It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors.
This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even.
Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself says the data is still being analysed and the actual results aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet.
So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.
> But that's energy, no electricity
as far as fusion viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat.
Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
Lasers can get over 50% efficient (although these are specialized types).
It’s silly to blame a facility not designed for power production for using inefficient lasers.
This is an important and necessary step to getting resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would’ve been to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
> the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat.
There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily available literally at the push of a button. But for some odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on electricity instead...
The question is whether this is a breakthrough and a significant milestone or not. It seems to me like your comment suggests that we have hit the "significant milestone" marker only when we have an actual electricity-generating fusion reactor, which I think diminishes the actual breakthrough that a positive net energy gain represents (if correct). It was long sought after, it has now been reached.
Exactly! This is a very good question that requires some context, preferably from within the field. What does it actually mean?
Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in answering that question and providing the necessary context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem ecstatic about the possibilities.
You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.
But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.
EUV light source generate plasma that is in the megakelvin range today for silicon lithography. It's obviously not the same and still cooler, but the assertion that we don't make use of highly energetic plasma is off.
Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss. We previously only knew how to achieve an inertial confinement based fusion reaction with a positive Q factor by first setting off a fission bomb, and this was only done for the neutron generation to increase the amount of fissionable material exploded (which is why they are called fission-fusion-fission bombs).
We can now generate fusion energy in a way that is obviously confine-able. That's a major step, and it's not THAT hard to imagine many mechanisms of turning a hot droplet into energy. For example the hohlraum itself in an indirect system will obviously be heated by the reaction and could be used to generate steam. Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
This four sentence post is a perfect example of OP's point. No insight, no though process, just a pithy negative reply.
> EUV light source generate plasma that is in the megakelvin range today for silicon lithography.
Only an order of magnitude off, but yeah, physicists and spherical cows and all that.
> Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss.
A little sense of humour is lost on so many bitter souls these days, it's kind of sad. Lighten up, mate!
> Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
You do realise that the fusion reaction we're talking about lasted for less than a trillionth of a second in a miniscule area, while other practical designs are aiming for continuous operation in the half hour range to examine practical engineering challenges of particular reactor configurations?
A high Q-factor may be completely useless if the underlying concept doesn't work for actual power generation and one might be easier to achieve than the other (i.e. getting a continuously working reactor first and tweaking it to improve Qp). The question therefore becomes, what's the actual value of the result. The article doesn't even touch on that, while even some C-grade online publications provided context like that.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's a significant milestone. It's just a number along a scale. If you were to tell me they've achieved a _sustained_ reaction which yields more energy than goes into it, for a period of, say, a day or so - then you could claim a significant milestone has been reached.
And even with that, some people argue that given how there's basically no sustainable source of tritium for large-scale electricity generation, the whole exercise is pointless unless the process uses other combinations of elements.
> ...I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.
My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias is against.
Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea?
I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there _is_ something going here other than that?
> Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea?
Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before substance, and raising expectations for something that's still essentially just basic research.
This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source, why even bother taking any publication serious anymore? It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their work.
It's a critique of the media preventing the public from actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up.
Many fusion new articles have this problem but i would argue that this time, how FT categorized this is appropriate. This is literally the first time the scientific break-even (not engineering break-even) has been achieved by any controlled experiment, including MCF. How is that not a breakthrough?
I will try to be really positive here. The researchers managed to achieve ignition on an area less than the width of a human hair for 100 trillionths of a second.
The resulting fusion may have gotten scientific break-even (again - no officially published results yet). This is great progress in terms of basic research, for sure.
On the other hand, we have experiments like Wendelstein 7-X, an experimental reactor that already can hold a stable plasma for seconds and is planned to go up 30 minutes of continuous operation early next year (construction is already finished).
The researchers state that they want to test, whether continuous operation is possible, how the plasma can be handled, how the materials and magnetic fields can be optimised and whether their approach is practical.
So on the one hand we have a theoretical result that may or may not be a scientific break even and is hailed as a major breakthrough that will open the door for commercial fusion reactors and lasts for trillionths of a second within a miniscule aera. No continuous plasma, no work on practical reactor design, just good old fashioned basic research at its best.
