The Washington Post reports a possible milestone in the pursuit of clean energy. CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir lays out what this major breakthrough means for the future.
Scientists see breakthrough in ‘holy grail’ of clean energy, report says
I’m guessing I won’t be around when this becomes available to everyone, but that’s okay. At least we seem to be going in the right direction with researching alternative energy sources.
I felt the same about finding life elsewhere in the universe, K. Cuzz. Science is heading in the right direction!
What a realistically positive, pro-human attitude to have!
It makes sense now that I’m ~middle aged; hopefully we’re building a better future for the human species..:::💚
Wrong. Technology is advancing rapidly
Well it could happen in less time, but we need to kill and destroy more every year. Yeah you won’t be around.
They are talking this will be commercially available sooner than you think.
Oh. My. Gods. This is LITERALLY what movies have been made about. Science is amazing.
This reminds me of the 1985 movie “Back to the Future” where Doc Emmit Brown needs a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 Giga Watts of energy to fuel the DeLorean for time travel!!!
@Oracle Of Delphi I think you’re putting way to much thought into this comment!
@MAC LeVa Please lets not get into a discussion about God. Who cares? We’re talking about nuclear fusion!
@badrul chowdhury What is natural? Living in a cave? Riding horses instead of driving cars? Dying from diabetes because there is no penicillin?
@badrul chowdhury Well, our “natural way of living” has nearly killed the planet. Do you have any other suggestions for clean energy? I’m sure you’re an engineer and scientist who has worked diligently in his field and has had peer reviewed work done that would solve climate change and the existential threat to humanity. I’ll wait for the link to your dissertation on how Fusion will enable a more rapid decay of this world.
The immutable law of physics always applies: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
Yeah the difficulty for fusion is that its not just regular hydrogen atoms we use. Theres only about 2 Deuterium isotopes of hydrogen per 10000 hydrogen atoms. And to create these isotopes we need a very difficult Lithium isotope to generate more during the fusion process
I eat so little that my lunch spontaneously appears, but I have to eat it fast otherwise it might blink out of existence before I get to it. Thats the advantage of not pursuing a trendy gluon-free diet, which allows me to be virtually full all the time. Quantum checkmate.
I always eat with an anti-friend so that the net energy is zero
Yes but we are converting matter into energy here — the energy is not free.
Thank you Scientists for finding a way to combat our crippling Helium shortage.
And I guess for providing nearly unlimited clean energy as a byproduct.
Unless they use Helium-3 as their fuel. And even with hydrogen as a fuel, the quantities involved are tiny compared to how much helium we use today.
@Tõnu Tamm boron is also on the table
In other news, the fossil fuel industry will do everything in their power to make this new energy source either illegal or difficult to use
@JasonDrvmz sell high
@JasonDrvmz Switch to shares in clean energy.
The fossil fuel industry actually promotes fusion because they know darn well that it will not be commercially viable in this century, and will in the meantime, distract us from known renewable energy technology, that will produce far cheaper power by the end if this decade. We are being duped by being distracted.
Great reset very near old world order transitioning to government new world order .
@dutchdna nah, I’m not with the whole woke ESG stuff. Oil isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s too much of a reliable resource
If it actually works, We the People won’t see the benefits until the corporations figure out how to profit from it.
@Jeremy DeCaro That’s a hard nope
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@Censored Opinions And? Initial costs for fusion (which make up most of the cost) pale in comparison to literally any other plant, especially in terms of fuel (besides renewables).
@dutchdna Most of the cost associated with constructing infrastructure is due to the way contracting works. And taxation is much more efficient for infrastructure costs per person.
Fusion power is always 10 years away, but this is very encouraging.
Fusion was always 30 years away, so I guess this is a step forward.
@Brother Mine 20 years.
@Lola Lasziv : No, the old joke is that fusion is always 30 years away. You can google it. But the joke is probably sometimes told with multiple variants such as 20, or 10 as in this video.
That’s the announcement, we are now 20 years away from viable fusion…..
I’m looking forward to this announcement. The researchers there hit about 70% of breakeven a year ago, so it is likely that they actually achieved breakeven. But a working reactor would need to do an order of magnitude better because of energy lost in capturing that produced by fusion and converting it into electricity.
Another question is whether they did this with a mixture of Deuterium (1 proton and 1 neutron) and Tritium (1 proton and 2 neutrons) or managed to get D-D fusion,
D-T fusion is much easier but it requires a source of tritium which is produced in nuclear reactors when neutrons are absorbed in the cooling water system.
And either method will produce stray neutrons which can make most other elements radioactive when they are absorbed, Still, this is much cleaner than the byproducts of fission power.
@Jay No it means they got 120% of the energy that the lasers applied to the fuel. However the lasers used are very inefficient so they didn’t get more energy out of the reactor than they put in, just strictly the reaction itself. Those reporting on this should be clarifying that.
@NNFaNRacing Did you read the actual report, or are you just being a contrarian?
What he said.
🥁🐒
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Thank you for the achievement, more hope for the survival of our planet.
