Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#2Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#3The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more like 10 shots per second.
Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#4came to HN to post this!! Potentially 2.5 megajoule output from 2.1 input
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#5This would be incredible... very excited for the details in the announcement coming Tuesday.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#6When can I pick up a Mr Fusion at Home Depot?
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#7The 457th "breakthrough" in fusion this year...
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#8I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a lot of other "firsts". I'm guessing the total (and I mean -total-, lasers typically aren't that efficient) energy put into this will be much greater than the output.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#9Didn't they claim this already in 2013? https://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-the-worlds-first-net-positi...
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#10I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a lot of other "firsts". I'm guessing the total (and I mean -total-, lasers typically aren't that efficient) energy put into this will be much greater than the output.
At least according to the TFA, it seems that the breakthrough is that they got 2.5 mJ out vs. the 2.1 mJ that was used to power the laser.