On the other hand we have working, practical fusion reactor experiments that are already able to hold a stable plasma for seconds and are tackling the engineering challenges of actually producing electricity. Some are designed for engineering break-even and Qp > 1 (e.g. ITER) and not ready yet, while others "simply" examine the practicality of a particular design (e.g. Wendelstein 7-X) and actually worked and continue to improve by orders of magnitude (in terms of operation time), pushing continuous operation time up to 30 minutes.
Now that I gave some context, how much of a breakthrough are we talking about? I don't know. All these experiments are important, of course and are required for the end goal of achieving economically viable stable power generation using nuclear fusion. I'd just like to wait for an official publication and a proper subsumption by other experts in the field.
Sure we can wait, but there already has been publications about the August 2021 shot, in which they determined that the August 2021 met the ignition criteria. It's pretty clear that they were on the verge of achieving scientific break-even.
Maybe we are just arguing about semantics and what constitutes a breakthrough but in my mind, the hardest challenge of fusion has been getting scientific gain over 1. There are still OTHER hard problem like continuous operation, capturing energy, but ultimately, getting scientific gain over 1 is/was the most challenging. You can say it isn't but the fact is, none of the MCF concepts have achieved a scientific gain over ~.64 and have not improved since the 1990s (JET). Look, if the 7-X or ITER or JET achieves a similar scientific gain, they will get similarly applauded.
I'm not saying that fusion will become a economically viable power source now. It is just that NIF de-risked the hardest challenge of fusion from a pure physics standpoint: more energy out than in.
I like to remind people now and again that humankind's very first attempt at inertial confinement fusion was wildly, ridiculously, terrifyingly successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike.
These may seem like tiny steps forward, but once the genie is out of the bottle it's going to be nuts.
Also this laser tech is ancient, once there's a major economic driver behind it I expect they'll rapidly advance.
How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to you?
For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' flight 40 years later?
The potential for powered flight was clear to those who observed and didn't think they were lying. The Wright Brothers sold their improved designs to the US Army in 1908, just six years after their initial flight. 15 years after said initial flight you have massive formations of planes Dogfighting over France, conducting reconnaissance and dropping bombs.
15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.
In the case of the Wright Brothers, most people didn't even believe it. One factor at work was that they'd been primed by years of Respected Scientists saying that it was physically impossible.
The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about.
I doubt that 'wright-brothers.org' is a reliable impartial source on that. The idea of heavier than air flight had been around, it wasn't conceived by them. Lilienthal was an earlier well-documented pioneer, there are pictures of his gliders in mid-flight. Just to name one. So without doing further research, the idea that actual scientists at the time thought it was impossible seems highly unlikely to me. As early as the 18th century Europeans experimented with fixed wing "flying machines". The Wright Brothers probably weren't even the ones to first archive powered flight, there are multiple contenders.
It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?
Like the ARPANET? That was even less of a notable Monday to the general populace, because I doubt any significant part of the public had a great interest in some universities being able to connect their at least fridge-size, expensive computers together similarly to how they were already able to do before, but now using "packets".
ARPANET was established in 1969, the internet as we know it started gaining traction in the 90s. So you're saying this "breakthrough" means we're 30 years away from the nuclear fusion equivalent of the dot-com boom? If that's true then I'm incredibly hyped, show me the data
There is no need to put “breakthrough” in quotes. For the first time since working on fusion since the 50s, we have achieved a positive gain of energy. Engineering-wise, it is a long way still until this can be put into its intended use, and who knows what roadblock scientists and engineers will hit on the way, but anyone who knows what they are talking about is suitably excited about this milestone.
I think it's just the difference in expectations between scientists and laypeople. "Major fusion breakthrough" to a scientist could mean one step out of 200, over 3 decades, towards functional fusion power. Scientists understand the long arc of progress. But these labs need to market to the public as well who invariably end up expecting a SimCity Fusion Power Plant within 18 months.
For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted responses to every new product announcement are essentially "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".
Rather, very anti science and technology hype. Many visitors of this website measure experience by decades, and have seen many waves of hype resiting in not much progress in unyielding areas, from self-driving car and silver-bullet methodologies to, well, commercial fusion.
When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors of this site get very excited and positive, from things like the Rust language all the way to solar power and reusable rockets.
A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, actual generation.
This is the very opposite to silver bullet approaches to fusion, though. This is a methodical, military-industrial-complex style development that was decades in the making.
I think it’s just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick takes that don’t dig into the first principles and instead serve as shibboleths that you’re not one of THOSE types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs or whatever.
I have plenty of experience and I don't agree that it's about hype. IMHO it's about the standard human reactionary response to something new and challenging [0], and people trying to sound smarter than something or someone by criticizing. It is disappointing.
[0] The saying is true IME: First they laugh at it (ridicule it), then they say it's not in the Bible (conflicts with the norm), then they say they believed it all along.
If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the small chance that they are in the 10%.
In fusion research, pessimism is realism. Especially in laser powered fusion.
This experiment is producing 2.5 MJ of output for 500 MJ of input.
Roughly once a day.
After decades of basic research.
It's a scientific breakthrough in the sense that the rocks are now being banged together hard enough to make sparks. And a little more is known about rock banging than was known ten years ago.
But it's clearly not going to be producing power on a commercial scale any time soon.
Aside from the particular percentages I don't exactly disagree with your observation about the odds of being right or wrong in the respective cases, but I think the skepticism being due to an lazy pursuit of this smugness and self-congratulation you describe is almost entirely flawed as an explanation of motivations.
Instead, I'd like to suggest, in addition to having with cumulative exposure developed a severe hype allergy, a lot of us are burnt with respect to that so-called progress. There's been a fair bit of outright corrupted delivery on the promise of new technology, not least IT, and many people here are savvy enough to see the costs of wrongheaded changes.
'Move fast or not, we don't care much, but back off breaking things we liked and leaving the rest of us picking up the shards.'
The problem is this might be true, but it will not always be true. The horse was probably better than the first cars for a while, but progress changed that.
Old computers perform better and use fewer resources? Have you used, say, a PC in the 90s? The fans were loud, the power usage constant and high, and the performance lacking by so many orders of magnitude that it can just be emulated in software today.
> the more someone has deep understanding in tech, the more they are critical of it.
I think the criticism comes mostly from people with just a little knowledge, trying to sound and feel like they know more. Just a few talking points or principles enable you to criticize, but not seriously analyze (much less create).
Everyone is a cynic simply because cynicism is easy. Any infosec professional can go "computers are insecure, never use them". And the advice will be correct, but ultimately useless. The ones worth anything won't just point out problems but also find solutions.
Most people in tech are cynical about tech because they intimately know the vision is waaay further out than reality, they know the breed and sometimes the names of the squirrels running in the wheels making it work, and have gone through more figurative duct tape and baling wire than most developing nations.
There's a bias for empiricism. People don't believe stuff until there's 50 years worth of data and 1000 politically correct and carbon neutral peer-reviewed papers on it. It must be approved by ethical panels and experts on TV. Only then it becomes science™.
Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured since.
On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in leaning towards pessimism.
The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy countries at least are now full of little gadgets that couldn't have existed even a few years ago due to the battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems that are pretty close to sci-fi.
I agree on batteries, but something like half a dozen Manhattan projects worth has been spent on fusion research so far and we don’t seem anywhere remotely close to achieving even a fraction of its promise. I remember reading about the future of fusion energy in my teens, and now my daughters are coming out of their teens. And I had kids late. I’m sorry but technical break even just doesn’t cut it for me at this point.
As a scientists, I'll never classify the 200 intermediate steps as "major breakthrough". Perhaps 1 or 2 of them. Fusion looks difficult, so let's say 5 of them. All the other are just improvements, minor improvements, side quest, dead ends, easy task for a undergraduate thesis, ...
If you read "breakthrough", you can be almost sure that it's an exaggeration from the press or the marketing team of the university (and in some rare cases, from the research team).
Engineers tend to have a problem solving demeanor towards novelty, which is excellent for finding the problem with things.
Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range.
I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on HN.
This is a “show me the evidence don’t tell me about the possibilities” crowd.
I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my bias is “wait and see.” This could be a massive leap towards proof it will work.
No, it isn't
Yes, it is. You just contradicted me
No, I didn't
Yes, you did
No, no, no
You did just then
That's ludicrous
Oh, this is futile
No, it isn't
I came in here for a good argument
No, you didn't. You came in here for an argument
Well, argument isn't the same as contradiction
Can be
"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to form a proposition. Contradiction is merely the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says"
I agree with the spirit of your comment, and I am extremely excited by these results. However, I think the history of fusion has showed us that the cynics have had a much better track record than the fusion optimists, haha.
My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that we’re still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or other things, like the relative instability of global energy markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
To be fair, fusion technology is a strategic imperative. The first nation to master it will quickly enjoy defacto Energy independence. Given that many of the crises will likely be energy-eccentric, we may see more investment in the space rather than less, especially if visible progress is being made.
I think I’d switch that from “quickly” to “eventually”, or “have a head start to” - we could get grid independence “relatively” quickly if the government subsidized it (I highly doubt first Gen fusion competes with natural gas or solar cost-wise), but a large amount of energy is used in transportation, home heating, etc.. Until those become fully electrified you’re still stuck in the fossil fuel economy.
True, I meant "quickly" on a relative scale. One advantage the 1st gen fusions would have is immunity to the supply shocks of fossil fuels and the intermittency of solar/wind. Plus we have workable electric vehicles and every home that has fossil-fuel powered heat by definition has a connection to the electric grid.
It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few things that would kickstart the electrification of everything better than functional fusion power plants.
There is no more reason to believe that than about fission. Fielding practical fusion would cost more than fission, and fission is not today competitive. (Some people are spending others' money trying to make fission competitive.) Unless somebody comes up with a copious supply of cheap tritium, it can have no substantial effect here, though it might be useful for outer solar system exploration.
But building out solar, wind, and storage will very predictably achieve energy independence, for radically less expense. No breakthroughs needed, but gratefully applied where found.
Can fusion power generation be made to work cheaply? Each day the question becomes less relevant.
People have been burned time and time again by scientists over hyping stuff in the last 10 years, then combine that with the replication failures over nearly every single scientific field.
Then look at the extreme amount of business fraud in the last 10 years with places like Theranos and FTX
Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians.
Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
When people use the word "reflexive," they're talking about things like conflating business hype designed to attract publicity and VC capital with a press release for a major scientific paper from NIF. I don't think it's unreasonable for HN to hold itself to an understanding of these things. If you actually want to critically examine evidence then you must necessarily read the paper before posting.
It's an example of latest in many high profile scams.
If you think it's parody that's fine, but you cannot deny the public mood is souring on big promises with out big results.
FTX is simply the latest in a series of media empowered EXTREMELY high profile scams. You can easily put a thousand other different high profile companies or claims in there.
"reflexive contrarians" in the context here was being used a perojative rhetorical trick to broadly dismiss valid doubts people have about this research.
What specific issue do you have with the methodology and why? What specific scientific criticism do you claim is being silenced? Merely feeling strongly about this work contributes nothing to the discussion.
Note that there's multiple bits of hype compounding on each other. The scientists hype it up a bit, the University PR guys do it a lot more and the popular press goes nuts.
Look if a scientist at LLNL is excited about it, then there's a conflict of interest here. The fact of the matter is that there is such a high likelihood that inertial confinement is a dead end, because as far as I can tell there is not a realistic plan to harvest the produced energy, which at least, some of the other designs do. The bar is literally higher in other branches of fusion research (and they too are getting called to task for reporting plasma q values instead of estimated plausible total yields). Until someone starts at least building a model of how to collect this energy high levels of skepticism are warranted.
Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success, but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified. The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building any."
What I encourage people to do, and what I was encouraged to do by a professor, is to find the value in things. Yes the thing, any thing, has great flaws, risks, is an imperfect match, etc. That goes without saying, and is is in some respects pointless to say - we can stay in place without going through the effort of researching something. It's the value in things, and finding that value, that moves us forward.
I try to live my life this way. People think I’m an optimist, but really I think the world is mostly BS and I try to acknowledge the good things. It works for me.
> It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. [..] This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing blown out of proportion.
I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal, great!
It isn't just hyped; popular reporting on fusion power hasn't been very accurate. It doesn't help fusion power that things like this are trumpeted as a breakthrough when the reality is that the INF was never was a viable way to generate power in first place.
When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical.
The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper titled ’Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future’ in 1982, and after the semester sharing my ‘it’s only 20 years away’ enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for the DoD. Hence it’s forty years since I first heard ‘fusion is always 20 years away.’
Of course I don’t know any LLNL scientists but don’t question their or your sincerity or motivation.
The difference between those and the incentives of financially oriented news reporting, doesn’t make me less skeptical. Their mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before the market can move.
And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I have forty years of experience with reports…I mean I see excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982.
I don't believe its contrarianism. Sure, its an interesting science experiment but it has no viable way to generate power in any way. The lasers needs to be more efficient by a factor of 100x in the best case scenario(it depends on the specifics of how they calculate net gain). Then you probably need to increase that by another factor of 2-5x even assuming you have a way to convert that thermal energy to electricity.
No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea how that would work either.
There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable power source.
Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here is just not accurate.
To an external non-technical observer, this is about as exciting as me hitting a clean compile in the scale of things. It really makes me happy but no one else cares until the product arrives.
I'm not sure when it happened, but this place has become a lot less inquisitive and a lot more dark in recent times. Possibly its correlated with growth, but it feels like something else.
Think it's correlated with growth. I've seen significant post-pandemic degradation on all major social media platforms I use (mostly here & Twitter), along with large increases in volume.
1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't there yet;
2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that tells a much better story.
3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss;
4. We still have container damage to content with due to neutron embrittlement.
Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that commercial fusion power generation is "decades away".
Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity.
I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a realist.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way of breathless PR around science topics both from university press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical.
Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity. Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims of amazing scientific breakthroughs.
I think it's more often just counter signaling that one is better informed or more realistic than whoever wrote the press release or media article, which may very be the case.
That's a pretty arrogant take based on zero actual evidence. When "in my experience" is "randoms on the internet who I've never met and occasionally argue with online", I don't think we can draw many conclusions.
I know for a fact that many people who worked on this are also on HN. You should know that scientists see posters on this site mostly as representatives of the software engineering world. Seeing this kind of sneering attitude so frequently on display here is pretty embarrassing and casts the whole profession in a poor light.
The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them actually solve something and they crumble instantly.
Maybe the average HN reader is smarter than the average reddit reader (very slightly if at all), but they're not more useful than someone who actually did work and shared it publicly.
>The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them actually solve something and they crumble instantly.
I'm sure many have experienced the phenomenon where they read some HN comments that sound authoritative and give them that level of credulity. And then they get into a discussion on a topic they may literally be an expert in and it's made glaring obvious the person they are in a discussion with only has a superficial understanding, yet takes the same authoritative tone.
Neither is particularly healthy. Either staying level-headed and analytical or simply admitting ignorance would be healthier. Skeptical/Gullible are two ends of the same crutch for when we are unable or unwilling to do either.
I think skepticism is healthy, rational, and intellectually economical, especially when we're talking about popular media stories. The skeptic isn't harmed by dismissing grandiose headlines about scientific breakthroughs which are selling a false narrative 99.9% of the time (yes, real science is happening, but the media's narrative about the impact of research is pretty much always false), and in the cases where someone is a little too dismissive, they might end up looking like an idiot one day, but layperson skepticism has no bearing on the validity of the claim, no amount of skepticism can overcome the reality on the ground, if it's real it doesn't matter what anyone believes.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being cautious, but never, ever, negative.
(1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm not sure that there is any actual news.
A few months back it was announced that scientists had discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they discovered a closer one.
(2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons & Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new blockchain" in this climate
(3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source"
(4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long ways to go.
