Also Repeal Day for those who want to get lit.

I guess December 5th was Ignition Day and we didn&#x27;t know it?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-022-04440-7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-022-04440-7</a>&gt; In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition, but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the following months fell short.Fluke or measurement error, it seems.

Because now it’s reproducible, controllable and consistently net positive in terms of energy output.It’s not a fluke anymore and I assume the engineering behind this is now understood well enough to develop it further and scale it up.Fusion for the most part isn’t a physics problem it’s an engineering problem the difficulty was always in how to implement it in the real world rather than in math at ideal white paper conditions.

A better question to ask yourself is if this isn&#x27;t any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it?If these are the same thing, why didn&#x27;t they make a big deal about it before? What&#x27;s the material difference?

What about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2333346-ignition-confirmed-in-a-nuclear-fusion-experiment-for-the-first-time&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2333346-ignition-confir...</a>Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?

Yeah... this is a great breakthrough and an historic day for physics and engineering and humanity. Every American should swell with pride.

Energy is conserved in the universe so there is never any net energy gain.See how pedantic and not helpful that is?

The NIF is not intended to be a power plant, and inertial containment in general is probably not a great design for producing power.This is scientific breakthrough. The best point of comparison is probably a fusion bomb, which requires an initial fission detonation to create enough pressure and free neutrons to force a net-positive fusion reaction. But at the NIF they do it using only lasers… incredible.

As was pointed out in other comments, their lasers and electrical equipment were not efficient as it was not necessary to get the scientific knowledge.

You are correct: this is the important point. Until this is actually powering homes at scale and competitive price- which, clearly from these numbers is a fantasy- developments in this field should be dismissed. It&#x27;s embarrassing to see HN so excited about what&#x27;s really quite the failure.(Sent from my ENIAC)

Also, they’re not counting all the meals the scientists ate —- this is total BS.

When you consider that they laser they used consumed 300 megajoules from the wall plug, in order to send 1.8 megajoules to the target, the fact that they got 2.5 megajoules out looks puny in comparison. Even newer lasers only have 20% wall plug efficiency according to the press conference.So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain. They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only talk about the 1.8 megajoules of laser energy sent to the target, not about the 300 megajoules of electricity needed to send 1.8 megajoules to the target.

I listened to the two hour press conference.  NIF leadership made it clear that energy research is not what Ignition Day is about, why the NIF was made, or why the NIF is operated.

I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into my old age. Even if we don’t get commercial fusion until the 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still need to pay for likely massive capex, R&amp;D, and transmission) and its repercussions!At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no need for fission plants, radically reduced costs for industrial manufacturing. Cheap energy could make raw resource extraction much cheaper and more easily automated. Fast transportation, vertical farming. With the concurrent innovations in battery tech, robotics&#x2F;automation, and electric vehicles and ships, the future is looking incredibly bright

&gt; My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.Unless you&#x27;re in your early teens and don&#x27;t plan on having kids until you&#x27;re in your 30&#x27;s this proba

Let&#x27;s be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2&#x2F;3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that&#x27;s the climate change problem. And it is big.Now let&#x27;s pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won&#x27;t change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that&#x27;s the only way.

This is such a profound and deep misunderstanding of this news story.

Not that I enjoy being a downer, but I think we&#x27;re still quite a ways off from a trajectory towards Star Trek society. Clean energy production is absolutely key, with pollution and climate change being big obstacles to a prosperous future, but clean energy doesn&#x27;t solve all air and water pollution. It won&#x27;t necessarily scale economically. It also doesn&#x27;t temper any megalomaniac&#x27;s pride, to stop them from creating conflict as they try to subjugate everyone else. We live in a very divided, hierarchical world with a fragile order, subject to the whims of people with godlike power over the masses.One of the most fantastical aspects of Star Trek was the societal evolution into one without interpersonal conflict, the idea being that without scarcity there&#x27;s no good reason for conflict... I&#x27;m just not sure how well that would hold up, knowing people. I don&#x27;t think all desire for status and power stems from scarcity of resources, and people will continue to lie and do harm to each other as long as they desire power over others.&gt; My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.Being available to everyone does depend on who &quot;everyone&quot; is. If people use the energy to grow food (and more people) until we run into some other population-limiter, we&#x27;ll always have too many people. Part of achieving sustainability is ending runaway growth. Maybe you can ask people nicely enough to stop reproducing, maybe education will do it, maybe nothing short of force will. Yet our economics were built around continual growth. So, that&#x27;s all a big problem to solve, still.

