|
|
|
|
|
|
by jokteur
1279 days ago
|
|
|
I see people reacting left and right saying "yeah, but the lasers used 300MJ" like a gotcha. At the press conference, they were pretty clear about what they achieved. They stated multiple times that it was the laser energy in, and not the wall plug energy. Also they also said that the lasers weren't designed to be efficient in the first place, because they want to maximize scientific output. And they were pretty clear that there are many many steps required until we have fusion energy. It is a significant milestone, and people are trying to downplay that by stating fusion will never be feasible anyways, and this is why we shouldn't be excited. |
|
|
> “The fusion reaction is heating the fusion reaction, which is making more fusions happen,” says Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “It’s like the fire has been lit. This is the first controlled fusion ignition that we’ve ever seen, and that’s spectacular.”
Well for me it's debatable whether this is such a huge achievement, because the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled fusion is a bit academic in this case. In uncontrolled fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon), you are using a nuclear fission primary stage to generate enough energy to start the fusion reaction in the secondary stage. In the NIF, you are using lasers (that have to be aligned to trillionths of a meter and damage their own guiding optics everytime they fire) to start the fusion reaction in a smaller pellet (that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars). So the only real difference between the first and the second case is that the H-bomb is smaller, much more expensive per amount of energy released, and explodes inside a chamber. And it's obvious to pretty much everyone who is paying attention that transforming this setup into a working and cost-effective fusion power plant is a very tall order...