US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over::undefined
This news gives me confidence that fusion is now only 9 years away.
For several decades it’s been 20 years away, and before that 50, so yeah. Progress.
(No /s, I think the money is finally in place to make it happen, and that was always the bottleneck.)
That said, NIF is for weapons research, not power, but some of the knowledge they gain is probably transferable.
I can’t believe that “Secretary of State John Kerry” passed editorial review in 2023. In Nature. Makes you wonder why academic institutions are paying these journals exorbitant subscription fees for alleged editorial rigor.
The use of “over and over again” gives me amusing Homer Simpson thoughts, “Oh yeah baby fuse me so hard! Just like that!”
The article glosses over it a bit, but I think it’s important to stress here that this isn’t energy gain in any real sense. Its more energy being created from fusion than laser energy gets to the target, but before then 99% of the energy input is lost in creating the laser beams.
So to give one of the examples used in the article, 2MJ of laser energy is delivered to the target and 3.9MJ is released. But to create this 200MJ was consumed to create that laser pulse.
Did they already build cooling?
Let me know when it actually produces electricity then I’ll be happy till then we should have been working on MSR
This one is for weapons research, nothing like the ones that are doing power research, but some of the knowledge might transfer
Oh of course it is, 7000 nukes aren’t enough
