For anyone seriously interested in the challenges in achieving nuclear fusion power production, I highly recommend Principles of Fusion Energy published by World Scientific. The book is quite technical but a non-specialist can skip the equations and get the essential understanding from the text which is succinct and digestible. This is the best book I’ve read on nuclear fusion energy vice a text on plasma dynamics or astrophysics.
Stranger
This is important, but I wouldn’t call it a breakthrough. A breakthrough is when there’s a qualitative change in capability, like a jet going faster than the speed of sound, a refrigerator producing ice, a semiconductor transistor, etc. The breakthrough for fusion was back when they first did the proof-of-concept experiments. It’s been all engineering refinements since, quantitatively improving the capabilities.
Not to deny anything of what you wrote, except to nitpick that under renewables I would include hydroelectric, which is big in many countries with the right geography, rainfall and orography. Though it has its own problematic issues.
But I doubt that anything to do with nuclear energy in general, be it fission or fusion, was ultimately driven by energy needs: it is first and foremost military technology. Everybody knows* and has know since the problems of radioactive waste and possible accidents came to the fore that nuclear energy is not cheaper than the others. It’s not the economy, it’s the bomb.
*eeer… right?
Then I wonder why the news coverage is treating it like a sea change?
Not that the popular media doesn’t often flub science as a matter of course. Just not sure why THIS particular thing is getting singled out, based on what’s been posted in this thread. On one hand “Not a big deal at all – hardly even an accomplishment” and on the other hand “Whee! Climate change is done-zo – and immediately to boot!” I mean, sure, excluded middle and all … but still.
It is exciting, just not a breakthrough. Incremental steps are essential to bringing a technology to usefulness. The media and public doesn’t have the capacity for nuance. And the media has treated every step of development this way. (See @suranyi’s link.)
Holy smokes, Kim Budil is director of the LLNL? I worked with her in graduate school, around 30 years ago. I had no idea she had gotten so high in her career!
That’s all, sorry about the hijack.
I didn’t include hydroelectric because it isn’t very scaleable—not only is it a major investment with literal upstream and downstream impacts, but it is also only workable at geographic sites with specific geographic and climatological conditions—and as a technology for future growth in the era of climate change it is increasingly problematic as evidenced by the current situation at Lake Mead. For the most part, sites that are suited for hydropower are either already developed or have not been developed because of other ecological or tectonic issues, and new hydropower developments are unlikely at any significant scale to offset hydrocarbon energy supplies, although hydropower may be used as a storage medium for other renewable sources such as wind and solar.
Because it’s a story, and most journalists and editors just don’t understand the technology they report upon and have not gone to the effort to check with actual experts in the field. You see this again and again in pop science journalism which makes it very frustrating to read in one’s own discipline and highly skeptical about reporting in other areas that isn’t from peer-reviewed (or at least peer-critiqued) journals and outlets. This is technically a ‘breakthrough’ (if factually correct) in the sense that it demonstrates an overunity yield from the plasma (although as @Sam_Stone notes, it isn’t anywhere near breakeven on total energy, as I guarantee that Qtotal << 1) but it isn’t an advancement that is going to quickly or directly lead to useful power production, and in fact it probably doesn’t have any practical applications other than being able to achieve a greater energetic yield for experimental purposes. It sounds as if this was an unexpected development, and investigating that issue might result in some useful information that is applicable to other fusion efforts, but again the NIF is not intended to be a system for the development of fusion power production.
Stranger
Ammonia uses natural gas and many polymers use natural gas liquids, although those often get lumped in with petroleum products while NG often does not.
IIRC domestic ammonia production uses something like 6 or 7% or our NG but I’d have to dig around EIA for the exact number. It’s not a standard report.
This is going to revolutionise power production in much the same way that the Segway revolutionised transportation.
C’mon! Don’t hate on the Segway!:
Stranger
On the evening news, the ‘breakthrough’ is being hailed as an energy revolution. Having read the SDMB for over two decades, I trust you guys. I now am dreading all kinds of friends and acquaintances mentioning this story to me, and having to pop their bubble and debunk the story.
What is a bit confusing to me is what the Secretary of Energy will say in the big reveal on Tue.
For sure the DOE science leadership understands this is something, but far far short of everything. DOE political leadership gains nothing by announcing some amazing progress that will amount to nothing even in 20 years, which is several eternities in politics.
And the news media has gone so hog-wild in the last day or two that whatever SOE intends to say, it’ll amount to nothing but saying “Everything you heard in the last 24-36 hours is pure exaggeration and hype. Prepare to be disappointed by what I have to say about the reality.” Which is not a press conference anyone wants to ever deliver.
CNN.com: “Nuclear fusion: How long until this breakthrough discovery can power your house”
There are not enough rolleyes emojis for this headline, not to mention the multitude of factual errors and terribly copyediting for which CNN.com is renowned. At least the article ends with a bit of realism:
Scientists will also need harvest the energy produced by fusion and transfer it to the power grid as electricity. It will take years – and possibly decades – before fusion can be able to produce unlimited amounts of clean energy, and scientists are on a race against the clock to fight climate change.
“This will not contribute meaningfully to climate abatement in the next 20-30 years,” Friedmann said. “This the difference between lighting a match and building a gas turbine.”
Stranger
Correct me, but is NIF not inertial confinement, such that it technically does not require a vacuum or magnetic fields but is merely a series of very tiny thermonuclear explosions? The fusion event is very brief, so there is no need for huge magnets or risk of plasma decay due to bumping the chamber walls, and then a fraction of a second later there is another tiny explosion, and so on.
I mean, yeah, there are many other major issues with laser fusion, but it always seemed to me to be the method most likely to succeed ever since I first read about the concept half a century ago.
Isn’t that “suburban Mom discovers cancer cure that doctors don’t want you to know about”? 
Anyway, I think a reasonable summary is that, if accurate, this is an incremental advance in a technology that still has a very long way to go to become practical.
National Enquirer was suburban moms. I partook of the far more sophisticated Weekly World News which has the latest in Norwegian medical advances. As you can tell, it’s about the world. Much more accurate!
The National Ignition Facility is, in fact, an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) system, using lasers to provide the energy deposited in the outer shell of the fuel pellet which vaporizes the shell to create the inward pressure to that causes fusion. It may not require a vacuum to sustain the plasma but to prevent attenuation of the beam(s) from absorption, and to extract the maximum momentum from the alpha particle you would want the reaction to occur in a vacuum chamber, and all ICF research setups I’ve seen have a chamber capable of getting down to at least 10-2 torr. The problem with inertial confinement is the briefness of the event; the possible confinement time is so short that it is difficult to get more energy out of the plasma before the pellet blows itself apart than the energy going into it, and one of the major issues with ICF is that it is nearly impossible to get more than a modest fraction of the fuel to be consumed before the pressure/temperature threshold falls below the triple product, notwithstanding how feasible it is to extract and convert the energy coming from one reaction to drive the next one.
As noted, the NIF facility was really designed to replicate fusion conditions experienced in a nuclear weapon for stockpile maintenance and new weapon design purposes, not for energy production research, and while there has been intermittent interest in ICF for power production most of the interest has been more in space propulsion applications where underunity yield and the pulsed nature of the output are not big issues. I see that there are three fusion startups working on some form of ICF (Agni Energy, Proton Scientific, and First Light Fusion, Ltd) but nearly all established fusion energy research has focused on some form of magnetic confinement (stellerators, tokamaks, magnetic mirror, spheromak, reversed field pinch, field reversed configuration) or electrostatic confinement.
I really doubt that ICF will ever be viable for power production, and despite all of the challenges of magnetic confinement it does seem to be the most viable path forward, although whether it will ever be possible to make it small enough to function an a practical and economic scale is a question that researchers and those making the decisions to invest public money in it should be asking.
Plus, WWN had the continuing adventures of Bat Boy:
That is some critical newsworthy reporting there!
Stranger
The crimes committed against Bat Boy make me weep, Stranger. I strongly believe that had he run 3rd party in 2016, he would’ve won in a landslide.
For all that it’s not a working fusion power plant or anything, I’m curious to hear the official announcement tomorrow.
Today XKCD weighed in on this with a wicked burn:
When Randall is poking fun at you, you know your sci-tech is in trouble.