I agree. This is a Big deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or polio-vaccine big.My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star Trek.Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as their future are just sooooo tiny compared to their reality. I&#x27;m thinking of faster horses and they&#x27;re going to live in a world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small thinking of mine.I&#x27;m so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are going to live such better lives.

I don&#x27;t know about everyone else, but I&#x27;m taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I&#x27;m remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it&#x27;s incredible how far we&#x27;ve come.Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.

And had we continued to develop and improve upon fission we&#x27;d probably be in a better place.

You mean like tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time and opening a hell portal to another dimension?

People also said the same thing about wind and solar, and those still have some downsides but they are also rapidly becoming the cheapest current form of peak energy, or with cheaper grid storage, energy period.Sci-if authors have been talking about both solar and fusion for years, and now solar has been industrialized why wouldn’t we be excited to see progression in fusion?

The negative effect of nuclear were known in 1927 (Hermann Joseph Meller). It would be surprising if we discovered another form of radiation, given calculations lead us far further without showing new forms of radiations.

Maybe. Fusion energy might be more expensive than current forms or has undesirable yet to be known side effects.People said the same of nuclear and here we are.

There will probably still be wars over other natural resources.

True; however, this was already the direction things were headed for said regimes as much of the world has begun to focus on energy security. On the upside, perhaps the lowered long-term demand for fossil fuels will reduce the risk of additional resource discoveries leading to more despotic regimes.

Currently, there are a couple dozen authoritarian regimes, most heavily armed, that are almost entirely funded by fossil fuel exports. That makes me fear things will get worse before they get better.

It&#x27;s a big deal, it will change the way people live. Hopefully it also help to eliminate wars, the war for the natural resources and land.

Minus the laser power supply, is it correct?

2.05 MJ in, 3.15 MJ out.That&#x27;s amazing.

&gt;&gt;:Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of energy over input?Let&#x27;s add some words. The output energy is electromagnetic radiation and heat. When they do make a conversion to usable energy (electricity) there will be conversion losses.On the input side, they are measuring laser energy. The lasers are not very efficient so this overlooks a bunch of losses on the input side as well.They are probably 100x away from real energy gain, and the facility isn&#x27;t even designed to be used that way.Never the less, it is a milestone along the way.

Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of energy over input?

Well, they&#x27;ll clearly give the government-backed science to some &quot;visionary&quot; who will promptly monopolize the tech and hail himself as super-genius who brought energy to the masses!

Without the accessibility of their public library, and public workers to guide them, they would have never been able to acquire the required knowledge in aeronautics

I don&#x27;t think they do, since they started with research done by the Smithsonian Institution.

Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.

How much of the funded research is actually a breakthrough?

Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the need to generate selfish profit is at reach!

Note that while this is important progress, it&#x27;s a bit of specific accounting. The entire system still requires more energy input than output, but this isolated piece can now output a little more than input.&gt; This is indeed a promising and exciting result, but we need to remember that this does not take into account the energy required to run the lasers that confine the reaction and other inefficiencies and losses.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemediacentre.org&#x2F;expert-reaction-to-fusion-announcement-from-the-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemediacentre.org&#x2F;expert-reaction-to-fusion...</a>It&#x27;s still entirely possible that we will not see a fusion reactor in production within our lifetimes.

Previous Fusion experiments, even though we could get Fusion reactions to occur, required more energy to start and sustain the reaction than was generated from it. For the first time, more was generated from the reaction than put in.

Neither did this one. This is not a net positive. That’s what they told journalists to start the current cycle of hype, but note that announcements direct from DOE don’t use that language.

No other fusion experiment has achieve greater outputs than inputs.So this is the first time that a fusion reactor has been net positive for energy production

Can someone ELI5 why this is significant over previous fusion experiments?

Thank you, Saint Biden, for doing the bare minimum for the ability to slap your name on it.

&quot;...a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy&quot;.That&#x27;s the best outcome you can think of as a result of possible free energy?

Fission requires material that can be used in nuclear weapons.Fission can always melt down.

Both are decades away from being viable power plant technology, which is either a con or a pro depending on your point of view.

I’d love to hear the pros and cons of fusion vs micro molten salt fission reactors.

Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

I would love to see &quot;fusion Manhattan project&quot;, this planet is well overdue for new gigantic R&amp;D projects such as Manhattan and Apollo.

Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you&#x27;re just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.

That isn’t what this would be used for. In fact, yields for the largest deployed H-bombs today I think are smaller than they once were (due to better targeting capabilities).