We could have clean, free, and infinite sources of energy, and corporations would still try to bleed us dry for every dollar. Still, one more step forward is one more step away from the nightmare we currently live in.
It cost money to research. Money to operate. Money to maintain. Money for wages. All that money is invested and spent before one cent in profits are earned and still you b****.
Remember that our existing nuclear fission power plants were supposed to create energy so cheap that wasn’t even going to be worth metering. The complexity of fusion appears to be significantly greater, which means that if you see 1 kWh of power produced from fusion in the century that in itself will be amazing.
Exactly my thoughts. The US gov’t should keep fusion nationalized and non-profit so that everybody benefits, but corporations will lobby to make it private so that they can rake in enormous profits from the publicly funded research.
@Ken Bob first, we don’t know if we will ever get a fusion reaction with more power out then goes in to contain the reaction.
Second, if nuclear fission is any example then every major industrialized country will produce its own reactor and in the case of fission even 60 years later we have very few success stories and a real cost that is probably much greater than when solar and batteries.
That’s why win solar and battery storage is so important because every business and household has the option of collecting their own and even selling it to their neighbors through a virtual grid such as Tesla‘s Auto Bidder.
The worlds greatest minds, students, professors, scientist should get together to get this done immediately.
When you consider that it takes Panasonic five years to get a sister battery plant operating, you can canon fusion, not happening in the century. No matter how many people and how many resources we waste on chasing this holy grail. This is nothing but a big distraction From existing renewable technology
At least a few of the smartest folks are using advancements in the science world to help people,instead of trying to make weapons and other nefarious items…Keep up the good work……..
Amen to that.
Currently, solar is the cheapest energy source on the planet. And effective long duration grid scale battery storage is certainly a less challenging technological feat than nuclear fusion. Solar is also eminently scalable, in that you can have fields of it owned by an electric utility, but also just a few PV panels of your own on the corner of your roof. But I’ll be listening in on the DOE’s fusion announcement with an open mind.
What one has remember is that, back in the 1950s, fission nuclear was touted as being “too cheap to meter.” As it is, present day nuclear in the real world has ended up being the most expensive energy source we have by the kilowatt hour. There are, of course, also issues of what could happen to any given nuclear facility if something went horribly wrong. And the viciously toxic radioactive waste under normal operating procedures wasn’t ever going to be just a bug: it’s an ongoing feature that last tens of thousands of years.
Again, I’ll be tuning in with an open mind. But I’m guessing that whatever fusion will bring us, we’ll still want a rather large portfolio of wind and solar moving forward as well . . . just in case we find ourselves in the middle of the 21st century, and things look a bit different than they did back in heady days of late 2022.
Thanks for the great update and focusing on this important endeavor!!!
“This fusion thing” has just become pretty real. I thought this was still 20 years away. And commercial application was still 60 years away. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime.
This is like the first heavier than air flight by Wright brothers.
On Dec 17 1903, the first flight, by Orville Wright at 10:35 am covered 120 feet in 12 seconds, at a speed of only 6.8 mph over the ground.
Boeing 747 is still a few decades away but that first flight was what legends are made of.
I agree!
First light of over-unity fusion deserves to be on the short list of important moments in human history.
How many person hours of engineering to reach those goals..??!…🧠💢😅
@Josh Roolf 70+ years and thousands of humanity’s best minds working at it relentlessly. But counting man hours is a Project Manager’s job. Spare these scientists from those dreads PMs who think if it takes 9 months to make a baby, putting 3 women on the job is going to make it happen in 3 months 🙂
Woudent it put nuclear scientist out work tho engeringers engering jobs suppose boom they side and im from nc I wonder would.ut nuclear. Scetiest.boom
@Spencer Weeks well aerospace engineers still exist despite planes and rockets already existing right
My 80yr old mom told me that she went to college with a couple of guys who went on to work on this problem for the US government their entire lives. It is truly a multigenerational project and one which I may not be around to see the end of myself, but is one I hope our species can literally use to save the planet one day, and perhaps use to visit the stars. Nice work scientists!
Newsflash– you’re not going to save the planet ever
@Jmorgan23 Well people like you certainly won’t Jmorgan
@Jmorgan23 Newsflash: You can lessen the damage.
@Ram 007 That’s right, the ney sayers are the ones that also block funding for these kinds of projects. I’m not saying this fellow is but most of the ones I know are pretty self centered and do some sort of work in the fossil fuel industry or work for energy companies in general and small business that support energy company products needed in the field.
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Can you imagine what would happen if they “OPEN SOURCED” the technology?
There’s a problem here, the fuel isn’t just “the hydrogen from water”, it’s tritium, which is a rare form of hydrogen, only about 25 usable kilograms exist in the world. Being rare, it’s also expensive, and currently relies on nuclear reactors to produce at very low yields. So let’s take a grain of salt before assuming we’re on the doorstep of a post scarcity utopia.
My goodness……I thought I would never see this day. this will change everything
For better and worse.