it taken us so long to get this far? And we still have a way to go to make it practical. On the face of it would seem that some engineering projects are more complex than others, way more complex. See this post from a year ago, Types of Research, R&D ventures, by ‘guesstimated’ probability of success [Progress].

Later:

Fusion would be essentially an emissions-free source of power, and it would help reduce the need for power plants burning coal and natural gas, which pump billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever.

“Probably decades,” Kimberly S. Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore, said during the Tuesday news conference. “Not six decades, I don’t think. I think not five decades, which is what we used to say. I think it’s moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.”

There’s more at the link.

1 comment:

  1. Part 3 of 3 ---

    What the medical establishment "informs" the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.

    Does anyone really think it's a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the 'war on cancer' a fraud? If you look closer you'll come to the same conclusion. But...politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large. Or people's own denial or indifference of the real truth.

    ReplyDelete