Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

ItsAConspiracy t1_j0z17je wrote

Reply to comment by probably_terran in Nuclear fusion breakthrough: What does it mean for space exploration? by Gari_305

Qplasma > 1 has never been done before. It's a serious milestone that scientists have been pursuing for 70 years. It's just not a practical power plant yet. But it does mean the plasma gets more energy from fusion than from the laser, which is likely to help with experiments to improve the yield further.

2

probably_terran t1_j0z3rev wrote

I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t a major milestone… but the first step of many and the goal of Qtotal > 1 is not particularly close. But a lot of the messaging ignores Qtotal completely and at least to me suggests ‘just a few more dollars and we’ll have clean free energy forever. trust me.’ I’d be fine with small scale projects but some (ITER) are billions. To me a proof of concept is worth more like millions.

1

ItsAConspiracy t1_j0z830s wrote

True, but on the other hand a lot of articles have been overly pessimistic about NIF's distance from Qtotal. They point out how inefficient the lasers are, while ignoring that NIF's lasers are old, and equivalent modern lasers are about 40 times more efficient.

There's no getting around that fusion research is pretty expensive. The payoff could be huge though. At this point it might actually be private funding that puts us over the top. CFS for example has about a billion in private funding, to do the same thing as ITER in a much smaller package, using better superconductors.

2