Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

LeviathanPC t1_j080plz wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in [OC] Cost of Carbon Zero - Historical Look At U.S. Funding of Fusion Energy by Metalytiq

Ya OP didn't word that well. IIRC the laser put around 2MJ on target and the resulting fusion yield about 3MJ, so if NIFs laser was more efficient than what OP said would be accurate. But in actuality it took the NIF laser something like 200-300MJ for that shot. But when you consider that NIF is getting relatively old and that it's a research center so efficency wasn't at the forefront of design it's not unreasonable to see where this could hopefully lead.

2

[deleted] t1_j086dhe wrote

Your lasers would need to be 100x as efficient and your reaction 100x more powerful to be a useful energy return..

1

LeviathanPC t1_j08848l wrote

But is that impossible, I don't think so. I'm not going to say we're 10 years away from it being viable because we've been 10 years away for the past 50 years. But look at how fast every other technology evolves, this is literally the beginning for where it all starts coming together. I'd bet people alive today will see fusion energy become a reality.

1

[deleted] t1_j08bmmz wrote

>But look at how fast every other technology evolves

See, that right there is the fundamental error all of you guys are making. That's not how progress works at all. Most of the time progress is painstakingly slow and its actually slower now than almost any time since the start of the industrial revolution. When a new technological front opens up you do indeed get rapid progress, but after 15 years or so progress slows to a crawl again. At the rate fusion research is going it will take 100+ years to actually reach a point it could reach a real net gain end to end. And even if it does so what? The cost in terms of steel, concrete, etc is going to be astronomically high regardless.

1