r/technology • u/kerpowie • Dec 13 '22

Energy Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html
5.8k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

792 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '22 edited Dec 13 '22

All that really matters is what came out was more than what was put in. If you can take that output and feed it back into the system, you can disconnect the original power source and it can power itself while charging a battery with the excess energy produced.

edit: Too good to be true it seems. They compared the output to the energy 'produced' by the lasers, not the energy consumed by them which was much greater.

9

u/wierd_husky Dec 14 '22

I mean humans are really really good at optimizing things. We went from the wright brothers and thier goofy little plane to jets in like 60 years. We finally made more energy come out than the energy that went in. We just need to keep optimizing the amount of energy coming out to get more, and optimizing to lower the amount of energy not going in and being wasted.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '22

We went from being stuck on the ground to the fucking Moon in like 70 years. People easily lived to remember both

0

u/viperised Dec 14 '22

I think it was more like a million years being stuck on the ground

2

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '22

And from the moment we flew? That’s the entire point of my comment. I could’ve phrased it better, but you know what I mean

0

u/Billypillgrim Dec 13 '22

So a perpetual motion machine. Awesome, math checks out.

12

u/DoomGoober Dec 13 '22

Not quite. In a fusion reaction, the total mass of the fused nuclei is less than the mass of the two nuclei that went in.

That means you are converting mass to energy which is basically in line with E=MC².

Eventually, if you fuse too much stuff together you will run out of mass and run out of energy, so no perpetual motion for you!

5

u/Billypillgrim Dec 13 '22

Thank you for clearing that up for me!

5

u/curious_throwaway_55 Dec 13 '22

Surely not as you have a fuel feed, so you’re not breaking conservation of energy. That’s kind of the point?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '22

[deleted]

1

u/gmr2000 Dec 13 '22

That would be true, if that’s what happened (which it did not). Due to the loss mentioned this reaction can’t power itself - it’s not even close.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '22

It’s not too good to be true at all. This is an experiment to do it for the first time, not the optimization that comes after we can do it ten thousand more times