{"id":27436,"date":"2024-02-08T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2024-02-08T10:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=27436"},"modified":"2024-02-07T16:22:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T21:22:26","slug":"fusion-versus-fission-the-sad-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/08\/fusion-versus-fission-the-sad-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Fusion Versus Fission, The Sad Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Biden loves windmills and solar panels.\u00a0 He\u2019s happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building them and hiding the actual costs associated with creating and maintaining them and hiding the actual real-world electrical capacity they represent.\u00a0 And he underwrites temporary discounts to power companies and private citizens who fall for his grift.<\/p>\n

But on a much smaller basis Joe Biden loves him some nuclear fusion.\u00a0 And the basis is smaller because all the fusion he can buy is laboratory fusion.\u00a0 Laboratory fusion is a research and development creature.\u00a0 Large universities with generous DOE and DOD funding get millions (not billions) of dollars to build very powerful lasers to shoot at really tiny pellets of various isotopes of hydrogen and lithium and helium, trying to get them to fuse together to form heavier elements and thereby releasing relatively large bursts of fusion energy.<\/p>\n

In 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was able to get more energy out of a fusion event than the amount of laser energy put in.<\/a>\u00a0 I believe the ratio was 1.5\/1.\u00a0 So, it got out 50% more energy than it put in.<\/p>\n

And of course, the crowd went wild!\u00a0 Yay!!!!!!\u00a0 Unlimited energy!\u00a0 Almost for nothing!<\/p>\n

Yeah sure.\u00a0 What is neglected isn\u2019t mentioned until the end of the article:<\/p>\n

\u201cPlenty of other obstacles remain than those noted above, too. Current calculations compare energy generated against the NIF laser\u2019s output, but that brushes over the fact that the lasers draw more than 100 times the power from the grid than any fusion reaction yields. That means either energy gains or laser efficiency would need to improve by two orders of magnitude to break even in any practical sense. The NIF\u2019s fuel pellets are also extremely expensive, says Kritcher, each one pricing in at an estimated $100,000. Then, producing a reasonable amount of power would mean dramatically increasing the frequency of NIF\u2019s shots\u2014a feat barely on the horizon for a reactor that requires months to load up the next nanosecond-long burst.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s review.\u00a0 They put in a hundred times more energy than they produce.\u00a0 Each tiny pellet costs $100,000.\u00a0 They only fuse a few atoms every few months.\u00a0 The infrastructure is state of the art \u201cgiant lasers\u201d that probably cost a cajillion dollars to build and ten cajillion dollars to maintain.<\/p>\n

Based on these \u201cobstacles\u201d my engineering intuition says the likely date of commercial implementation is about five years after the heat death of the universe.\u00a0 Give or take.<\/p>\n

Joking aside.\u00a0 Give me a break.\u00a0 This is right up there with world peace and practical communism for impossible dreams.\u00a0 But the author ends off this depressing list of obstacles by saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cThose are the biggest challenges,\u201d Mordijck says. \u201cBut I think if we overcome those, it\u2019s really not that hard at that point.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here he sounds like every crackpot who wants money to invent time travel or faster than light space craft or perpetual motion.<\/p>\n

In the far future I think we\u2019ll extract energy from geothermal sources.\u00a0 In the immediate future we\u2019ll use fossil fuels and nuclear fission reactors.\u00a0 Nuclear fusion will require breakthroughs in physical science and engineering that currently aren\u2019t even imagined.<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, the Scientific American articles said we were fifty years away from commercial nuclear fusion.\u00a0 That was fifty-five years ago.\u00a0 I\u2019m still waiting for my cup of fusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Biden loves windmills and solar panels.\u00a0 He\u2019s happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building them and hiding the actual costs associated with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,712,3545],"tags":[3372,3821],"class_list":["post-27436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-fake-science","category-science","tag-energy-research","tag-nuclear-fusion"],"yoast_head":"\nFusion Versus Fission, The Sad Story - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/08\/fusion-versus-fission-the-sad-story\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fusion Versus Fission, The Sad Story - 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