Why is news about fusion ignition not a bigger deal in popular media?

Laser ICF is not ever going to be applicable to power generation. NIF is first and foremost a weapons research facility, and the primary reason NIF exists is to investigate plasma in regimes similar to the core of a detonating H-Bomb. The ignition results are nice and might provide some useful new experimental data on the behavior of ignited plasmas, but ultimately this has very little bearing on the future of fusion energy. In order to get useful energy out of laser confinement, we would need to do about 1 shot every second. Currently, the hohlraum (fuel pellet) is made of diamond and gold, machined to sub-picometer precision. Beyond the fact that it takes much, MUCH longer to charge up the systems for a shot, you'd need to find a way to manufacture these extremely expensive pellets en masse, load them into the chamber, fire, capture the energy, and also design your chamber to not fall apart after a few dozen shots from ablation.

You should be getting very excited when any of the magnetic fusion approaches achieve ignition, because unlike ICF they are much more straightforward to scale and capture energy from.

People exposed to the same media get very different opinions about how saturated coverage is.

If you listen to an FM radio station for instance, you can easily get frustrated that they seem to play the same Doobie Brothers song every time you are in your car.

I read a book about programming for radio and how a large number of listeners listen to just a little bit here and there. If you want to expose the whole audience to a new song you have to play it a stupendous number of times, enough that a person who is listening all the time (me in high school) hears the song 50 times and is thoroughly sick of it by the time 95% of listeners have heard it.

I used to watch CNBC a lot and felt there were days when there was a lot of good news and the market went up or a lot of bad news and the market went down. I developed a "financial sentiment index" based on a few 1000 articles a day from Yahoo Finance and found not only that averaging sentiment from financial news with a generic commercial sentiment analysis tool was not at all predictive or retrodictive of major market indices, but that my impression of CNBC was certainly illusory. On TV you are going to see maybe 20 stories that get heavy rotation in a day and if these were independently sampled the exact choice of which 20 stories you run is going to determine the average sentiment more than changes in sentiment across the universe.

The moral is that your judgement of what is getting covered too much or too little is not based on enough information to be significant.

I think it is a great result, but at the risk of sounding negative, I just can't see how this is a big deal. It was touted as the first time we've seen fusion ignition and is therefore a proof-of-concept. But as far as I can tell, what they did was make a tiny fusion bomb. We already know that we can get fusion ignition, namely the actual thermonuclear bomb. I don't see how one is going to scale up miniature bombs into power generation, especially when you have to use X-ray lasers (if I remember correctly) with a 1% efficiency.

It seems to me that the technical achievement is creating a fusion bomb that is small enough to be not destroy anything. What these little bombs are good for is unclear to me. But I would not have imagined blasting droplets of tin to get X-rays to etch microchips, either. Nor would I have thought that one could drive around at 60 mph by means of a bunch of discrete gasoline explosions, either. So who knows!

It's lead news everywhere.

The question for me is why is it news at all?

It's not really relevant to anyone and is really a technical milestone more than anything meaningful.

Tin foil hat time. We're back in the cold war and every potential sign of being ahead of Russia will be lead news.

Not sure what you mean by 'limited coverage in popular media', but here's what I saw about this subject in the last 48 hours:

The Guardian (UK): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthr... : "Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean 'near-limitless energy'" -- which implies a pretty big deal, not?

Deutsche Welle (DE): https://www.dw.com/en/energy-breakthrough-can-nuclear-fusion... : "Energy breakthrough: Can nuclear fusion help fuel the world?" -- also a guaranteed click from anyone, regardless of interest level in the subject?

NRC (NL, in Dutch): https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/13/amerikanen-wekken-voor-... : "American breakthrough in nuclear fusion research" -- describes this as "an important step"

France24 (FR, echoing French-language publications): https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20221213-us-set-to-anno... : "US scientists announce historic nuclear fusion breakthrough" -- "historic" saying a lot here

So, while not above-the-fold headline material anywhere, it seems this is getting very decent coverage worldwide?

> Is it not as big of a deal as I thought?

