Fusion power is a hot idea. Figure out how to do what the Sun does without all the gravity. X amount of energy in and get x+ out. The world has been chasing this for a while, but you may have seen recent headlines suggesting they’ve had a breakthrough.
Did they? Really?
First, several people have seen this link or something similar. “US scientists make major breakthrough in ‘limitless, zero-carbon fusion energy: report.”
These headlines are popping up as if zero-carbon energy is something we must have (not true) and that this breakthrough will get us there (it won’t). And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know much about this pursuit until I went looking. And I’m still looking.
So, here’s the sales pitch.
U.S. government scientists at a California laboratory have reportedly made a monumental breakthrough in harnessing the power of fusion energy.
The scientists, working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reaction, the Financial Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment. …
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and under-secretary for nuclear security Jill Hruby are expected to formally announce “a major scientific breakthrough” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Tuesday.
It didn’t take me long to debunk the PR, which has a lot in common with the Climate Cult.
Electric vehicles (for example) are not clean, nor is the power they use, nor can we ever create enough energy to make them that way or charge them or replace the batteries without fossil fuels, but they leave all of that out. They offshore emissions or ignore them and pretend we’ve made a breakthrough toward net zero when they’ve done no such thing.
Fusion has a similar problem. When they say they’ve gotten close to the same energy out as energy in (or Q=1), they are not including all the energy used or needed, just some of it.
In the recent case, we have laser energy used to hit a fuel pellet but not the energy that powers the facility, maintains the vacuum, and cools and powers the electromagnets, without which the experiment and fusion were impossible. To quote Ace,
This is like claiming your company is running at a “profit” because revenues exceed the costs for materials — without noting that there are some other costs, like labor, rent, insurance, etc., that must be included to determine if you’re really running at a profit or not.
But it’s worse than that. Fusion is another way to create heat and steam to move a turbine that generates electricity. Energy is lost in each of those transitions, but none of that loss is calculated in the announced results.
Pointing an x amount of laser at a fuel pellet that releases 0.7 x of the laser energy is an improvement over the same experiment producing 0.67 x, but you’re not 0.3 x away from Q=1. You are 0.3 x away, and all the other stuff they left out of the calculation.
It’s a lot like Climate Cult math.
As you’ll see in the video below, when you roll all of that math in, the actual best guess is closer to Q = 0.1. That’s a far cry from the reporting (surprise!) and no improvement on the previous best, which all tolled resulted in about Q = 0.1. (watch the video, and by all means, send me more info on the topic, please).
Lots of headlines and back-slapping, and the stooge at the head of the Dept of Energy is selling the lie to the people, and she’s one of those people handing out the research grants. She needs to be appeased and appease; after all, it’s not her money, though I suspect she believes it is.
So, what incentive do scientists who want more funding have to be honest? What benefit is there to journalists looking to make a few extra clicks when it only debunks their intended eye-catching headline? None, by the look of it (like the Climate Cult or COVID-19).
The truth is not attractive enough, or the deception advances some other interest.
And I’m not saying fusion is a dead end (I do not know that) or that they didn’t make progress, but we are nowhere near what the rhetorical glossy tri-fold pamphlet they just handed out claims.
If you encounter the approved narrative, send them here or share this with them, and get (or give) some feedback. Maybe someone has more convincing math, and we’d be happy to have a look and share that.
Watch this to get a sense of the fusion energy misinformation campaign. There’s a bit of an ad for the video sponsor after her opening remarks, but most of the 12 minutes are devoted to the topic.