You should be very excited because we live on a planet with independent competing countries and well... you don&#x27;t want to live in the US or Europe with China or other not so friendly countries building a bigger more powerful nuke. If a weapon can be built, it will be built. How, when and if it can be used are things you can control not whether someone somewhere will develop it. Especially in war time, all bets are off.Although, it would be interesting to see fusion reactors on planes and ships powering other types of weapons like lasers and more powerful railguns or faster icbms.

Soviet Union built this and it wasn&#x27;t really practical and ended up leading to test ban treaties<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tsar_Bomba" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tsar_Bomba</a>

Good things often have dubious or downright evil origins (which would never be justifiable a priori).A relatively recent example: development of cancer chemotherapy began with the incidental finding that the chemical warfare agent nitrogen mustard reduced the white cell count of affected soldiers.We make progress building on the shoulders of giants, but those giants are often standing in dung.

That&#x27;s a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs.I&#x27;m not very excited in hearing we&#x27;ll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.

A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima because they were fairly sure it was going to work and wouldn&#x27;t have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on the timelines involved.Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren&#x27;t sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it&#x27;s entirely possible they would have gone with the &quot;sure thing&quot; of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often &quot;wastes&quot; money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.

Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium.It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them.Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don&#x27;t think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.

Given it&#x27;s Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla&#x27;s stock compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth); but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting Starship to Mars. He&#x27;s not going to be as rich in the future as he was in that moment, and he&#x27;ll be relentlessly mocked for the context as his ship takes on water (eg when he&#x27;s worth $60-$80 billion and spent $44 billion buying Twitter and SpaceX needs $10+ billion infused into it to keep pursuing Mars).

Imagine if we&#x27;ve spent 10% of the current military budget ($600B+) on renewables &amp; fusion. We wouldn&#x27;t have to fight those wars for resources.

Assuming you have experience in software, then <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers&#x2F;find-your-job&#x2F;0d659855-5fe3-49dd-a1c7-e75f07f64bb9_mid-senior-level_full-time_livermore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers&#x2F;find-your-job&#x2F;0d6...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers</a>

Google &quot;national ignition facility careers&quot; and this is the first link<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lasers.llnl.gov&#x2F;about&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lasers.llnl.gov&#x2F;about&#x2F;careers</a>

Former LLNL employee here, they hire a LOT of foreign nationals. Several people that I worked with there were Canadian.

The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?!Edit: I&#x27;m Canadian, the question is rhetorical.

There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway. No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all, but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;10&#x2F;technology&#x2F;commonwealth-fusion-mit-reactor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;10&#x2F;technology&#x2F;commonwealth-f...</a>

Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc.Further, it&#x27;s possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.

Way more than that. This would shift the entire geopolitical structure of the world. Humanity would never be the same.

Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.

How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.

With abundant electricity wouldn&#x27;t we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?

LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.

&gt; silver bullet to stop climate change alonenothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI&#x2F;automation and increasing material wealth.$1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

TL&#x2F;DRLasers are pretty inefficient. How much energy did it take to make 2.05 MJ of lased light?Does this breakthrough have a reasonable path to to make more electrical energy than it puts in?

Here&#x27;s your most exciting paragraph&gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.It&#x27;s fusion Manhattan project time.

No, first two will use third. 
Nikola Tesla dreamed of free energy for the world. I don&#x27;t think they dream the same...
So entropy will go down now?

Can you elaborate? Someone with no context can read your comment either way.

True. AI will have a much bigger impact on humanity in the next two decades than fusion will.

AI can be quite useful in real-time computation for magnetic confinement. But sure, that&#x27;s beyond GPT-3&#x27;s current capability.

Putting these in the same basket is hardly justified.

2022, not ordered by importance: Dall.E 2, Chat-GPT, Fusion Ignition. 
Can&#x27;t wait for 2023.

Isn&#x27;t tritium used in fusion and a potential weapons material?

Depending on the scale and reactor design, we have really good examples of run away fusion reactions. Run away reactions are easy, controlled ones are hard.And whilst I won’t doubt that if fusion ever becomes commercially viable the reactors would be walk away safe it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to account for that in your design.

Also don’t forget the biggest benefit over solar&#x2F;wind: it keeps on generating power on cold windless nights.

It’s potentially just a much better version of fission.Fusion won’t cause a runaway reaction — in fact it’s brutally difficult to get it to react at all, hence why this is an achievement.It also doesn’t use materials that can be used for a bomb, again unlike fission.As a result it has the potential to be cheaper to implement, cheaper to fuel, with no meltdown risk.

