The Hope of Fusion vs the Pomp of Politicians and Climate Activists

    0
    333

    by Mish Shedlock, Mish Talk:

    If there is a climate problem, science will find the answer, not politicians or activists.

    There was an interesting trio of articles in the Wall Street Journal this week with seemingly conflicting messages.

    Hold the Nuclear Fusion Hype

    Headline Number One: Hold the Nuclear Fusion Hype

    The breakthrough is exciting but its practical use as an energy source may be decades away.

    TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

    What the experiment proved is that scientists can recreate the physical reactions in stars. But scaling the technology and making it commercially viable by most scientists’ accounts will likely take another few decades.

    How Fusion Works and Why It’s a Breakthrough

    Headline Number Two: How Fusion Works and Why It’s a Breakthrough

    The Energy Department has announced the first gain in energy from fusion in a laboratory—the first time fusion reactions produced more energy than it took to induce them. Last week 192 laser beams at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility heated and compressed a capsule of hydrogen to previously unattainable temperatures and pressures, igniting fusion reactions that produced 50% more energy than the laser beams had delivered.

    Nuclear-Fusion Breakthrough Accelerates Quest to Unlock Limitless Energy Source

    This is the third headline and the article has the most details. The link below is a a free link. The article merits a close look and has some very interesting diagrams.

    Headline Number Three: Nuclear-Fusion Breakthrough Accelerates Quest to Unlock Limitless Energy Source

    Experiment yields net-positive energy, a milestone in effort to develop nuclear fusion as a source of clean power.

    Researchers said that shortly after 1 a.m. last Monday, they fired the largest laser in the world into a tiny cylinder holding a diamond capsule containing hydrogen isotopes. For a brief moment, the laser delivered energy that exceeds the entire U.S. power grid, in an attempt to compress the capsule’s fuel to reach densities, temperatures and pressures that are higher than the center of the sun. In the moments after the shot, the researchers weren’t sure what had happened.

    “The shot goes off. It takes only a few billionths of a second, and so we need an exquisite suite of diagnostics to measure what happened,” said Alex Zylstra, the principal experimentalist on the project. “And as the data started to come in, we saw the first indications that we had produced more fusion energy than the laser input.”

    It is premature to talk about building fusion power plants, said Gianluca Sarri, a professor of physics at Queen’s University Belfast who wasn’t involved in the new research. “There are technical issues that need to be solved still before it becomes an energy source,” he added.

    We are still not gaining electrical energy” Dr. Sarri said.

    The lasers at the National Ignition Facility are less than 1% efficient, according to Jonathan Davies, a senior scientist at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. The facility used hundreds of megajoules of electricity to produce the laser light needed to produce about 3 megajoules of fusion energy.

    Same Thing, Different Lead Message

    All three articles say the same thing inside, but the initial message looks vastly different.

    • Hold the Hype
    • Fusion Breakthrough
    • Limitless Energy Source

    The articles and headlines are accurate. They don’t really conflict, they just provide a different initial message.

    The details in the third article show the problems ahead. Scientists were successful but it took hundreds of megajoules of electricity to produce the laser light needed to produce about 3 megajoules of fusion energy.

    Yet, I find it fascinating that scientists were able to produce temperatures as hot as the sun without anything melting or blowing up.

    Read More @ MishTalk.com