A bevy of energy dignitaries, including often-clueless Energy Secretary Energy Jennifer Granholm, assembled at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay area May 8 to celebrate the lab’s December success in achieving a highly-hyped fusion energy hurdle: achieving more energy output from the input required.
“If you can replicate the process that’s on the sun here to provide abundant renewable energy, that’s really what fusion is,” said Granholm. She was right but got it wrong. So did most of the coverage, which hailed the December experiment’s success without acknowledging its enormous limits.
Bloomberg got the real story of the week’s pseudo-event. It has not been replicated. Since the early December event, firing 192 expensive high-energy lasers at a tiny hydrogen isotope target to achieve a miniscule energy gain for an infinitesimal moment, Livermore scientists subsequentially have failed five times to repeat that feat. “The US government lab that made a long-awaited breakthrough in fusion energy late last year has run five similar experiments since then without being able to replicate the results,” said Bloomberg.
KQED, San Francisco’s Public Broadcasting System’s TV station, also reported on the failure to replicate the December event: “The lab has fired up its lasers five times since its successful experiment, but have not yet had a repeat.”
This is nothing new for Livermore’s laser fusion program (which mainly exists in secrecy as part of the DOE nuclear weapons program). An August 2021 experiment at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility showed ignition and a preliminary form of energy gain. About a year later, the Livermore scientists admitted they were unable to repeat that and were redesigning the experiment.
Livermore has plenty of explanations for why it has been unable to repeat its hyped December experiment so far this year. Richard Town, associate program director for Livermore’s inertial confinement fusion program, told The Quad Report, “Achieving ignition on Dec. 5, 2022, was an incredibly challenging feat. Many factors had to go nearly perfect, including fielding an exquisite target and delivering 2.05 megajoules of laser energy to that target. Since the milestone experiment, we have executed five deuterium-tritium layered experiments. None of these experiments were direct repeats of the ignition experiment, as we have explored various iterations on the design of the experiment.”
Town added, “Also, delivering 2.05 megajoules of laser energy to the target puts stress on the entire NIF facility. We need to balance the risks of pushing the laser this hard with our other commitments, most notably other stockpile stewardship experiments. We can only run the laser at this high of energy about eight times per calendar year with NIF’s current configuration.
“We have experiments planned to attempt to repeat ignition in the coming months. Our experimental schedule evolves based on many factors including target availability, facility ability and experimental readiness, so we cannot give an exact date.” — LLNL’s Richard Town
“We have experiments planned to attempt to repeat ignition in the coming months. Our experimental schedule evolves based on many factors including target availability, facility ability and experimental readiness, so we cannot give an exact date.”
Most accounts of LLNL’s December event have amounted to cheerleading, hailing the momentary achievement as a major breakthrough that brings practical, electricity-producing fusion much closer to reality. That’s hyperbole at best, wishful thinking absent analysis of what’s required before fusion energy becomes a reality, at least several decades away.
What will it take to make fusion a practical contributor to the world’s electric-generating technologies? First, it has to be demonstrated at a far more convincing level than what happened at LLNL. The reaction of hydrogen isotopes fusing to make helium and generous amounts of heat energy must be continuous. Materials to handle the enormous forces released don’t yet exist. The fuel supply – primarily the hydrogen isotope tritium – is a major problem. Dealing with a bombardment of neutrons released by the reaction will present serious materials, handling and, yes, waste management problems.
If the physics become manageable, which is far from certain today even in the face of Livermore’s efforts, the engineering challenges will be enormous. Despite the persistent hype, practical fusion energy will not be cheap, safe, and environmentally benign. Nor soon. There is no free lunch.
Fusion is the most hyped energy topic at least since ‘too cheap to meter’ for fission energy in the 1950s, and maybe since the discovery of fire. But ‘fusion breakthrough’ headlines are great clickbait.
–Kennedy Maize
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