Been hearing they can get back more energy than they put in. If so would be better than perpetual motion.
The way I get it hydrogen is part of the input and helium is the waste. They say its the way the sun operates and I jump to my own conclusion that is the way the sun operates without burning up any faster than what is does.
If its decades away, I hope they don't shut off the coal, gas and oil before they perfect it.

Best I get from the old timers when they switched from horses to tractors, the gov didn't have to buy everyone a new tractor to get them to drop their mules. When a new invention is a good thing people will adapt for convenience and monetary reasons without being forced into it.

Of course if its more than a little while away, I won;t see it. According to my parents and grandparents ages at death then I'm 92% used up and no guarantee for even today.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html

Fusion is the line you use when you’re fission for catfish.

^^ LOL^^

Fusion is when you melt two atoms together to form a new one. Fission, your taking a heavier element and splitting it to lighter elements. You can't weaponize Fusion. We can get Iran and North Korea all the fusion plants we wanted and they cant make anything from them other than electricity.

Fisson splits large atoms into many smaller ones - this would be the technology used in nuclear power plants.
Fusion creates a new element all together that will have more protons in the nucleus- the sun and stars would be an example of natural occurring fusion
Just remember your atomic order of things- neutrons, protons and croutons

The biggest problem with fusion is building the " box " to contain it in. As we are talking millions of degrees of heat, you have to contain the stuff without it touching anything as it would vaporize everything it get close to. You need high pressure, high temperature and still need to get new fuel into the reaction. Its way more complicated than that, but those are the basic problems to be solved. Some say that a working fusion reactor is 30 years away and allays will be. So far that statement has been true. If they had spent the resources on the development on fusion technology that they have wasted on wind , solar and bio fuels, we would be running those reactors by now. But where is the fun in that. To actually have a working solution to the whole energy debacle.

One experiment for a fraction of a second produced more energy than it took to initiate and contain the reaction. Touted as a great breakthrough and perhaps it is. I think it needs to be duplicated multiple times to be sure, but they were confident enough in their results to claim credit. Still a VERY long way from having a working reactor that can sustain a reaction and produce electricity.

It didn't , actually. They had to plug those lasers into a power supply , and they left it out of the equation . They just measured the output of the lasers.

Correct. The experiment produced 3.15 megajoules of energy from an input of 2.05 megajoules FROM THE LASERS....192 lasers.

What they aren't mentioning is that it required 300 megajoules to fire the lasers and run the reactor. So the lasers are about 1% efficient . AND the experiment produced energy for only 100 trillionths of a second.


So for sure it is interesting but also indicates how far we have to go. If all the money wasted on wind and solar nonsense was spent on fusion research we might make more progress in a shorter time frame towards a far more valuable product

In January 1977 I started work at the University of Rochester Laboritory For Laser Energetics, a laser fusion project. The first tests were done on the Delta test device. If I remember correctly it operated with eight lasers. I don't remember what material the lazer rods were but they were fired (initiated with a yag lazer, a rather dangerous device). That system was replaced with the Omega system, a twenty four beam system. The lazer rods were about six inches in diameter and about a meter in length, again fired by a yag lazer. These rods were neodenium iron boron glass crystal. The lazer bay and target bay was about the size of a football field. The target sphere was a 66 inch diameter 304 stainless steel sphere with a three inch wall thickness. I watched it being forged at a foundry in Silver Creek, NY. Quite a process. Two halves, machined, then welded together, cleaned up again, and final machined to some very tight specs. When all done it had to be absolutely vacuum tight. The actual target at the center of the sphere was a hollow glass sphere .003 to .004 in diameter cemented to an unbelievably slender glass stem. These spheres were filled with either tritium or deuterium (made from sea water). I understand now they use a mixture of the two. The capacitor banks used to fire the lazers were immense, hundreds of them, and took upwards of a half hour or more to charge. We won't talk about the PCB oil that filled them. I left the lab in 1982 as a Senior Lab Engineer. Within a few months of starting the job I realized I would not live long enough to see power coming out of the wall generated by lazer fusion. I venture to say niether will our kids, maybe not even our grandkids. It's just an incredably complex and expensive process. It was fun though. I worked with some incredably talented people of the Sheldon Cooper type (Big Bang Theory). It was always fun to mess with them. I was always amazed at the simple things in life that went right by them in both lanes and they never realized it.

Thanks for giving us insight into the actual scale of those components Paul !

And to think God created billions of fusion reactors with just four words, let there be light.

Meanwhile we continue to believe and live out the ancient lie of the serpent, ye shall be like gods.

So is the idea to create enough heat from a fusion reaction to boil water into steam for the prime mover?

Mike

My understanding of modern nuclear weapons is an initial fission explosion (atom bomb type) initiates a fusion reaction in a core made of deuterium and tritium (heavy Hydrogen isotopes). The massive energy release from the fusion part of the reaction is what makes modern warheads many times more powerful than early atomic weapons. That gives an idea of the engineering challenge faced when trying to contain and control a fusion reaction here on earth.

This is pretty close. I can't go into detail on it's step by step functioning, or the boogymen may come and get me. At the EOD school, I taught nuclear physics as it pertains to nuclear weapons.

I did get a dose of tritium once and had to pee in a jug for a week to monitor it. That was fun.

That foundry was Newbrook, part of Excelco in Silver Creek. It was owned by Al Newman then
They still are involved in government work.
So many were space projects back in the day
Trapped many coon behind both plants by the crick in the 70's and 80's. Lived just around the bend up Walnut Creek

Sorry, I’ll leave now.

Lots of opportunity and optimism for the younger generations of today that may well benefit greatly from the research and science that is here now and yet to come. Interesting to think that a World that may have 10 billion humans in a couple to three decades could actually be adding back to the earth instead of mining it. Are these things long shots? yes they are but probably better shots then crypto.

Bryce

crypto !!!! Good one!!!

Interesting but boring at the same time. Last time we did this a huge meteor smashed the yucatan penisula.