Comments by "" (@DanielSMatthews) on "Major breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy" video.

  1. This fusion milestone marks the beginning of the end for both fossil carbon and renewables based energy production. With fusion reactors we will have no limit to the amounts of electricity and synthetic fuels that can be made, so not just hydrogen which is not ideal for many applications.
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  2. I don't know what you think you heard before but this was a world first and a historic milestone.
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  3. What it proves it that fusion power generation is possible, now they have to upgrade their 1990's era lasers to the most compact and efficient they can build today and see how much surplus energy each shot can produce. Last weeks test was like proving that you can set fire to a lump of coal, the rest is just engineering.
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  4. It has been jumping confinement all these years, and that is why it never gave back more energy than it received. Perfect confinement is required for fusion to happen at all, otherwise the plasma is not hot and dense enough for the hydrogen atoms in it to fuse into heavier helium and give off surplus energy in the process. There is another fuel they can use, boron, that if they can get that even hotter will give them electrical power directly with no need for a turbine, the part of the powerplant usually needed to mechanically drive a generator.
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  5. In a laser facility like that? How long is the ignition phase in a high performance 4 stroke engine at maximum safe revs? The model they are looking at is a continuous stream of fuel pellets falling into the laser path which is pulsed. It is more of an engine than a furnace.
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  6.  @outlawbillionairez9780  If you are talking about fission power well it is not always that simple, you can use neutrons from a fusor to pump subcritical fission fuel densities up to criticality such that cutting power to the fusion will stop the fission reaction too. 🤓
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  7. Competition is good for the market, and so the consumers. 👍
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  8.  @revisionfour  Hard to tell, but what I do know is that the guys running the first company to go commercial will be humanity's first trillionaires, so there is that motivation at play.
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  9.  @simonharris4873  Yes and the beginning of the end for both carbon and renewables based energy production for all but a few nitche uses.
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  10.  @arcadealchemist  Fortunately they are on the right side of the border and not off in la la land.
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  11. It is not minor at all, it is a fundamental proof that fusion with a net positive output is possible on Earth in a controlled manner.
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  12. No.
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  13. Yes because the tritium they produce is going to be a very valuable fuel option for fusion reactors, and we may as well burn that uranium and thorium why it is still worth something.
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  14.  @Design_no  Well they knew it worked in bombs since the 50's. 😏
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  15.  @Design_no  Don't forget that technology is accelerating, so the next 10 years will see as much change as the last 50. It is driven by a variant of Moore's Law, a doubling effect and that technology breakthroughs leapfrog on each other in a cycle of enabling.
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  16.  @Design_no  Mate if you knew how many books I have read on nuclear physics you'd not be trying to BS me. 😐
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  17.  @lukeh321  There are other more compact aneutronic designs that are yet to break even that would also be pulsed, probably at the frequency of the AC grid as they produce charged particles and not neutrons so there is no thermal component and it is all direct electrical energy production. That mother of all metal doughnuts at ITER is just one, out of date, idea that is meant to run almost continuously and produce heat that needs turbines to convert to electricity.
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  18.  @Design_no  No it was a tiny fraction of a second in that laser shot, it is a pulsed system that uses a method called chirping to compress all of the laser energy into a very short period of time to get the energy levels required.
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