Wind and solar only provide power during wind &#x2F; during the day. Fusion can provide 24&#x2F;7 power.
Battery packs can only store so much energy, and Lithium is a contested resource as most of the Lithium produced is required by the automotive industry these days, and the largest deposits are in regions where you maybe don&#x27;t want to get your Lithium from (child labor, unsafe conditions, politically unstable countries, etc.)But yeah, future energy will be a mix of available technologies, not a single technology alone. So you need e.g. fusion (or fission) for &quot;baseline&quot; power and wind&#x2F;solar for peaks

Predictable and abundant supply of fuel, and hopefully greener to produce the powerplant itself.

Industry does not run on solar and wind and sad to say it, current storage energy is not green.The cleanest energy available now is nuclear fission, but there is no money in it for the energy industry. It is too plentiful and cheap if implemented properly and capitalism does not like plentiful and cheap.France has had cheap electricity for decades and it seems it has been so cheap that they don&#x27;t want it anymore.This is all capitalist boondoggles.

Much more compact, less use of land or sea real estate, more power produced per volume and throttleable.

Apart from the safety improvements and environmental benefits, it&#x27;s a way to produce a ton of energy. I believe it&#x27;s about 4 times as much energy from fusion compared to fission with the same amount of fuel. I&#x27;m a fan of solar and wind, but it&#x27;s going to be way easier to power the entire world sustainably if you&#x27;ve got fusion in the mix.

High power density. Start and stop on demand. Abundant fuel is another advantage, but in our neighborhood sunlight is also abundant. Fission also has good power density, but not so good on the start&#x2F;stop flexibility.

Could you elaborate on your point a bit more? If you&#x27;re talking about utilizing the weak force vs. the residual strong force then I&#x27;m not sure this argument holds up.Also, when comparing to renewable+storage you have to consider how much land has to be dedicated to energy use in these scenarios. Wind and solar require orders of magnitude more than a potential fusion reactor (or an existing fission reactor).

&gt; But maybe I&#x27;m missing something important about the economics?I think you&#x27;ve understood it.Imo fusion is never going to be able to compete with renewables+storage with the energy being captured from neutrons. Maybe reactions that release energy in charged particles or photons could, but they&#x27;re even harder to do.

&gt; Solar and wind have massive environmental impactsGot a source for this? The only time I&#x27;ve seen this has been political talking points that had no backing.

Solar and wind have massive environmental impacts. Fusion&#x27;s foot print is much smaller for the same output. Batteries are rather dangerous. Fusion is -- as far as I understand it -- much less likely to escape a reactor due to how difficult it is to sustain the reaction. Moreover, it&#x27;s more dependable.So in sum, the advantages are (1) dependability, (2) safety, and (3) small footprint.

&gt; Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If&#x2F;when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict.Except this is also true for fission. So if fission has failed to transform society, why do you think fusion will?

Wind and solar have a max theoretical output that is constrained by physical space and competition for its use, in addition to weather patterns, etc.Fusion energy has a theoretical max that’s orders of magnitude higher.Wind+solar is the path to decarbonization and sustaining our current world.Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If&#x2F;when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict.

I think when comparing PV&#x2F;wind to nuclear (fusion or fission) generation, we should include the cost of storage for renewables in the comparison.Renewable generation + storage gives a system that&#x27;s capable of meeting base load needs, just as nuclear generation does. Cost comparisons among base load-capable technologies is a better way to evaluate the economics, IMHO.

Consistent baseline grid load is the difference.

Fusion brings the power of the stars directly to us, without it capturing the energy millions of miles later. 
It unlocks a Star Trek, post-scarcity future that PV and wind cannot bring due to their space requirements.Also, you could eventually put one on a spaceship or other planet. For that Star Trek future.

If we get an order of magnitude more energy, we can do an order of magnitude more things; fossil fuels gave us the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear fusion may unlock something similar.

I&#x27;m still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they&#x27;re pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In comparison fusion seems very expensive and unproven and even when we get everything to work it might not be much better than a solar farm with a big battery pack. But maybe I&#x27;m missing something important about the economics?

It will get there. It&#x27;s just a matter of time and resources.The destination will be a milestone for humanity, so we should not give up.

Offset the financial viability with the cost of freedom from energy reliance and the need (more like craving) for military interventions

&gt;The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000Why wouldn&#x27;t a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest on capital costs? Other?

&gt; The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000Is there any calculation to this? What’s the cost of shot? Is there any limetime limit of the laser?

Its worth pointing out that per unit energy a lot of money is made making economically unviable cargo ship power, submarine and other military naval power, space ship power sources, diesel-electric locomotives ...True if you want to replace base load of a civilization size network it needs to be economically viable, but we generate &quot;a lot&quot; of power at higher than market minima. Ironically, &quot;good batteries&quot; are the natural enemy of fusion research.One fun thing about laser fusion is it theoretically can scale down very low and has a trivial &quot;off&quot; switch making it a good resource for engineering tokamak reactor materials or sensors or similar tasks.The inner lining of a production fusion reactor is hard to make, so a laser facility would be ideal for research. Which is why we have one...

Q is irrelevant, you need throughput. If your Q is one million, but you are processing one tiny capsule per second, you are producing too little money to pay for the facility.If you can process a tanker worth of hydrogen per second, Q can be just above break even and you will still make money.

The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000, not because of energy breakeven, but to produce enough energy that the shot is financially positive. The amount of fusion energy produced in this shot is worth a penny or two.(And even then, it&#x27;s dubious a laser fusion scheme will be competitive with other energy sources.)

You&#x27;re using X energy to release Y energy from the fuel (the pellet, containing deuterium and tritium). It was there already, just not in a usable form.

The energy is &quot;released&quot; from the binding energy of the nuclei. It&#x27;s similar to how throwing a bottle of nitroglycerine can generate a huge explosion, even though you use a tiny amount of energy to throw it.

Energy is released when two atomic nuclei combine to form a larger atomic nuclei.There&#x27;s a threshold of energy required to attain this fusion reaction (otherwise there would be no light nuclei in the universe), and once the nuclei combine there&#x27;s energy that is released, similar to how some chemical reactions can be exothermic in nature.

You have a piece of wood. You ignite it with a match. This causes a self sustaining reaction in the form of fire that releases far more energy than the match could ever create.This is effectively what is happening with any energy generator.

You take a lighter and light gasoline on fire, using X energy. Then once the gasoline catches on fire, it&#x27;ll burn on its own, releasing Y energy.Same principle, different means.

You know how when you burn something you release the energy in the chemical bonds?Fusion and fission are like that but for atoms instead of molecules.

It&#x27;s not &quot;creating&quot; energy, it&#x27;s releasing energy.The original atoms (exactly which atoms depends on the reactor, but let&#x27;s assume it&#x27;s deuterium and tritium) have a certain starting energy. When you fuse them together the resulting atom (helium-4, if you start with deuterium and tritium) moves it into a lower energy state.Since the fused atom has lower energy than the input atoms, the fusion reaction releases the difference in energy, which you can then capture.

The input energy X is used to create the conditions of high temperature and pressure that are needed for fusion to take place.When fusion happens, two hydrogen atoms fuse together into one, losing a bit of mass in the process. The mass difference is converted into energy Y (using E=mc2).In this case, Y was greater than X, so there was a net gain in useful energy.

If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom:<pre><code> 2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u
</code></pre>
vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron:<pre><code> 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u
</code></pre>
You&#x27;ll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configuration. This is the energy released by the fusion reaction via E = mc^2. Here we see the mass difference is:<pre><code> 5.03015105811 u - 5.010602 u = 0.01954905811 u
</code></pre>
Converting that to energy you find that is 17.6 MeV. As you go up the periodic table fusing nuclei you will get less and less marginal energy until you get to iron where at that point fusion become net negative and fission is then takes over where breaking nuclei apart gains energy, marginally more as you go up the periodic table. That&#x27;s why you want to fuse light particles and fission very heavy particles. It is also why there is so much iron as it is kind of the base state of both of these reactions.

The Y comes from the mass of matter converted in to energy. The mass of the material before the reaction is greater than the mass of its products.The law you&#x27;re referring to might be the conservation of energy, but that applies to non-nuclear reactions and is more accurately called the law of conservation of mass-energy. In this case the energy in times the mass at the start is still equal to the energy out times the mass at the end. For the energy to increase, the mass must decrease to produce the Y in your equation.

I think you should think of it as “this lumber only needs 1 match to light it on fire while that lumber requires 10 matches to get started.”

sometimes, when two small particles fuse, they become a single larger particle, but the larger particle&#x27;s mass is slightly less than the sum of the masses of the two smaller particles. The slight difference becomes energy released, and the amount of energy released, roughly speaking, is E = mc^2.

