Maker Hacks: Fusion Energy - Dreaming Of Uncorked Genies

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-touted-by-white-house-drawing-praise-and-some-skepticism_4921829.html
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition

Nuclear Fusion ‘Breakthrough’ Touted by White House, Drawing Praise
and Some Skepticism
Officials offer different views on pace of commercialization
By Nathan Worcester
December 13, 2022 Updated: December 14, 2022

It was 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 that experimental physicist Alex Zylstra
first spotted it: for the first time, a target yielded more energy
from a fusion reaction than a laser put into it—though that’s not
counting the much greater input energy that was needed to power the
laser in the first place.

“One of the first things I did was call one of the diagnostic experts
to double-check the data,” he said during a Dec. 13 press conference
with his colleagues from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Zylstra was running a test with the world’s most energetic
laser—Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF).

By blasting a capsule of hydrogen atoms with that laser until the
atoms heat into plasma and combine, he and his colleagues were hoping
to achieve nuclear fusion through an approach known as inertial
confinement.

The other main approach to fusion, magnetic confinement fusion, uses
devices such as tokamaks to contain plasmas using powerful magnetic
fields.

NIF physicist Tammy Ma said that “tears were running down [her] face”
when she learned about the result.

“I want to emphasize that each experiment we do is building on 60
years of work in this field, and more than a decade on NIF itself,”
Zylstra said.

His team’s latest work comes as the latest in a recent series of
fusion-related achievements from that facility, where fusion research
is pursued under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s
“Stockpile Stewardship” program, as an alternative to the underground
nuclear testing that ended during the early 1990s.

The most important of those achievements may have occurred in August
2021, when NIF researchers first briefly achieved ignition according
to one set of criteria—namely, when the forces cooling plasma down
aren’t strong enough to swamp the forces heating it up. (The Dec. 5
result has also been called “ignition,” as it marks scientific energy
breakeven.)

“The NIF result in August 2021 changed everything, but this result
changes nothing,” said Daniel Jassby, a former research physicist with
Princeton University’s plasma laboratory, in a Dec. 13 interview with
The Epoch Times.

At the Dec. 13 press conference, Lawerence Livermore director Kim
Budil said that about 300 megajoules of energy drove the experiment as
a whole. The target produced about 3.15 megajoules of energy from 2.05
megajoules of energy, according to a press release.

The latest result and press conference coincides with Congress
negotiating a last-minute spending bill. Republican senators have
called for their colleagues to wait until after their party takes the
House of Representatives in January to finalize the package.

Jassby did not rule out the possibility that the latest announcement’s
timing has something to do with the ongoing spending debate.

“That could be—that’s standard political activity,” he said.

The reported breakthrough also coincides with increasing tension
between the United States and its nuclear-armed geopolitical rival,
Russia, in the midst of the Ukraine war. Lawrence Livermore’s Mark
Hermann noted how NIF’s fusion research aided the United States’
nuclear deterrent capabilities.

The scientists, bureaucrats, and administration officials who spoke on
Dec. 13 said the results vindicate decades of earlier researchers who
have sought energy breakeven.

“They never lost sight of this goal,” said White House office of
science and technology policy director Arati Prabhakar.

Yet, an apparent discrepancy emerged as to a plausible timeline for
commercial fusion power.

Budil, of Lawrence Livermore, stated that commercialization could be
achieved in “probably decades,” though perhaps not 50 or 60 years.

“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,” she said.

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, by contrast, appealed to
President Joe Biden’s “decadal vision to get to a commercial fusion
reactor within 10 years.”

She said the latest result “shows that it can be done.”

When Granholm was asked about that gap by a reporter, Budil jumped in
to say that magnetic fusion was more advanced than inertial
confinement fusion. However, she did not state that either approach
could be realistically commercialized within a decade.

“With real investment and real focus, that timescale can move closer,” she said.
Praise and Skepticism

Some fusion insiders have stressed what they see as the significance
of NIF’s contribution.

A spokesperson for a major international magnetic fusion collaboration
called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)
said the results were “a shot of adrenaline for the global fusion R&D
enterprise.”

Tokamaks—the technology at the center of ITER’s work—are still “the
closest to commercial deployment,” added ITER spokesperson Laban
Coblentz.

Andrew Holland, the CEO of the Washington-based Fusion Industry
Association, said that the announcement on the finding “shows the
world that fusion is not science fiction: it will soon be a viable
source of energy.”

He also called for regulation of the emerging fusion sector, adding
that the NIF experiment “will give governments around the world
further incentive to support the development of commercial fusion
energy.”

Yet other experts who spoke with The Epoch Times sounded more
skeptical, particularly with regard to the idea of fusion energy
reaching commercialization within a decade.

“It will take half a century to develop the presently non-existent
technologies required for a power reactor based on [inertial
confinement fusion], including a practical laser or ion beam,” Jassby
said in an email to The Epoch Times.

In his view, tokamaks remain “highly speculative.”

“Anyone who predicts commercial fusion before 2050 has a far greater
imagination than I do,” said Rod Adams, a Navy nuclear veteran who is
a partner with the Nucleation Capital venture fund, in a Dec. 13 email
to The Epoch Times.

Like Jassby, he mentioned what he sees as the odd timing of the latest
result, which aligned with a spending debate in Congress.

“A final source of skepticism is the skillful orchestration of the
announcement. Why did the news ‘leak out’ in time for multiple sources
to produce articles even before the widely promoted press conference?”
he asked.

Steven Krivit, a journalist and noted fusion critic, told The Epoch
Times in a Dec. 13 email that the latest NIF data is “irrelevant” from
a practical perspective, though not necessarily to scientists.

He questioned the definitions used to claim the reaction exceeded
breakeven, noting that the lasers used to carry out the experiments
require hundreds of megajoules of energy.

In a follow-up message to The Epoch Times, Adams said the experimental
net energy production amounted to “sound and fury producing dozens of
articles about a breakthrough.”