Uh oh — we're not quite there yet with nuclear fusion; in fact, we're not even close

it’ll be unicorns and windmills for a while yet

David Strom. My take, fusion breakthrough is a total dud

“I 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.”

"It’s the sun in a box. It’s a man-made star. It’s the little engine in Tony Stark’s chest…It’s the idea that it could be the perfect fuel source." — @BillWeirCNN nerds out and helps me understand this fusion energy breakthrough. pic.twitter.com/j5aiL6VLTl

— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) December 12, 2022

Federal scientists announced that they created the first-ever nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than it took to produce.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called the breakthrough “one of the most impressive scientific feats.” https://t.co/jSICEunNI7 pic.twitter.com/1S7asYAsDS

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 13, 2022

…..

“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.”

“These recent results [at] NIF are the first time in a laboratory anywhere on Earth [that] we were able to demonstrate more energy coming out of a fusion reaction than was put in,” NIF physicist Tammy Ma said at the news conference. She predicted that pilot projects for power plants based on the fusion approach will be built in the “coming decades.”

But this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment. It took about 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to get a hundredth of the energy back in fusion.

“The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”

“That is not an achievement. It is a disappointment. They made a somewhat interesting experiment that shows achieving fusion is possible but they are about as close to nuclear fusion power on the grid as they were 40 years ago. Uncounted billions of dollars later.”

“Despite today’s announcement, fusion is neither commercial nor close to commercial, so it is still vaporware"

Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find a plasma physicist who thinks fusion will be in the mix in the next decadehttps://t.co/JD4vfMDKkA @wired

— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) December 13, 2022

“After all, a fusion bomb delivers enormous net energy. However it is not in a form that we can use productively. See the problem? We mastered fusion almost 70 years ago. Mastering fusion in a manner that is useful for something other than complete destruction of cities is orders of magnitude more difficult.

“There are private companies taking entirely different paths toward achieving the goal of providing useful electrical energy from fusion, and their ideas are very interesting. They are spending vastly less money, claim they are making real progress, and have actual plans that make sense to harvest usable power. They may be going down dead end roads as well, but their approaches are promising in a ways that the government-led approaches appear not to be.”

Strom isn’t alone in his assessment of this touted “breakthrough”; here’s a WSJ reporter who shares his disappointment: