Don’t Fall For It

Guest Post by Karl Denninger

Breathlessly, I tell you, breathlessly, over-unity fusion has been achieved!

Don’t buy that bullshit; they’re lying.

Specifically its crap until you can show me all of the following:

• A sustainable reaction that continues for hours, not microseconds.  I can’t make power out of a single microsecond event.  I can make power out of a reaction that continues for hours and evolves energy while doing so.  Until you can do the latter you have nothing and nothing in the current results, assuming they’re real, nor anything in prior results suggests progress toward that.

• The over-parity ratio of energy output to input is exponentially (that is, by at least 10x) high.  A conventional nuclear fission plant requires about 10% of the output nameplate rating in input power just to operate.  This is why you can’t black-start such a plant (well, I have a theory that might work to do it in an emergency, but if it goes badly….. oops!) and this also, to a large degree, applies to other conventional energy such as coal.  The scrubbers, conveyors, grinding apparatus for the input fuel and similar all require a lot of energy input, so you have to get a lot back out to make it worth it.  Coal, natural gas, nuclear fission and oil all do.  Until fusion can produce 10x as much energy on the output side as you put in to cause the fusion its a laboratory curiosity piece, not a source of commercial power.  Exactly zero progress has been made toward that in the last 50+ years.
• The energy produced has to be able to be captured and converted into usable power of some form, either chemical, mechanical or electrical, and thus the above point must be measured after said conversion.  Gamma rays are energy but they’re not usable thus until and unless you can transform them into one of those forms they don’t count.  Yes, on a physics level energy is energy but in terms of practical use that is not true and it is fraudulent to represent that which is not the case to others.

• You must be able to source the reactants with the product energy and have enough left over to be operationally viable as a business.  This is non-trivial as well because the fusion we have achieved thus far requires deuterium and/or tritium.  Both are exceedingly rare hydrogen isotopes (about ~150 per million for deuterium) and because they are chemically the same as ordinary hydrogen separating them is a five-alarm pain in the neck that requires a great deal of energy itself.  In addition tritium is atomically unstable (that is, it decays) so you can’t store it permanently either (deuterium is atomically stable, on the other hand, so with deuterium you can.)

Let me know when there’s a viable engineering pathway to the above.

Until then keep they breathless exclamations to yourself; you’re making a fool of yourself promoting and cheering on crap, beyond continuing work on possibly reaching those above points — at some far, far into the future and only after someone pulls a “Scotty” in terms of a breakthrough that today we have no engineering path that places it within reach.

And incidentally, if you think they actually got back more than they put in, even leaving the externalities above aside, you were conned on that  too.  Here’s the salient statement from the article itself:

But that changed in the dead of night on Dec. 5. At 1 AM local time, researchers used laser beams to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. The lasers produced 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules.

Sounds great, right?

Uh, no….

“It is a big scientific step,” says Ryan McBride, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. But, McBride adds, that does not mean that NIF itself is producing power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.

So the laser beams contained 2.05MJ of energy but the unit consumed 300 MJ of energy to produce the 2.05 MJ of laser beams that was aimed at the target.

In other words they produced about 1% of the energy they put in, not 120%.

The blunt word for what was allegedly reported, in other words, is bullshit.

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