Laser Fusion Experiment Unleashes an Energetic Burst of Optimism (nytimes.com) 187
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists have come tantalizingly close to reproducing the power of the sun -- albeit only in a speck of hydrogen for a fraction of a second. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of hydrogen, they were able to ignite a burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power -- energy released when hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, the same process that occurs within stars. Indeed, Mark Herrmann, Livermore's deputy program director for fundamental weapons physics, compared the fusion reaction to the 170 quadrillion watts of sunshine that bathe Earth's surface. "This about 10 percent of that," Dr. Herrmann said. And all of the fusion energy emanated from a hot spot about as wide as a human hair, he said.
But the burst -- essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb -- lasted only 100-trillionths of a second. Still, that spurred a burst of optimism for fusion scientists who have long hoped that fusion could someday provide a boundless, clean energy source for humanity. The success also signified a moment of redemption for Livermore's football-stadium-size laser apparatus, which is named the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F. Despite an investment of billions of dollars -- construction started in 1997 and operations began in 2009 -- the apparatus initially generated hardly any fusion at all. In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported success, but the energy produced then was minuscule -- the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. On Aug. 8, the burst of energy was much greater -- 70 percent as much as the energy of laser light hitting the hydrogen target. That is still a losing proposition as an energy source, consuming more power than it produces. But scientists are confident that further jumps in energy output were possible with fine-tuning of the experiment.
But the burst -- essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb -- lasted only 100-trillionths of a second. Still, that spurred a burst of optimism for fusion scientists who have long hoped that fusion could someday provide a boundless, clean energy source for humanity. The success also signified a moment of redemption for Livermore's football-stadium-size laser apparatus, which is named the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F. Despite an investment of billions of dollars -- construction started in 1997 and operations began in 2009 -- the apparatus initially generated hardly any fusion at all. In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported success, but the energy produced then was minuscule -- the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. On Aug. 8, the burst of energy was much greater -- 70 percent as much as the energy of laser light hitting the hydrogen target. That is still a losing proposition as an energy source, consuming more power than it produces. But scientists are confident that further jumps in energy output were possible with fine-tuning of the experiment.
Can you extract power from it... (Score:2)
And use it to feed the lasers to create the next one and so forth?
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You can definitely extract the power from it. We've done that plenty of times, with fusion bombs.
The trick is doing it in a controlled way that, as you say, let's you feed power back into the loop with extra left to power the city.
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I would not call that "extracting power". I would call that "depositing an enormous, stunningly destructive payload".
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I'm going to patent your idea and call it a "son" or something like that. Still working on the name.
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Thats kind of the plan.
The big hurdle (well there are many, but at a more macro level) is for fusion power to be useful it needs to generate more power than is fed into it. Once it can do that, then you just loop it around and scoop off the excess. Although one must presume the next big goal would be figuring out how to scale it.
70% is an awesome achievement. We where orders of magnitude away from the goal not too long ago. Now they just need to squeeze that extra 30% and someones gonna get themselves a nob
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BS, Lawrence does a lot more than nuke weapons research. They are deeply involved in energy research being part of the Dept. of Energy. I can see how the term Energy in their owner confused you.
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They already have massive supercomputers that get that job done. There's a reason we haven't tested a nuclear weapon since the early 90s.
Re:Can you extract power from it... (Score:4, Informative)
Supercomputers are great for modelling things you understand, but you have to be able to compare your model runs to the real thing.
Re: Can you extract power from it... (Score:2)
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The US Department of Energy also includes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees regulation of commercial CIVILIAN nuclear energy generation.
It's entirely possible for them to oversee both. They're kind of a bit department.
Based on the title (Score:2)
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Energetic Burst of Optimism
It sounded more like someone had invented the improbability drive.
Re: Based on the title (Score:2)
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Would you say it would be improbable? Can we calculate exactly how improbable it would be?
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My razor has 5 blades, bucko.
Re: Based on the title (Score:2)
If you get the chance of a tour, take it. (Score:2)
I have had the fortune to tour NIF a couple of times. It's a very impressive and interesting facility.
Lots of people with "Q" clearances work there!
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Just so we're clear, because its not always clear.
"Q" clearances are meaningless outside the Dept of Energy. Theres an entire subculture of astonishingly gullible idiots on the net that seem to think someone with a "Q" clearance would know about anything secret that isn't hydrogen bombs.
