{"id":64562,"date":"2022-12-29T13:01:53","date_gmt":"2022-12-29T18:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64562"},"modified":"2022-12-29T13:01:53","modified_gmt":"2022-12-29T18:01:53","slug":"nuclear-fusion-dont-believe-the-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64562","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Fusion:\u00a0 Don\u2019t Believe the Hype!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nuclear Fusion:\u00a0 Don\u2019t Believe the Hype!<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo by\u00a0Ilja Nedilko<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In a dramatic scientific and engineering breakthrough, researchers at the Bay Area\u2019s Lawrence Livermore National Lab recently achieved the long-sought goal of generating a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was directly injected into a tiny reactor vessel. By the very next day, pundits well across the political spectrum were touting that breakthrough as a harbinger of a new era in energy production, suggesting that a future of limitless, low-impact fusion energy was perhaps a few decades away. In reality, however, commercially viable nuclear fusion is only infinitesimally closer than it was back in the 1980s when a contained fusion reaction \u2013 i.e. not occurring in the sun or from a bomb \u2013 was first achieved.<\/p>\n

While most honest writers have at least acknowledged the obstacles to commercially-scaled fusion, they typically still underestimate them \u2013 as much so today as back in the 1980s. We are told that a fusion reaction would have to occur \u201cmany times a second\u201d to produce usable amounts of energy. But the blast of energy from the LLNL fusion reactor actually only lasted one tenth of a nanosecond \u2013 that\u2019s a ten-billionth of a second. Apparently other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction\u00a0over a<\/em>\u00a0billion times<\/em>\u00a0every second is far beyond what researchers are even contemplating.<\/p>\n

We are told that the reactor produced about 1.5 times the amount of energy that was input, but this only counts the laser energy that actually struck the reactor vessel.\u00a0 That energy, which is necessary to generate temperatures over a hundred million degrees, was the product of an array of 192 high-powered lasers, which required well\u00a0over 100 times as much energy<\/em> to operate…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nuclear Fusion:\u00a0 Don\u2019t Believe the Hype! Photo by\u00a0Ilja Nedilko In a dramatic scientific and engineering breakthrough, researchers at the Bay Area\u2019s Lawrence Livermore National Lab recently achieved the long-sought goal of generating a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was directly injected into a tiny reactor vessel. By the very next day, pundits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[31300,5493,5933,2865,655],"class_list":["post-64562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-brian-tokar","tag-counterpunch","tag-fusion","tag-hype","tag-propaganda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64563,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64562\/revisions\/64563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}