The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Energy => Topic started by: Timber Rattler on December 15, 2022, 11:04:30 am
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https://hotair.com/david-strom/2022/12/14/my-take-fusion-breakthrough-a-total-dud-n517800
know this is a contrarian take, but stick with me here.
A lot of noise was made about a fusion energy breakthrough, but I hate to tell you that for all the hoopla the results they announced were actually a big dud.
I know, I know. We all desperately want fusion energy to be the next big thing. And we should want that, because the promise of the technology is nearly beyond comprehension. While it will never be “too cheap to meter,” because the costs for building a fusion plant will still have to be paid for and harvesting the fuel will never be free, fusion does promise to be cheap and abundant when it finally gets here.
And clean. While I am a climate apocalypse skeptic, that doesn’t mean that I am indifferent to the pollution that fossil fuels, especially coal, emit. Fossil fuels have made modern civilization possible and gasoline is a chemical wonder, someday we will move on to bigger and better things. We should have done so with nuclear energy already, but environmentalists and government regulators have stood in the way due to irrational fears about nuclear waste and far too slow progress on safer and better technology.
So why was the breakthrough far less impressive than advertised? Let me count the ways.
First, the net energy gain is a myth. It is true that the scientists ignited the fuel and the energy release was more than the energy put into the fuel pellet. But that is not what you should be interested in. The energy used to put that energy into the pellet was vastly more than what was released.
In simple terms the lasers delivered X amount of energy to ignite the fusion process, and the fusion process delivered about 1.5X coming out. But in order to deliver that X amount of energy (about 2 million joules) they needed 150X to generate it.
In other words, the net energy “breakthrough” was actually a huge energy drain. It took 300 joules of energy to get just over 3 joules out.
All they did was use up a lot of energy to generate very little.
Excerpt.
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IOW, like the alleged carbon footprint of an EV or a windmill, only part of the equation is being considered, not a full accounting.