For instance: There is no such thing as a "CIA agent" with a "Q" clearance. Nor is there a Pentagon clearance called "Q" or an FBI, Homeland security or so on.
Its just the guys who know the sensitive stuff about how to build
Re: If you get the chance of a tour, take it. (Score:2)
Numbers don't add up (Score:5, Informative)
10 quadrillion watts * (1/100 trillion) sec = 100 joules
60 Watts * 5 minutes = 18000 joules
It's Lawrence Livermore, so I'm more inclined to believe this is an error by the NYTimes reporter, rather than an error by LLNL. Does anyone know what the real numbers are, so I know whether or not to be excited?
Re:Numbers don't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
Journalists at journalist school all attend a mandatory course called "How to always get the units messed up". That is why they are incapable of presenting any technical information coherently.
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Probably they mean the laser pulse lasted for 1/100 trillionth of a second, but the fusion then released 10 quadrillion watts in the (unspecified) time following, which was still only 70% of the power that went into the laser pulse.
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Billion used to mean trillion in the U.K.! The period around the official switchover in 1974 was a confusing one for journalists there. Billion is a more common number, and they called it "thousand million." As for trillion, maybe that's where Carl Sagan first heard "million million."
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100-trillionths of a second [...]
10 quadrillion watts * (1/100 trillion) sec = 100 joules
100 / trillion vs 1/(100 trillion) ? You seem to be off by four orders of magnitude. I make it 1000kj.
It's Lawrence Livermore, so I'm more inclined to believe this is an error by the NYTimes reporter
Or maybe not?
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You seem to be off by four orders of magnitude. I make it 1000kj.
Or, for our American readers, 238 calories.
This is a lesson on why to use standard notation.
Clearer to say "0.1 nanosecond" and "10 Terawatt".
Even better, use scientific notation.
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Or, for our American readers, 238 calories.
Calories are a metric unit: The energy used to heat a gram of water one degree C.
The "American" unit for thermal energy is the BTU: The energy used to heat a pound of water one degree F.
The "American" unit for mechanical energy analogous to the Joule is the foot-pound.
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Ironically the "American" unit is British Thermal Units (BTUs).
Similarly they use English measures, even though in England they use the slightly different Imperial measures.
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Clarification: that's food calories, as one would find on a U.S. nutritional label - the energy to heat one kilogram of water by one degC. In the rest of the world, food calories are properly called kilocalories.
Re:Numbers don't add up -100 trillioths, not 1/100 (Score:3)
10 quadrillion watts * (100 trillionth) sec = 10**13 * 10**-7 = 10**6 = 1M joules
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Re:Numbers don't add up (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]
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10 quadrillion watts * (1/100 trillion) sec = 100 joules ... 60 Watts * 5 minutes = 18000 joules
Close enough for astrophysics.
The point is that an enormous amount of power produced in a tiny instant of time does not amount to much energy, and energy is what you need to get stuff done. Producing enormous instantaneous power output from nuclear fusion was done long ago, in thermonuclear bombs. Making the power continuous and controllable is the tricky bit.
Re:Numbers don't add up (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion yield was 1.3 MJ per pulse/capsule. Laser energy delivered to the fusion capsule was 1.9 MJ, so the efficiency is 68% by that metric. However this omits the laser energy that didn't get correctly focused/absorbed by the capsule, as well as the energy lost in the lasers themselves (which are probably ~1% efficient). The press release doesn't list a gain factor [wikipedia.org], but based on other results NIF has reported, I believe this new result is roughly Q ~ 0.007. This is a huge achievement for NIF (who were sitting at Q ~ 0.00008 in 2013 and Q ~ 0.0003 in 2018). However Q = 1 is what's necessary to reach "scientific breakeven" where the fusion energy output equals the energy input for heating the plasma. Obviously a viable power plant needs to be Q > 1 to account for other losses (like the inefficiency of capture/conversion into electricity). Q > 5 ("ignition") is considered necessary to achieve a self-propagating fusion reaction.
By way of comparison, the current record for magnetic confinement fusion is Q = 0.67 achieved by JET [wikipedia.org] in 1997.
Should we be excited? This is great progress, and every new experiment increases our understanding of the complicated physics of fusion plasmas. From a scientific and engineering perspective, this is amazing. However, if you're most interested in eventual fusion power, then magnetic confinement (tokamak [wikipedia.org] designs) are well ahead, and ITER [wikipedia.org] is much more likely than NIF to provide a pathway to fusion power plants.
This is really going to help with global warming. (Score:2)
We can skip a few steps and go straight to inferno!
Was it a net positive? (Score:2)
From my understanding, the major hurdle with fusion power generation is that it takes more energy to sustain the reaction than you get out of it. So relative to the amount of energy consumed by the lasers to initiate the reaction, did they at least get more energy out in the end?
Re: Was it a net positive? (Score:2)
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Short, simple, to the point... I like it! Thanks!
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70% of what they put in came back out. This is actually a phenomenal achievement, and several times better than what they expected. So worth getting excited about, but still far far far from a practical power plant.
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It's considerably worse than that. This approach to laser fusion is of only theoretic and technical interest. Those huge lasers are enormous, enormously expensive, enormously fragile, and require huge amounts of on-going maintenance. (Well, I'm assuming it's the same approach it was the last time I looked into it.) They also last for a limited number of cycles, because that sudden surges of power put them under lots of stress.
That said, the theoretic and technical reasons *may* justify it. But I'd be r
This is not fusion POWER research (Score:3)
How exactly fusion power is supposed to be generated and extracted in this kind of setup ?!? How do you make it a continuous or at least repeatable, so it generates heat ? Even if you can cycle those powerful lasers fast enough (which I seriously doubt) how are the pellets going to be loaded? They will need moving parts inside the burn chamber and insane precision...
This is fusion weapon research masked as fusion power research.
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Don’t be so cynical. I’m confident this research has gotten us to the point where we’re only 10-15 years away from practical fusion energy!
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How do you make [laser fusion] a continuous or at least repeatable, so it generates heat?
How do you make the combustion in an automobile engine continuous so it can turn the shaft and smoothly push the car? You DON'T HAVE TO! ... how are the pellets going to be loaded?
How are machine-gun bullets "loaded" into a target?
They will need moving parts inside the burn chamber ...
Just like the machine gun target needs moving parts (other than the bullets)?
They will need ... insane precision
LASER light systems are
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This is fusion weapon research masked as fusion power research.
I don't know how you justify that assessment. Is anybody is interested in making better thermonuclear bombs, when current technology could wipe us all out many times over?
A basic problem with peaceful applications of nuclear fusion is that the conditions to produce fusion are extreme, and often can only be produced in explosive events. That does not imply you are making bombs.
Years ago, I researched magnetic field theory, and came across something called the "exploding coil method". Iron is often used to co
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There's another school of thought which suggests that if this could be perfected, there'd be a lot less need for weapons. The thinking being that if we can stop squabbling over oil or whatever else, then we won't need the weapons we threaten each other with every day.
There may well be some weapons research going on here. But one wonders just how much more powerful we need a weapon to be than the fission bombs we already have. More efficient and cheaper to own perhaps, but otherwise, not sure what else.
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The NIF did reach an important milestone - they achieved ignition proving that inertial confinement (heat & pressure) can produce almost as much output energy as input energy using something other than a fission explosion. It basically proves that it is possible. We also have experimental evidence to back up the mathematical model needed to
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Yes, and the mechanism would disintegrate if you fired it several times/second, even if you could get enough power.
This is a research device. It is not a model of something that could readily be developed into a power source. Reports that it will lead to that are, at best, misleading. It may lead to theoretic or technical developments that will eventually lead to a power source, but it won't be any straightforward development from this system.
This in *exclusively* a weapons program (Score:2)
The way they're doing it is useless for energy production, but very useful for weapons research, and everybody knows it. They're not even trying to hide it. At this point, the only thing nobody gets, is why they're acting as if it's not.
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Wow, everybody has been getting the memos. Please inform us what those memos say.
What is in the memo (Score:2)
https://str.llnl.gov/2021-03/h... [llnl.gov]
To put this into perspective (Score:2)
What they did was they produced roughly 0.000000028 kilowatt-hours of energy.
If that doesn't sound like much, it's because it isn't.
So can somebody explain to me what difference a supposedly really high power output makes when the total energy produced is still negligible? What does this sort of thing prove, exacty?
Dupe (Score:2)
This is a dupe. I read the same story in 1964. Also, every few years thereafter.
just 5 years away! (Score:2)
But a GREAT article headline ! like something out of the onion
Reality Check (Score:4, Informative)
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Well.. technically speaking, solar energy is fusion energy.
We're just grabbing the energy from a huge plasma ball in space.
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Cool. Now let's just build another solar fusion on the other side of the planet and say goodbye to nighttime forever.
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> So as a power source, what you want to use is anything but the type of fusion the sun is made of.
I'm afraid this is very poor logic. The solar energy is already available, and requires no significant technological breakthroughs, merely engineering. It's also massively scalable and presents none of the fuel generation or harvesting difficulties of tritium and lithium. There is _no point_ to fusion power on Earth.
Scaling solar power enough to provide all of Earth's power consumption may require solar mi
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Great, now talk about the environmental damage necessary to pave deserts with solar panels, and what endangered species you're completely wiping out with that plan. Or how much you would need to scale massively destructive and polluting mining operations in order to get the materials necessary for building a couple billion solar panels in order to satisfy current energy needs, much less any and all growth.
Having a compact source of net positive fusion power is something that this society is going to need i
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There is _no point_ to fusion power on Earth.
The "point" of fusion power will likely be physical footprint, cost of production, and asset reliability.
One can easily imagine the total system cost of solar, wind, and batteries to be higher than a much more focused grid that revolved around fusion power. That's theoretical of course until there is a product by which we can judge costs, but it's certainly plausible enough to see if we can do it.
Solar and wind power take a lot of space, particularly solar power. While I'm sure someone will spout off that
Nuclear weapons stewardship (Score:2)
This contraption is not about civilian electric power generation.
https://str.llnl.gov/2021-03/h... [llnl.gov]
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The solar energy is already available, and requires no significant technological breakthroughs, merely engineering.
But it's also diffuse. There is not much solar energy illuminating one collector, so to get to utility scale you would have to pave over huge expanses of the sacred Environment with collector arrays. Someone would have to keep them clean enough to maintain efficiency. Fusion would mean withing for breakthroughs in the tecnology, but night storage for solar at utility scale (not "fifteen minutes while we rebance the grid") means waiting for magic battery breakthroughs.
For now, where solar really, um, shines
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What about your "logic"? All you would need is roughly 30 billion solar panels, collecting solar energy for a year, and some way to store a quadrillion watts which could be emitted in an instant to match the performance profile.
That's only a little more than 4 panels per person. That seems pretty good. As for your storage number, what does it mean to store quadrillion Watts? Watts are a rate, how doe you store a unit that's a rate? Do you mean you would need a storage system capable of releasing power at a quadrillion Watts? Because that seems to be about two orders of magnitude too high.
Re: Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:2)
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Who said anything about civilian applications. This is the DoD. They do shock, awe, death, & destruction.
Technically, Lawrence Livermore is funded by the Department of Energy, but it is considered to be a weapons lab.
Re: Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:2)
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... and the Department of Defense isn't interested in really powerful energy sources anymore? You know these guys operate boats with multiple fission reactors on board for propulsion and steam generation, right? And other boats that go underwater and don't come up for a few months at a time that also are powered by fission reactors?
You don't think they are interested in cracking the fusion nut open so they can then optimize and reduce the size of the thing (the same thing they did with fission naval react
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Also, you don't think that dependence on foreign oil reserves isn't a national security issue? If the promise of "too cheap to meter" is finally realized, switching to EVs would mean there is no reason to give two shits about the middle east anymore outside of general humanitarian concerns like genocide. We could untangle ourselves from those millenium-long conflicts and stop making them worse, which in turn would cause less threats to national security from terrorist fundamentalists.
Their biggest bitch h
Re: Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:2)
This is the DoD. They do shock, awe, death, & destruction.
Not really [fuzzyskunk.com].
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Not really
There are some applications that need high energy density that you cannot get with solar or wind
If humans figure out fusion (and it is getting so close that commercial organizations are getting involved), then it will be a valuable resource to help us break the grip of fossil fuels
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> There are some applications that need high energy density that you cannot get with solar or wind
Solar, and wind, can be and are turned into high density chemical energy, In fact, they are, particularly solar, which is used to create bio-diesel. There is not even a hint that fusion power can be done without a very large power plant. Even the most optimistic tokamak designs rely on molten lithium cooling to harvest neutrons and regenerate tritium. and that _cannot_ be handled in a portable container.