They do make it out to be a bigger deal than it actually is. If you read the press release as a layman you'd be convinced that we were generating electricity from nuclear fusion now and we'll see commercial fusion plants pretty soon.

However when you then look at the actual data it becomes clear that we're not there yet by a long shot, so if you first set expectations that high in the press release every reporter worth their salt is going to put some big caveats in their article. Which just makes this look like yet another case of over-promise, under-deliver.

This particular story is the moral equivalent of a company breaking the million dollar barrier. From a certain point of view, it's big news... but from another more objective point of view, "a million dollar income" is completely arbitrary. The set of caveats they add to "got more energy out than we put in" in this particular story is equally arbitrary.

Or, in other words, yes, this isn't as big a deal as you think, because they are... well... at least shading the truth. They've created a fairly arbitrary and practically useless measure for which this is "over unity". What's more, this isn't just me being negative; as many people observed in the HN comment chain there are ways in which it's kind of arbitrarily low too, like, we already apparently have lasers that would be more efficient and make the overall ratio of input to output look better. It's arbitrary in a lot of ways, not just self-serving ones.

It's not a huge breakthrough. It's an incremental step. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to see a lot of incremental steps between here and where even we finally land on with fusion. But there's been so many and will be so many more incremental steps that they aren't really newsworthy for a general audience.

Because it's not as big a deal as you think.

The result achieved is the first moment the laseroutput energy has been eclipsed by the energy output.

But the energy input to the laser absolutely dwarfs the energy output still.

Think like, an order of magnitude more energy before it becomes equal to the actual energy needed to achieve fusion.

MSNBC talked about it so much yesterday my eyes were glazing over. I saw at least three different astrophysicsts/professors.

Personally, I'm burned out with the over-hyped scientific announcements that are many years away before anything of significance comes, or the battery improvements that don't show up and have some impractical gotchas. That being said, This is pretty cool someone got this working and they are being realistic with the impact to our energy needs and timeline.

I've seen it all over the popular media. They're treating it like a big deal, it seems to me. It is competing with several other items in the news that are even bigger deals, though.

Because it isn't a big deal overall.

It is extremely far away from something really net energy positive that is, if you count efficiency of pumping the laser and efficiency of converting neutrons back to electricity. Currently it's about 1% overall efficiency with no clear path to >100%.

And even that is achieved, it's super far from economic viability. Because it will at the best case, amount to a coal power plant running on infinite free coal. Coal currently takes 20-30% of electricity price on coal plants. Getting a 20-30% cheaper electricity isn't a big deal.

When Wilbur and Orville discovered flight, we all thought flying was impossible. Then, when they proved it was possible, everyone ignored it for a while, thinking that freight airplanes or passenger planes could never happen. And then it changed the world. This discovery is HUGE because we can now have the potential to create as much energy as we need. But it will take time for it to change the world. But it is an enormous discovery that most are just beginning to understand.

I told my mom about the breakthrough. Her immediate question was, "will this help to save money on energy costs for the house?".

I replied, "this will eventually result in nearly limitless energy that will fundamentally change humanity".

She responded, clearly disappointed, "oh, okay".

I think for the average person, unless it has an immediate impact on their life, it's difficult for them to visualize future potential benefits.

> Is it not as big of a deal as I thought?

It's not. I don't get the hype here on HN. NIF didn't do anything that hadn't already been done, they just did it on a new facility. An that "more energy out than in" refers only to a very specific small part the power use, that of the actual laser. The total energy into the system as a whole is still orders of a magnitude more than generated.

At least on British and Swedish news, it received significant coverage. Related articles are still pretty prominent today, a day later. I think people who somewhat follow the news will have seen it.

It's also definitely not going to lead to any practical application in the foreseeable future, which is why the coverage isn't some week-long story. My own understanding of fusion is very limited but the breakthrough is about getting the actual fusion reaction to produce net positive energy. A big deal in physics but the amount of energy produced was tiny, it was far less than needed to power the equipment, the fuel capsules require extremely high-precision manufacturing that does not scale, we still don't know how to build an ignition chamber that could last with an active fusion reaction, and we don't know how to usefully capture energy from the reaction either.

