However those lasers aren't very efficient, generating the 2.05 MJ required more than 300 MJ of electricity.
What is the path forward... Can anyone elaborate? Do we make the lasers 100x more efficient? Will hitting a target with a 100x mass yield 315 MJ?
Edit: thanks everyone for the clarification. Really helps me putting the numbers in context.
Weapons research might be a motivator too.
I would be astounded if this can be commercialised. Not because I'm cynical for the sake of it, but because I cannot in good faith see a credible engineering path which might make that possible without spectacular breakthroughs in a number of disciplines.
MCF seems more likely to get somewhere. But my best guess is that advances in renewables will have made fusion redundant within ten years. There is far more scope for incremental and affordable improvements in collection, distribution, and storage than there is for the Big Science breakthroughs required to build one commercially viable ICF plant.
We had never done that before.
This will probably unlock more funding. In the end a different approach is probably more likely to lead to a power plant unless truly gigantic advancements in laser efficiency can be achieved.
They can be used only as the pumping sources for the solid-state lasers or fiber lasers that can produce the short pulses.
So the efficiencies of two lasers must be multiplied. I doubt that there is any chance to obtain an electrical to light conversion efficiency above 10%.
So the energy generated by the fusion reaction should be much greater than 10 times the light energy, to be able to produce excess energy, even with lasers 10 times more efficient than now.
Yes, it's better, but the argument still holds
Reporting based on the energy put into the reaction itself (the lasers) reflects far better the feasibility of the confinement tech than spending an inordinate amount of budget on an already incomprehensibly expensive science experiment to try and optimize every last edge condition.
Then we can tell how the hydrogen stage will be affected by age, and probably how we can optimize the contents and casing of that to be smaller and last longer.
Any benefits to the future of power generation is a secondary goal.
In nuclear fusion, "ignition" means that you get more energy out than the lasers impart. This is the first time anyone has pulled that off in decades of trying, which is a big deal.
But practical nuclear fusion would of course require that you get out more energy _from the entire system_ than you put in, and getting there will require even more problems to be solved. But now at least one obstacle has been overcome!
The term is refreshingly intuitive. For decades we've been striking stone and flint. Sparks. We just got a bit of kindling going. It's no bonfire. But it's a big step forward.
Are you sure of that? This is from 2014: https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/giant-leap-for-nucle...
Hurricane’s current output, although more than the hydrogen fuel put into the reaction, hasn’t yet reached the stated goal to achieve “ignition," where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. At that point it might be possible to make a sustainable power plant based on the technology.> Hurricane’s current output, although more than the hydrogen fuel put into the reaction, hasn’t yet reached the stated goal to achieve “ignition," where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply.
Also, couldn't the net energy from the ignition be used to continue the reaction, so you only need the lasers for startup?
Sorry for the newb questions, just curious.
For power generation, since the energy from any fusion reaction is primarily emitted as heat and neutrons. The neutrons are difficult to utilize and is basically wasted energy, but the heat would just heat water, turning it into steam, then turning a turbine.
Don’t have a good explanation for your second question, although I think the short answer is “not with the way the Livermore experiment was set up.”
The idea, ultimately, is that like with a wood fire, the energy from the fuel "burning" is what starts the next bit of fuel "burning", and then as it runs on it's own as long as you keep giving it more fuel, you collect the excess heat by boiling water.
So, similar to a wood fire, you might need to use a blowtorch to get it started, and run at a net negative of energy, but the exciting thing is that there was a little flame... that means we can probably make a roaring fire out of it.
Fusion is the opposite. Fusion's natural state is Not Fusing, so in ICF you have to keep compressing and heating the fuel. Using equipment with optically tight tolerances and epic pulsed energy densities. Which are somehow maintained reliably for long periods. In spite of significant debris and huge temperature swings.