So about the NIF laser fusion thingy...
https://www.science.org/content/article/historic-explosion-long-sought-fusion-breakthrough
> If gain meant producing more output energy than input electricity, however, NIF fell far short. Its lasers are inefficient, requiring hundreds of megajoules of electricity to produce the 2 MJ of laser light and 3 MJ of fusion energy. Moreover, a power plant based on NIF would need to raise the repetition rate from one shot per day to about 10 per second.
Don't get me wrong, it is a huge breakthrough and very exciting. But:
> “The physics phenomenon has been demonstrated,” says Riccardo Betti of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.
That's what it is. A PoC of a physics phenomenon, or rather of the fact that it is possible to make it work at will (ish).
It's going to be decades and billions in funding to get it anywhere near to becoming a viable energy source.
It took 12 years between first sustained chain reaction in Chicago Pile-1 and the first grid-connected nuclear power plant becoming operational. It took further 3 years until the first NPP that produced tens of MW of electrical power (which today would on the smaller end of spectrum). That was under just-postwar conditions. Do you expect timelines to be longer now?
@robryk these just-postwar conditions in the USA meant heavy industry in full swing and just waiting for more stuff to build on taxpayer's dime. It meant the New Deal. It meant a lot of money available for huge infrastructure projects there.
Also, I would say that a closer analog to the NIF thing is the first time atom was split by humans, not a reactor achieving self-sustainable criticality. A "we were able to do this once", not a "we are now able to do this in a sustainable way for hours".