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There was probably someone in the 1940s that said you could never have an operational fission reactor that would fit on a submarine either. And yet, here we are with about 9 generations of GE naval reactors worth of deployed hardware, the latest of which only needs to refuel every 30 years or so.
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Your Mr Fusion will be delivered by Amazon drone.
Re: Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:2)
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Re:Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, that argument again for why trees never fall over: that 100 yr old tree in my yard has never fallen over, 50 years ago it was at least 50 years from falling over, hence, it will always be 50 years from falling over. Brilliant!! And to think the scientists at Lawrence don't have the benefit of your deep intellect and decide to keep bashing their heads against the wall you insist is there. What dolts.
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Fusion has always been 20-50 years in future.
Obligatory funding graph [wikimedia.org]
Fusion has never been "20-50 years in the future". Fusion has only been a certain amount of effort (a.k.a. money) in the future, and we haven't spent nearly that much effort.
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Well we just stopped spending $12B/mo in Afghanistan, maybe we can chip off some of that savings into fusion and get this thing done.
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Your graph only shows US funding. The US isn't the only entity funding fusion research. If it were a sure thing that simply required a requisite amount of funding like your comment implies, other entities like the EU, China, Japan, or private enterprise would have long ago spent the necessary money in order to unlock the billions and billions of revenue practical fusion plants would enable.
Re:Fusion commercial energy source? Never. (Score:4, Funny)
fusion power is 8 minutes away and always has been.
Re:of course there's optimism (Score:5, Informative)
...as long as the grant money keeps flowing.
NIF isn't funded with grants.
They get DoD dollars for nuclear weapon simulation and maintenance.
These experiments are part of that work.
Re: of course there's optimism (Score:2)
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Um, I'm going to deny your hairsplitting and say that, for the vast bulk of the populace and common idiom that "DoD dollars for nuclear weapon simulation and maintenance" = taxpayers dollars money raining down from the government to do what you do = grants.
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RAM initially used to cost $1 per bit and was made by hand.
We've automated the crap out of producing incredibly incredibly complex CPUs, and gotten the cost down to peanuts in comparison to how complicated the circuitry is (and the cost to build the fabs).
If you think that laser pulsed fusion is going to continue to be as painstakingly precise and expensive as it currently is, if it proves to be a viable source of energy, then you haven't learned anything about technological progress and profit motive.
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Memory got cheaper per bit mostly because progress in technology allowed the bits to get smaller in dimension. Car analogy: a cheap car in 1980 was $4000 or $16k in today's dollars. Not very different from a cheap car today, despite technological progress and profit motive.
Fusion power production is not something that will become cost effective by miniaturization. In any case, the purpose of laser pulsed fusion is to do measurements and gather data that can be used in computer simulations to guide the desig
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a cheap car in 1980 was $4000 or $16k in today's dollars. Not very different from a cheap car today, despite technological progress
At that point, cars were already a mass produced mass market product. And while modern small cars might cost the same, they offer a hell of a lot more in terms of safety and creature comforts. From the 80s to today, it's been small incremental improvements.
Fusion power production? First we have to make it work; figuring out how to get fusion going, how to sustain it, contain plasma, extract useful energy from it, and so on. Lots of ideas about all that, but most have yet to be put into practice. Tha
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You could have made that argument about liquid metal cooled fission breeder reactors back in the '80s, but they've actually become more expensive to build now that we know how difficult and expensive it is to decommission them (and also since Pu239 production is now considered a liability rather than a benefit as there's enough of it around for more nuclear weapons than anyone actually needs). Some things are just impractical, and I'd bet laser-initiated inertially-confined fusion is one of them. The econ
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My guess is that if lasers, computers, and the other components were ever going to be good enough, they should already be good enough.
This kind of thinking would still have computers based on vacuum tubes.
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The point, which Lawrence was very clear about, was that lasers were not going to be how to build a fusion reactor. The goal was the science behind the fusion, i.e., how to get it there, how to control it, etc. But maybe you could tell the scientists there they are wasting their time, I'm sure they'd listen to you as they would have never thought of it in that way before.
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Those two statements are not at odds with each other. It's entirely possible that they are using inertial confinement fusion in order to just create some fusion to then experiment on how to contain, how to extract energy, how to create and test new materials that speak to many of the ongoing concerns.
The best place to test stuff meant for a to-be-yet-designed commercial fusion reactor, is in an apparatus capable of creating fusion. Which really isn't very different than a lot of the experimentation that s