[nforgerit]

Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way.

That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternative approaches to fusion) or this weird "we were able to beam particles through a wormhole" story some months ago, make me very skeptic about the current startup economy.

It all reminds me so much of the movie "Don't look up".

[DennisP]

Helion has built six reactors. Their sixth maintained a vacuum for 16 months while doing thousands of fusion shots, exceeding 100 million degrees. Now they're building their seventh reactor, which will attempt net electricity in 2024.

NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1% efficient. Equivalent lasers today are over 20% efficient, so their results were not as bad as many articles made out. They're still off by a factor of five, but also they got a 230% jump in output by increasing the laser power only 8%.

[zbrozek]

How does resetting the chamber after a pulse work? I would naively assume waste products are produced and probably need to be removed eventually, if not on every full "engine cycle".

How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?