[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?