It's huge news, but practical fusion is still far due to the
extremely high input power required for the laser.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20221213a/full/
Quote
The yield surpasses the criteria for ignition established by the National Research Council in 2007. By other measures, such as the amount of energy deposited on the fuel capsule—around 250 kilojoules—the gain, or Q, is around 10, says Michael Campbell, who led NIF construction until 1999. Yet the amount of fusion energy from the record shot amounts to just 1% of the 300 MJ from the grid that’s required to power the 192-beam NIF laser, Herrmann says. Thus, although the lab’s achievement is a significant step, inertial fusion is still a long way from becoming a viable energy source.
A lot of the early reporting I'd seen on this made it seem like we were less than a decade out from commercially viable fusion and the biggest obstacle had finally been tackled.
Still, it's genuinely quite exciting stuff, and I expect a lot of research to go into improving the ignition process so that it doesn't need so much input power
(300MJ!!!
) vs the output power
(~2MJ laser output
) that actually ends up used to run the reaction
(that produces ~3MJ
).
Edited by null1024 2022-12-15 12:33 AM
