Lightknight said:
EDIT: It occurs to me that the post below may seem confrontational. Please understand that I'm aware that what I have here is an opportunity to speak with a particle physicist about an area I do not have any specialty in and I appreciate that. So please don't think of any of my responses as mere rebuffs so much as posing questions in response.
Yes, you are correct. I completely mispoke when I said "power plant" and meant to say reactor. I mentally use the terms interchangeably and that clearly caught me here. So let me start by absolutely conceding that point.
Since I thought you were thinking about cold fusion my only intention was to explain that we have achieved fusion and have produced energy from them. I did not think or intend to mean that we have actual plants in place that are powering homes. Sorry.
No worries, I can entirely understand the frustration talking to cold fusion nuts can cause.
Wait, I thought the Torus experiment had achieved near break-even results. Like 16 MW compared to the 24 MW they put in using magnetic confinement?
Torus? Do you mean JET [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus] (Joint European Torus)? That is the most successful fusion experiment so far, but that 65% output ratio was achieved nearly 20 years ago now, and the facility will never be capable of actually reaching break-even. It's mainly used as a tool to understand the physics going on, not to try to actually produce as much energy as possible. The plan is for the knowledge gained at JET to allow ITER to actually produce energy once it's up and running, but as I mentioned before that's not going to be until at least the end of the decade.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/giant-leap-for-nuclear-fusion-as-scientists-get-more-energy-out-than-fuel-put-in/
I thought this year saw this claim fail?
It depends exactly how you look at it, but in any meaningful sense, no. More energy was produced from fusion than was directly transferred to the fuel itself. But even if you ignore all the inefficiencies in the electricity and lasers, the fuel is not floating freely in the air; it's contained inside a capsule which the lasers essentially vaporise, and it's the energy emitted from that which ultimately hits the actual fuel. If you selected a small volume of fusing plasma inside a tokamak, you could easily find that that particular volume was putting out more energy than it was receiving. But since it's not possible for that volume to exist in isolation, it makes no sense to ignore all the energy required to heat up the whole thing. That's pretty much exactly the same situation as here. Even if you assume you could have 100% efficient power generation and transfer, some stages of the process are inherently lossy. With a tokamak, you have to heat a large volume of plasma, so you can never ignore the energy needed to do that and assume you'll eliminate that loss in the future somehow. In inertial confinement, as implemented at NIF at least, you have to put energy into the hohlraum, only some of which is ultimately transferred to the fuel. Even if the efficiency of that process is improved, it can never be 100%, so you can't just ignore it and assume it's something that can be fixed later.
That's not to say it wasn't an important step in terms of the physics, but it's a very long way from getting more energy out than went in. Far enough away that it was shortly after that result was announced that the program to develop an actual working power plant based on NIF was cancelled [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/67/4/10.1063/PT.3.2344]. NIF has done better than we've managed before, but not as well as was expected and ultimately just not well enough.
Skepticism is not the same thing as calling shenanigans.
Not always, sure. But science is all about evidence, and Lockheed Martin simply haven't presented any. Going to the public and the media with grand claims and requests for money, rather than going through scientific channels with actual evidence, is always a big red flag. See the first link from my previous post:
?I?m surprised that a company like this would release something that doesn?t have much context,? said Steven Cowley, a professor in plasma physics at the Imperial College London, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and a leading expert in magnetic fusion energy.
?Normally, if someone says they?re doing well in fusion, they would quote some data, ?We got a temperature of x and a confinement of y,?? he said, referring to how long a reactor can hold the heat of a reaction before it escapes. ?There?s no such information.?
Note that Culham is where JET is located; this guy is the head of the most successful fusion project in the world so far. Maybe it's not obvious to non-scientists, but phrases like "I'm surprised to this released" and "Normally, you would quote some dara" are about the most vicious calls of bullshit you will ever see published as official statements. It's like MPs (in the UK parliament) calling each other "honourable gentlemen". They're not being nice to each other, that's just the worst thing they're allowed to say. It might not look as bad as Kenyan MPs actually punching each other, but the sentiment is often the same. Professor Cowley's remarks may not look like he's calling shenanigans on the face of it, but he couldn't have insulted them much more if he'd made a bunch of "your mum" jokes and then pissed through their letterbox.
