How long though did he have to wait from first drawl that to putting it out? I suspect he drew that over a decade ago, having it at the ready …
And not a very good mock for him.
Now, if the dam itself were made of ice, that would be a better analogy.
Too many of his jokes are too esoteric (I mean, I find them funny, but that’s not a good standard), but this gets the level perfect. It’s not slap-you-in-the-face obvious, but simple enough that the average Pooh bear can figure it out.
A (IMHO) much better article on what happened:
Brian
So would we (whether the general public or scientists) recognize the “real breakthrough” at first glance? Or would it look just as futile at first as all the others?
The breakthrough was back when controlled fusion was demonstrated. Everything since then has been getting the engineering to the point where it is a cost-effective way to generate power.
Sigh. My news feed is all full of stories about the ‘breakthrough’ and how we are on the cusp of a fusion future. Most of them are hilariously wrong.
Here’s the thing: The National Ignition Facility’s lasers are less than 1% efficient. It’s really hard to build a highly efficient yet extremely high powered laser.
Yes, it’s important that they got more energy out than the laser energy they put in. A real milestone. But the method they used does not mean that output energy of the system was greater than the input energy to the lasers. Far from it. To generate 2.1 GJ of laser energy, they probably had to feed in something like 300 GJ to the lasers to get 2.5 GJ out of the reaction.
As a complete system, it’s still only getting ~1% of the inout energy as fusion energy. Unless we invent lasers that can do this with greater than 70% efficiency (which we can’t do for the forseeable future), they would have to increase the yield by a huge amount, and that may or may not be theoretically feasible.
So while this technique achieved a milestone, it may be a complete dead end for practical fusion power.
Okay, so would we recognize the cost effective method at first glance? What would it take to break through the default cynicism?
I had heard on the radio that part of this recent advancement was due to using a gigantic laser system that was expected to cost $1B and ended up costing $4B. This is the kind of funding “challenge” that this research has.
From the Ars Technica article:
In my addled brain, “not reaching the break-even point” means it’s only fodder for Weekly World News.
We’ll know it’s cost effective when they start building multiple production plants.
@Sam_Stone is right. Per the NY Times:
Although the latest experiment produced a net energy gain compared to the energy of the 2.05 megajoules in the incoming laser beams, NIF needed to pull 300 megajoules of energy from the electrical grid in order to generate the brief laser pulse.
Some rare footage of this experimental breakthrough:
It’s a little more nuanced than that. Technically speaking, “controlled” nuclear fusion was demonstrated by Mark Oliphant at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1933, which was certainly a ‘breakthrough’ in physics terms (although long theorized since the early 1920s by Eddington) but not in any way that was a practical innovation. Showing that nuclear fusion could be used to massively increase the output of a nuclear weapon through thermonuclear fusion was another innovation (and one that, arguably, we’d be better off without as a practical application) but is only controlled in the sense that it could yield a single massive yield of energy too enormous to put to use as an energy source. Since then, physicists have been looking for ways to control the output of the fusion reaction similar to that of nuclear fission in such a way that it could be sustained for a sufficiently long period of time with net energy extraction, and arguably that has not been achieved even by this most recent ‘breakthrough’ regardless of the Qp>1.
What is novel about this particular instance—again, if a review of the data actually shows that it was an overunity yield—is that more energy was released from the plasma than went into heating it, which at least suggests that net energy extraction from a fusing plasma is plausible on a terrestrial scale. That doesn’t mean that nuclear fusion is economically practicable, and this particular way of getting net energy output from nuclear fusion is most likely not a path toward a practical power source, but then the earliest steam engines barely produced enough net power to overcome thermal and tribological losses, but the knowledge from developing then (which proceeded thermodynamic theories of heat engines) did ultimately lead to more efficient steam and internal combustion engines. So there may be interesting physics emerging from this that leads to improvements in other methods of nuclear fusion power production, but it isn’t as if this particular method is a straightline path toward a workable controlled fusion reactor. Whether you want to call it a ‘breakthrough’ or not is mostly semantics, but it doesn’t mean you should invest in the inevitable “Mr. Fusion” Kickstarter campaign promising to deliver you a microfusion reactor to power your armored flying suit next Christmas.
“Would you classify that as a launch problem or a design problem?”
Stranger
From an article I read:
Can someone explain how this is fundamentally different than saying that a wood fire produced more energy than it took to light the match? In other words, isn’t the pellet essentially fuel? Or is the point that the material is not depleted after the reaction and could be used again?
I’m really not grasping how this doesn’t violate the laws of physical and I haven’t seen it explained in layman’s terms.
There are bonds within the nuclei of the atoms that make up the matter that are manipulated (broken for nuclear fission, fused for nuclear fusion), which release energy beyond the chemical energy released from a wood fire.
What am I supposed to do with all these banana peels and stale beer?
Step 1: Gather some gullible friends who like to drink.
Step 2: Set up some cameras.
Step 3: Discreetly place banana peels around the area.
Step 4: Get your friends to drink the beer.
Step 5: Record the results.
Step 6: Profit.
In fusion it is also the release of binding energy; the newly formed ‘fused’ elements release excess energy in the form of momentum of the products. The energy from combustion and other electrochemical reactions is from the redistribution of electrons (which is what “chemical energy” is) but the energy of the residual strong force is orders of magnitude greater. We don’t generally see this force released because in the terrestrial environment such interactions are statistically extremely unlikely to exceed the threshold for fusion, but in the core of the Sun and other stars the likelihood is increased enough (and the amount of mass is large enough) for these to occur en masse.
So many possibilities suggest themselves…
Stranger
Well if you ignore that fusion isn’t a combustion, it’s not fundamentally different.
Yes, except fusion isn’t combustion, so the pellet is also the oxygen.
No. The material is gone.
It’s just that getting this “fire” started takes a lot of heat and it goes out again immediately.
Not sure which part you need a layman’s explanation of.