Latest xkcd: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2710&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2710&#x2F;</a>

Mass and energy are equivalent. You&#x27;re using X energy to reduce the mass of your fuel and converting that mass into Y energy. When X &lt; Y you have useful energy production at the cost of the mass of your fuel. Energy is conserved.The reason nuclear fusion is such a desirable goal is because it only takes a relatively small amount of mass to convert into a relatively large amount of useful energy, and the mass (the fuel) is relatively easy to obtain.Like all energy generation, it&#x27;s converting one type of energy into another, more convenient type, to do useful work. Like a hydroelectric dam converting the potential energy of water into more useful electrical energy. Energy is conserved when water spins a turbine, it&#x27;s just that electrical energy is more useful for work than the potential energy of the water. Of course you can still use the potential (or kinetic) energy of the water directly, such as with a water mill. But the energy to work ratio is worse in that form (especially if the work to be done is far away from the watermill).Whenever you build a fire you need to input some amount of energy to begin the chemical reaction that releases energy. In this instance we get not electrical energy, but energy in the form of infrared and visible light, to heat our home and light our way. Yet the total energy released by the fire far surpasses the energy you used to start the reaction, but because the wood&#x27;s mass is consumed, energy is ultimately conserved. You have converted wood (not useful for heating your home) into infrared light (useful for heating your home).

equally confusing is the BBC article which mentions the energy used for the reaction does not include the energy needed to power the lasers, which renders it a net loss

Same way you use spark plug to get the engine going in an ICE car

I think it&#x27;s more like a release of potential energy; kind of like how you can lightly nudge a large object teetering on the edge of a cliff and it&#x27;ll make a huge splash at the bottom. It took a lot of energy to create the big splash, but you didn&#x27;t need much to trigger it.

Nothing is being actually &quot;created&quot;, just converted.

A daily life parallel: You can use a lighter to put a small amount of energy into a bunch of wood to extract more energy than you put it. In the case of fusion, this energy is coming from fusing hydrogen atoms, rather than a chemical reaction.

The answers you got are excellent but a short response might just say you don&#x27;t start with just X energy.In a sense it&#x27;s no more mysterious (conservation of energy-wise) than adding the energy of a spark results in the energy of the wood fire.i.e. energy is transformed, not created as you quite accurately write.

E = mc^2the &quot;extra&quot; comes from the mass

Y is the energy that was holding some hydrogen atoms together which you have liberated (while destroying the atoms in question but that&#x27;s OK cause it&#x27;s abundant).

to answer essentially,because matter is energy, you can use conversion energy to turn matter into its stored energy.

The analogy is that settings a pile of wood on fire requires a small amount of fire to start a big fire.Energy in total is still conserved, but it makes engineering sense to compare the size of the starting fire to the total inferno created.

This is a stupid question but I don&#x27;t know anything about fusion:How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn&#x27;t that violate some fundamental law of physics?

I mean almost all of the power in a nuclear bomb comes from fusion. The fission part of it is just like the detonator for the real explosion.

I don&#x27;t think a pure fusion bomb will have any form of advantage compared to the current hydro-bombs. They wouldn&#x27;t produce more energy, but will need more gear to reach ignition.

This particular research is literally built off of weapons research (National Ignition Facility).

The bigger the target, the more energy is needed to compress it. So it would require more laser energy to get to 100 MJ or 1 GJ, I think. But maybe only a few times more powerful.  (Pity they didn&#x27;t build in some head room!)

I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones.I&#x27;m also a bit concerned that this type of research may encounter national security related obstacles. Obviously a pure fusion bomb would be a game changer for nuclear (non-)proliferation.

That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.

It was discussed a lot in the threads about this yesterday, but apparently the lab had relatively inefficient lasers. Newer ones are an order of magnitude more efficient

This tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;latzenpratz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1602686252486217728" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;latzenpratz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1602686252486217728</a>&gt; &quot;had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5 megajoules out, that&#x27;s still far less than the energy they originally needed for the lasers,&quot; says Tony Roulstone of the University of Cambridge.But it&#x27;s good to finally see progress. Very few technologies can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor could.

Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?

The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security

Speculation.People believed that X:Y was 2.2:2.0, but it&#x27;s now 3.15:2.05.The 10% EROI apparently wasn&#x27;t impressive enough, it&#x27;s now 54% EROI on paper (assuming less because of capture inefficiencies).I&#x27;m no expert, but theoretically my understanding is that this ratio should scale along this same pattern for higher values of Y.

The official announcement (with the real info) was this morning.Before that, the only official word was that an announcement was coming, and all the info was unofficial leaks and rumors.

Yesterdays news was that this result was leaked to the FT with apparently preliminary numbers. And today there was a press conference that had somewhat better looking numbers.

&quot;Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we&#x27;re working with 3.15:2.05.&quot;What is the difference between todays announcement and yesterdays ?I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but apparently this news is different than yesterday ?

This is already used for nuclear weapons research, which is why it&#x27;s under Dept. of Energy.

Cheap and abundant energy has a multitude of military applications.Peaceful ones too, probably.

We&#x27;ve had thermonuclear weapons (h-bombs) for a long time already.Harnessing the energy in a controlled and sustainable fashion is what&#x27;s hard.