The original point of LLNL was to develop nuclear bombs. There is such as thing as "mission creep", also the challenge of maintaining the ability to develop bombs in the future if we need to.
Studying nuclear bombs is still the point. The press releases about fusion "energy" are just for appearances sake. The methods they employ are useless for energy applications. They're just H-bomb simulations.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
What could be done about that aside from expecting people to just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments would probably be a lot more constructive!
Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over one fence who has very different political views to mine. We have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually really engaged and trying to understand each others' perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the conversation is rewarded.
I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick" (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to take place in "moderation space" (in which all community members could participate) and for there to be opportunities for people to refine their comments in response to feedback — and for doing so to be the norm.
Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen different moderation strategies around the web produce very different results, so it seems to me that there should be plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from doing so.
I'd say most of the problem here is that viewpoints are meted out as simple pithy statements. Half of the comments on this thread are one sentence statements saying the building has 200x to go before it's truly net positive.
You get more content out of a discussion with your neighbor in 30s than that. Those comments are genuinely worthless, they don't talk about things like:
1) What are the parts of an inertial confinement fusion based system which are difficult and which are missing today and would need serious investment
2) What is the likelyhood that the power output observed here could double, or more with other scale factors?
3) What's the net system costs once a plant is made. Is the fuel cheap or expensive?
Etc. It's fine to be contrarian, but most of the contrariness on this most internet forums is of the most basic, shallow kind that is defeated in a moment by any serious thinking.
The short answer to being better? Posts with more in depth content. I seriously think HN should consider banning pithy one or two sentence posts "they still would only get 1/4 the power" you find all over the place.
Your conversation with your neighbor has no meta-conversation going on.
Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of people) can learn and be swayed.
Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important" topics.
That's a good point. I guess I hadn't really thought about how performative discussions on public forums are. Maybe embracing that more deliberately somehow could produce a worthwhile difference?
Being able to bring the audience "in" on the broadcast nature of these (presumably authentic) conversations on X contentious topic would be an intriguing problem to solve. With AI coming more mainstream, an AI analysis of conversations might be where you could shine, including calling out astroturfing (like spam is detected today).
Part of it is that we read about "breakthroughs" in diverse fields only to see nothing come of them. Past experience creates valid doubt. Also, as exciting as this might be, we are nowhere near a practical application.
Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we haven't come to a halt.
It’s ok to be cynical about things that are massively overhyped. This development is an important milestone, but it is nowhere near what it is being reported as.
I agree that the discussion generated from this article is not what we want on HN, but I don't think it is fair to criticize the comments as being reflexive contrarians when they are simply and correctly pointing out that the claims being made in the article are misleading at best. And these aren't nit-picky details about side-issues in the article - the are the core headline claims that aren't further clarified or nuanced in the article text, so guidelines to not "pick the most provocative thing ... to complain about" aren't applicable IMO - without posts correcting the article many reader would have a wildly false understanding of what actually occurred which isn't what we want either.
I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual research results and their implications, rather than on the poor coverage.
We're hackers, engineers. We poke around for problems before there are problems and we pry open the black box to make sure it's not just filled with Bullshit. If you want to unquestioningly lap up everything that's offered to you, then I've got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan I'd like to sell you.
Over-hyping the small steps as big leaps is the problem. If the scientifically literate people here are sick of it, imagine what the voting public thinks.
“First time ind history fusion releases more energy that is put in” is a big leap. The fact that it’s still a technology in its infancy and decades away from actual use doesn’t make it any less impressive.
I think the cynicism is linked to the cycles of bubbles.
When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, there were companies just pouring money in to anything related to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be a big deal...
It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe we'll do it next time.
In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we crack the fusion nut, we will change the world.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story could probably be auto-flagged.
The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually.
I think there are a couple different types of cynicism and one might be more justified than the other.
The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough.
The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial results and the article says the data is still under review". This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it.
My experience is that if scientists are exited about it then it's probably not a big deal to non-scientists. It may be a small piece of a big deal in a few decades.
Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do something truly new, inventing technologies that previously didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!
"LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal"
Just because they're excited doesn't mean it's a big deal, nor any guarantee that it works or ends up being practical.
I've heard 'exciting' news about fusion many, many times over my entire life and essentially all of them have come to nought. Or after the excitement settles down over said development we still find that fusion ends up being that magic number of 40 years into the future.
I've even worked in the nuclear game but I don't expect to see my home powered by fusion energy in my lifetime, unfortunately.
It’s been clear like that for a while. Crypto threads are infested with nonsense, ignoring anything that’s even distantly related and ignoring any breakthroughs. Any new tech is poo pooed immediately.
My father does radionucleidic metrology and every time there is a breakthrough at all, be it JET or something else, total rejection that it was a big deal or "real" or that its "not a large enough net gain reaction" to matter. Its wild
I think scientists are humans after all and they (much like people who rejected bitcoin when it was at $3 and now have to justify their pre-held beliefs) have to justify why they didnt think it was possible or "real" even in the face of multiple fusion breakthroughs.
"Announcing a breakthrough" without replicated results is exactly what made cold fusion a taboo subject in the first place.
We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe it until a lot of separate research groups show the same results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not believe somebody just because you personally know them or they are "respected". Their work has to be replicated for Science to take it seriously.
I’m a physicist and it’s absurd how much career concerns push us to overhype even the most incremental research effort. I’m not surprised the public are sceptical
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians
no it's not
( /s but also many of us have seen enough 'fusion breakthrough' and 'battery tech breakthrough' and 'medical breakthrough' and 'AI breakthrough' announcements that it's difficult to give anything much credence without at least a production prototype showing real world performance.)
This isn't practical and it isn't exciting. Shoving unexciting breakthroughs in everyone's face is part of the problem with science funding today. It's tough for actual breakthroughs to get traction in the news cycle because of all these underwhelming duds.
HN comments are not thinking, doing anything, or building something. It is a place where you gain attention and karma not from some constructive act. People post constructive things, then commenters vie for attention. If you look at threads, the top "comment" on them is something about a completely different topic. And then they mostly go downhill.
Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are contrarians, it a function of the machine.
Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you see here.
"Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion revolution.
It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
An example of the context in which I want to tamper excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16020118886526320...
> SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday: https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...
Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful in the way it is described in these articles, solving currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are so far away from something useful that these inches are ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people like me).
By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great science reporting on these topics, but I have been conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
> “Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said. “That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate.”
People are cynical because the world is already feeling the effects of climate change, the technology exists today to move the grid to zero emissions, and because the work required to do that is a quotidian, slow-and-steady slog, it gets ignored in terms of both funding and mindshare in favor of things like nuclear fusion experiments.
Are you claiming a key reason that low or zero emissions technology hasn't been implemented is due to scientists wasting time on nuclear fusion experiments? Not entire political spectrum who doesn't believe global warming to be real, overstated, or some sort of conspiracy.
People have just become unsensitized to clickbait, it's mostly the media's fault, they always use titles like "cancer cure discovered" to get more views and thus more money, the viewers see a thousand articles like this and keep getting disappointed to the point a real cancer cure could be discovered and no one would believe it. tldr:crywolf
It doesn't matter if we find an infinite energy source. It will just shuffle the powers around. Nothing will really change. Humans will shift their fight to something else and inequality will still be the source of most of our problems.
that's a brilliant phrase, a reflexive contrarian. They just go the opposite of, I've been thinking about this behavior of late, great way to characterize it.
I do not think I can meaningfully increase my levels of credulity (nor my skepticism). I strive to communicate my thoughts accurately. Given those two points, how is it not healthy?
It's not reflexive-contrarianism as such; it's that the science press has historically been so, so bad that cynicism is the only healthy response. Think of the last 5 things you've seen in the science press: which ones were overemphasized? Which ones were exaggerated to the point that they didn't reflect anything meaningful about the actual result? And thinking back on the press releases over the years, what percentage of what you've read end up having an actual effect on the world? Add to that the fact that this is about fusion breakthroughs, something that has been wrought with complete disinformation by the science press since the late 1940s. Of course people here are going to be cynical about it.
This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.