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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

It was discussed a lot in the threads about this yesterday, but apparently the lab had relatively inefficient lasers. Newer ones are an order of magnitude more efficient

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This is what I captured from the press conference:

300 megajoules was used to generate the laser (this is also captured in [1]). They also mentioned that newer lasers have 20% wall plug efficiency. If so, they need to improve the energy output by 5x in order to break even relative to wall plug energy consumption.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/world-record-fusion-experi...

“Wall plug energy consumption”

I don’t know why but this caused me to picture Alec from Tech Connections in a few years time, showing off his fusion laser plugged in to a kill-a—watt, while he explains carefully, through the magic of buying two of them, why you can get more power out than you put in, and why these old inertial confinement fusors were pretty neat actually.

That's just the lasers, the rest of the plant needs power too. Big water pumps are big power hogs, as is the rest of the supporting equipment that any power plant requires to operate. Far over "wall plug" break even is required for commercial viability.

Just bootstrap a second fusion power plant with the first, then continue on, similar to how compilers for a language can be written in the language itself.

Bootstrapping the power plant isn't the problem. The economics of the power plant are the problem, naming producing a worthwhile surplus of power, after accounting for all the power needed by the plant itself.

So if we had the 20% wall plug efficiency, then we need that 3.2:2 ratio to become 10:2 to hit break-even. That looks like a huge gap but maybe there are tricks here that resolve this once you get over the initial gap.

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