The appropriate analogy for this technology would be that it may be possible to initiate a thermonuclear weapon without relying on fission at all. Currently we use a fission nuclear bomb just to generate the temperature and pressure needed to start the fusion reaction, same as the one on today&#x27;s announcement.So far it hasn&#x27;t proven to be viable, but time will tell.

Uhhh... it&#x27;s definitely being used for &quot;stockpile stewardship.&quot;  The fusion crowd went splitsies with the weapons folks to get this funded in the first place.

&gt; It&#x27;s nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.

&gt; demonstrating the scaling laws at workOne would think that one look at the sky would be enough to say that &quot;hey this fusion thing scales pretty well&quot;.

AFAICT: There&#x27;s a large net gain compared to the energy emitted by the lasers. There is still a considerable loss compared to the energy consumed by the lasers.While at it: I don&#x27;t think the NIF approach will ever be applicable to commercial power generation on Earth. But I hope it will be one day applicable to a fusion-based rocket engine.

They needed roughly 500MJ of energy to power the lasers and produce the 2.5MJ of energy, so the net loss was... about 500MJ.

The net gain of the entire system at NIF doesn&#x27;t matter, because the system at NIF was never designed to make a net gain.People are estimating how this result moves the equation for an overall system that is designed for power production. Most numbers I have seen still leave a theoretically optimal power plant producing around a 30% loss in power with this number.

I keep getting lost in the numbers here. What was the net gain&#x2F;loss for the entire system? Without the “lasers are 1% efficient at 20% energy loss with 40% energy transfer loss” and all that.

There are pictures of CAD and experimental setups for the targets. They’re also pretty open with the setup numbers, so in theory, you could make your own NIF setup and try to get their target designs working.From what I understand, a lot of the work from the past years has been trying to piece together geometries, pulse timing, stability, and quality of targets.

The targets are really the secret sauce right? If there were a civil ICF for power program, would NIF designs and data even be available to help, or is it all classified?

3.15 Mj = 0.875 kWhthe unsolved issue with laser fusion (ICF) as an energy source is the fast 
degradation of high powered lasers. High powered beam degrades optics on it&#x27;s path and those things are expensive. ITER has similar problem with superconducting magnets.

I agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue celebrations in general.

I think the &quot;With modern lasers&quot; part is addressing that.

As I understand it that&#x27;s largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised. Building a new facility from scratch would result in a much lower power consumption from the grid.

300 MJ is about 83 KWh.In the UK is 1 KWh is £0.34So, this costs £28 in electricity to run this experiment. The experiment is a momentary thing.Clearly there is now some work to, but now this is becoming an engineering problem of how to extend, sustain, and scale this process.

don&#x27;t you think it&#x27;s nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do.There&#x27;s a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself.If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.

I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications.  The &quot;breakeven&quot; thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote.  The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion.  But we have been able to do that for a while now.  The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion.  A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop.  The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion.  The gain is greater than one.  That&#x27;s the important message.  And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion.  And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we&#x27;ve gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion was impossible, the fact they can said they did it, despite 1980s era technology and a shoestring budget for decades, really says something.
ICF is just one fusion technology, and probably not the best one, but fusion in general will probably see a massive budget increase worldwide now that it&#x27;s been proven it can be done.I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030, assuming funding increases. Once we get them commercialized; coal, wind, solar and other power production will be obsolete for the most part. We can also use fusion heat to separate waste into it&#x27;s base elements (you can recycle anything!), and help make any process needing a lot of thermal or electrical energy more efficient.

A quick peruse through this wikipedia article will tell you what still needs done, and what this means:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy</a>Give it a read. Intertial confinement fusion with a Q &gt; 1 may very well point the way towards a realistic powerplant. Fusion is at a point it deserves investment. The NIF cost about the same as a single b-2 bomber.

If it takes 300 one time in the future to start a long term reaction that’s a price I think we would all pay. The fact that we proved the idea now makes this just an engineering problem.

Now add in the 50% efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity (and that&#x27;s very optimistic), and it&#x27;s only 1.5 megajoules, or 0.5%, right where I calculated it based on initial information.IANAP, but I see no path forward to sufficient Q-total using plasma fusion to put this to any practical use. Unless the reaction can somehow be self-sustaining, I do not believe this will ever work.

Explains why the experiment took place at 1am.

Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don&#x27;t start celebrating yet. 
Source: New York Times.

Naive question: Once they get out more than they spend, can they just loop the generated energy back in and keep increasing this exponentially?

&gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we&#x27;re working with 3.15:2.05.With modern lasers, that&#x27;d be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.The jumps to get here included- 40% with the new targets- 60% with magnetic confinement- 35% with crycooling of the targetThe recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.&gt; I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”It&#x27;s nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.

&gt; Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is better for everyone.That is debatable.

No need to pit them against each other. This achievement wasn&#x27;t certain. Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is better for everyone.

This a commercially viable power source ain&#x27;t.

The future just got a whole lot brighter for my children. This is going to save our planet, not funky wind farms.

Huge!So much left to do. Capture that output energy. Streamline the machinery that produced the result. Do it at scale and efficiently.But that&#x27;s just engineering, as they say. Which is one thing we are pretty good at!!

Recently discussed <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863</a> [740 comments]

Would that mean that you wouldn&#x27;t need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish?How would it affect the rough calculations above?

&gt; tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gramD-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.

I&#x27;d imagine commodity tritium breeders would be a part of the infrastructure build out and that it will be a highly competitive space as fusion-to-the-home nears reality.

Thanks a ton for that!
$25&#x2F;MWh is great but not the 10x economic impact I expected. Especially since [1] we see PV at $50&#x2F;MWh currently.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cost_of_electricity_by_source" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cost_of_electricity_by_source</a>

&gt;&gt; Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.Hydrogen bombs are driven by indirect implosion by a nuclear primary. It isn&#x27;t a runaway process; the yield of a secondary is limited by the implosion achieved by the primary. Most hypothetical designs for an inertial fusion power plant achieve similar energy gains.

I think capital costs &amp; construction times are going to be extremely important.I think the biggest reason nuclear energy stopped being built is it takes too long to get political wins.NuScale and other SMNRs might be able to help with that.However, the capital costs &amp; construction time for Fusion Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear reactors.But are we too far away from it being a reality that anyone is predicting how much?

1000 time gains is double performance every 2 year, means in 20 year we would be able to achieve fusion with hydrogen from water at home scale min power plants.

[0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant. They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized cost of energy could get as low as $25&#x2F;MWh. For this one really needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically competitive in some cases.While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason to expect it can be scaled up. Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rsta.2020.0053" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rsta.2020.005...</a>

This isn&#x27;t for power plants, this is to model the efficiency of the second stage of a stored h-bomb in place of periodically exploding them, which we can&#x27;t do anymore due to the test-ban treaty.

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn&#x27;t find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually).Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$15k a kg. But tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram (!) [3].This leads to a calculation of ~$700M for the coal plant and ~$3.75B for the fusion plant (of which only ~$1.5M is deuterium)I have a few questions and I wonder if any can help:1. Is the above fusion fuel correct?2. What measures are expected to bring these prices down to price efficiency?Of course, I am not calculating the cost it would take for the reactor, storage, delivery etc.Nevertheless, this is an absolutely incredible development and the people working for this progress should be definitely proud of their work. My generation and the ones following will hail this as a breakthrough moment. Thanks![1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iter.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;FusionFuels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iter.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;FusionFuels</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prices_of_chemical_elements" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prices_of_chemical_elements</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;fusion-power-may-run...</a>

Activation products are of a different nature than the fission products and minor actinides you get in fission reactors, and are not necessarily as fearsome to handle, nor is the total activity comparable at all to what you get in spent fuel.However, those high energy neutrons do a ridiculous amount of damage to the structural materials, and if there are constant outages to swap and repair components, I don’t see an easy way of making energy economically.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aneutronic_fusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aneutronic_fusion</a>

Perhaps Dr. dr Vicente is talking about ITER, but surely not a real fusion reactor.Here&#x27;s something talking about an actual fusion reactor:&quot;While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger.&quot;and&quot;To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating. In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebulletin.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebulletin.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;fusion-reactors-not-what-the...</a>

Furthermore, fusion does not produce highly radioactive, long lived nuclear waste. “Fusion produces only low level radioactive waste — more than fission does — but this low level waste does not pose any serious danger,” said González de Vicente. Contaminated items, such as protective clothing, cleaning supplies and even medical tubes or swabs, are short lived, low level radioactive waste that can be safely handled with basic precautions.From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iaea.org&#x2F;bulletin&#x2F;safety-in-fusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iaea.org&#x2F;bulletin&#x2F;safety-in-fusion</a>

I have a PhD plasma physics, I think I am qualified to make these statements without this sort of dismissal!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect</a>

Remarkable. It&#x27;s still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation&#x2F;radioactivity.If you don&#x27;t like nuclear for these reasons, you&#x27;ll probably hate fusion.

US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved