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.
For an almost completely unwarranted analogy (so, more of an illustrative example):
April 1932 - first time an atom was split by humans
June 1945 - first human-initiated nuclear explosion (even with all the resources pumped into the Manhattan project)
December 1946 - first nuclear reactor hosting a self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction
January 1954 - first nuclear-powered sub
June 1954 - first nuclear reactor generating power directly for public energy grid
Took 22 years for fission.
> April 1932 - first time an atom was split by humans
For fusion something similar has happened decades ago. (You are pointing at the experiment that involved causing fission without a chain reaction. It wasn't understood for couple of years after it that fission actually happened.)
I would put "getting energy-positive[*] fusion" in the timeline roughly around CP-1's criticality.
> December 1946 - first nuclear reactor hosting a self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction
Wasn't that CP-1? It reached criticality in 1942.
@robryk yeah, that toot was edited to fix that date.
As I said, this is a highly imperfect and completely unwarranted analogy. the point of it is: NIF fusion breakthrough is not going to have practical effects for power generation for years, or more likely decades.
I totally agree with a lower estimate of, say, "<10% chance of practical powerplant within 7y", but am very surprised by the "decades" one (which I understand as ~30years).
@robryk because:
https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/109508264679462815