Nuclear Fusion: Inside the breakthrough that could change our world | 60 Minutes

Not to overstate the significance of this achievement since there are many substantial hurdles to overcome before this is anywhere near viable for commercial power production, but I still feel like I’m seeing a glimpse into the earliest stages of a technology that will one day change the world. Being in my mid 30s currently I’m hopeful it will happen in my lifetime.

My Grandpa Worked on the Lasers in the Livermore Labs for 30 years, he retired 10 years ago and died 3 years ago. If he was still here he would have been elated to see everything him and his team's work did to help get us to the first step to a great future for humanity.

My UCLA Physics class took a field trip here 25 years ago. They were working on this project even back then. I don't remember much about college but I remember that trip and the lab - what an amazing treat for our class.

“The power of the sun. In the palm of my hand.” -Otto Octavius

Gotta say, I'm surprised this was actually a pretty good segment. Most every news segment I saw about this experiment covered it with such blind fervor, almost no one pointed out its shortcomings

Shout out to Dr. Octavius. What you had achieved way back in 2004, the world seems to be catching up now.. Your legacy and contribution to Science will always be remembered. May your soul rest in peace.. and may you come back again in Spider-man 4

I never forgot when my high school AP Physics class booked us a field trip to go see an experimental fusion reactor back in '98. Way better than the continuous trips to Disneyland you usually got in Southern California at the time.

He got bars!! “….meet the team that brought star power down to earth.”🔥🔥

It’s hard to explain what a game changer the abundance of cheap, clean energy will be. Congratulations to everyone who dedicated their careers to working on this

“From a machine, a star is born” is so deep.

6:36 That line, as well as the little exhale that someone has before bursting into laughter is precious. No one has ever said that sentence in that tone before I bet.

Fusion within a decade has been the goal for 60 years.

Years ago, I took a course on energy engineering as part of my degree. There was only a brief chapter on fusion energy, and how unlikely it was. I never thought they'd actually make this breakthrough in my lifetime. Amazing. Edit: FFS, people. Enough with the needless nitpicking and bickering. Of course I know this is far from viable. The fact they've actually made progress and reached this point is what's impressive. That's the entire point of this video. Seriously, I didn't think I needed to explain something that obvious. I swear, it's like some people are just waiting to type some variation of, "well, actually" at any opportunity and waste time arguing over nothing.

"The power of the sun in the palm of my hand" - Otto Octavius, 2004

Every day I feel like we're more and more living in a sci-fi movie.

So in the final month of 2022 we achieved fusion! Wow sounds like beginning credits of a Star Trek movie where they indicate the first breakthrough that led to the warp engine. In this case the fusion engine. Nice!

"It's not a science problem anymore - it's an engineering problem" - Accurate description. Science is painful, takes unseen amount of effort... But engineering can be exponential.

It is awesome to see 60 Minutes still producing quality content even in new age media. I watch a lot of channels that have covered this but I haven't had the pleasure to see it presented through this lense. This vid is definitely a keeper.

This is incredibly exciting. Explaining the fusion part of the process in laymen terms really helped understand

I appreciated this report that included many aspects of the reported experiment that earlier reports missed. I especially liked the inclusion of Charles Seeife's perspective because almost all previous reports only included fans of nuclear fusion research to provide journalistic 'balance' in their reports. This report also noted that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) deal with nuclear weapons research. In fact, this experiment included a weapons related component that was never mentioned in earlier reports. NIF has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-Bomb) research tool. It was preceded by two other large fusion laser facilities that were expected to lead to the so-called 'ignition' condition. LLNL experiments in this field began in the late 1950s. NIF failed, by a wide margin, to meet it's primary goal by its 2012 deadline. The LLNL has always obscured NIFs primary function when presenting it to the public. One estimate is that NIF has already consumed approximately $11-billion in federal revenues. This experiment took about a week to prepare. The fusion reaction lasted for approximately 0.08 billionths of a second before most of the extremely compressed deuterium/tritium fuel plasma was blasted away from the reaction center by the blast of energy it generated. Only about 4% of the extremely expensive fuel ended up fusing. The rest was scattered in the target chamber which then required removal as radioactive waste. This report failed to mention how rare, expensive and radioactive the tritium fuel is. The current market value is approximately $30,000/g. The precision hohlraum and nearly perfect diamond fuel capsule was converted into a plasma along with the close-in structure that supported the assembly. One estimate of the target cost is $100,000. If one assumes that a repeat experiment is conducted once a week then the duty cycle of the fusion reaction would be 0.0000000000001%. There are many orders of magnitude of advances needed before scaled up fusion energy power reactors, that are commercially viable, can displace our addiction to fossil fuel derived energy sources. Experimenters, in such fields and their fans, must be experts in excluding warning reports, such as the following, from their consciousness. IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian) The lab employs their own definition of 'ignition' that is different from most people concept of ignition. Most people equate the term with something like a match head striking a rough surface where the initial reaction spreads to the rest of the fuel in about two seconds. There was no significant spread of the fusion reaction in the NIF Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments and that reaction was primarily dependent upon the 3 billionths of a second compression from the X-rays generated from the The impinging laser beams. The lab staff claims one reason the laser input energy was about 100 times greater than the fusion energy output is because their lasers are old. In past breakthrough announcements to the public they failed to mention the amount of energy used to create their compressing laser beams. They are looking to eventually employ more modern Laser Diode Pumped Lasers (LDPL) which can be up to 20% efficient. Even the largest of those lasers don't come anywhere close to even one of NIF's laser output energy. In the case of NIF the compressing energy is shifted in wavelength at least twice. If the same was done with LDPLs the efficiency would be far less than 20%. I urge readers to search for the following titles. Is This the ‘Kitty Hawk Moment’ for Fusion Energy? (TheAtlantic) Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking By Charles Seeife - Published on 30 October 2008 ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)