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.
@robryk but sure, let me run with your take.
Say the NIF thing is closer to what CP-1 was, and the thing similar to splitting the atom happened decades ago.
So it was *decades* between that event and the CP-1-anaolog-ish event today, while it took 12y for on the fission timeline.
So it's reasonable to expect that the next "12y of development" thing (between CP-1 and grid power generation) will also take decades.
But again, highly imperfect analogy.
Ah, you expect different parts of timelines to scale in similar ways. I see, what you are saying indeed follows then.
My intuitive assumption would be to assume that different parts will be similar in terms of absolute time taken (or rather, that the additional difficulties in each are independent of additional difficulties in other stages), but I don't have evidence or even good intuitive reasons for that.
@robryk
> Ah, you expect different parts of timelines to scale in similar ways. I see, what you are saying indeed follows then.
Not necessarily. I was only entertaining your take.
My take is that I expect it to take decades to get any practically applicable power generation system using nuclear fusion.