To use a flight analogy, yesterday was the Wright Flyer covering a couple hundred meters before an unintended landing. From there, it's a long way to cross-continental passenger flights.

Not an expert on this, but by the time fusion energy is here, will it still be relevant? Wind and solar are super cheap now, many countries have regular energy surplus that they can't store (yet), do what will an extremely expensive energy generation mechanism add? Once we 'fix energy storage' do we still need fusion?

It took Hank Green (someone I feel is exceptionally good at distilling scientific oddities into layman-speech) about 3 minutes to explain the backstory as to why this was exciting news.

It's a big deal, but understanding why it's a big deal requires a fair bit of knowledge which can't easily be digested without time most news outlets are unwilling to devote to it.

https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/7176414313681292549...

Because although it was an extremely significant technical achievement, we're still probably a couple of decades from hooking a fusion plant up to the grid. And depending on how the economic incentives go, there's a decent chance we'll never hook one up.

In terms of practical benefit to eg carbon neutral electrical generation, it has no immediate impact and the long term impact is still very difficult to handicap.

It's still decades away from power generation if ever. A much more interesting technology is Mills Hydrogen to dark matter converter that is now close to operation. https://brilliantlightpower.com/harnessing-power-from-the-co...

I think the first often steal the spotlight. In this case Fusion ignition happened a while ago with Ivy Mike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike

This is Fusion Ignition; with Lasers or without Fission

So that's my take on it.

I believe the coverage has been great however, it's not going to change your heating bill next month.

Plus everyone's too busy reading and writing about what Elon did today so you basically get the news that generates the most clicks these days...

This was the top story on all the MSM sources I look at all day yesterday and is still percolating today. I got multiple push notifications from news apps too. I'm genuinely curious how you found the story to be underreported.

It was the top story on cbc radio yesterday. They pre-announced a potentially world changing announcement.

Actual announcement was important but nuanced. HN comments had this tone. When you’re at that level the press and regular people move on.

It’s not big in media? In Sweden it is. Probably biggest science related news for a long time. Even my mother mentioned it. It was on the front page of Swedish National TV webpage, and radio was talking about it all day.

It's been covered

But it's also the FIFA world cup nowadays, with Morocco over performing compared to expectancies

Christmas will be in a few days

Inflation and energy crisis and winter are settling in

So it's covered, but there is a limited bandwidth when is comes to news atm.

It needs to produce about 100X more energy if it wants to produce grid power. It didn't achieve net break even compared to the amount of energy that went into the NIF equipment to produce the shot. Not even close.

How big of a deal is it? Is fusion energy finally closer than 50 years away now?

It's an important milestone, but many things have to happen before this would have an effect on people's lives. And there's absolutely no guarantee all of those things will actually happen.

Because your average news consumer isn't intelligent or educated enough to appreciate it, and the media understands that all too well. They know who to pander to, and it's not us.

My very non scientific and conservative parents asked me about it yesterday after watching fox news, they seemed excited by it. Just an anecdote but the news was in fact reaching people

It’s not a big deal. It’s a curiosity, but not the climax of fusion ignition research. We have a very long way to go, and it’s not clear we might even get there as our time dwindles.

It was literally ALL over CNN's home page. I saw at least six articles written about it the day it was announced. News just moves fast and it's been a day.

It was the top headline news yesterday here in Canada on most of the media I ran across.

I have no idea why, it's going to be decades before it has any real impact on Canadians.

You need about 20 minutes to explain fusion and why it's exciting.

It's difficult to tell a news story that has more than 15 seconds of complexity.

In 20 years this will... of course this cannot be sold to popular media... it just went from 50 to 20 at best.

It was covered in Zone Economie (Radio Canada, Quebec daily) and they rarely talk about science related news.

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Was literally the top headline on the BBC when it happened, so it has been covered.

It has been covered hweavilt by the media in my country.

It has been extensively covered here in Sweden.

Top article on BBC News website yesterday

Because there is one every other month.

I wait until they build the power plant and then we see.