<story><title>US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved</title><url>https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>It just seems a little strange to take credit for a milestone when the milestone everyone cares about is yet to be reached. (More energy out than in.)&lt;p&gt;Good to hear that there&amp;#x27;s a laser design that might achieve that.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>This tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;latzenpratz&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1602686252486217728&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;latzenpratz&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1602686252486217728&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5 megajoules out, that&amp;#x27;s still far less than the energy they originally needed for the lasers,&amp;quot; says Tony Roulstone of the University of Cambridge.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s good to finally see progress. Very few technologies can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor could.</text></item><item><author>jkelleyrtp</author><text>&amp;gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we&amp;#x27;re working with 3.15:2.05.&lt;p&gt;With modern lasers, that&amp;#x27;d be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.&lt;p&gt;The jumps to get here included&lt;p&gt;- 40% with the new targets&lt;p&gt;- 60% with magnetic confinement&lt;p&gt;- 35% with crycooling of the target&lt;p&gt;The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ganbatekudasai</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t take it too personally, but you, and many others here, need to rethink their approach. You see a short tweet without context about a topic you clearly know nothing about (which is totally, fully okay, it&amp;#x27;s a complex topic), and think you are now able to criticize milestones in this impossibly complex topic.&lt;p&gt;Not even ask questions, not something like &amp;quot;hey, I saw this tweet, I know it&amp;#x27;s just a tweet, but can someone help me understand context?&amp;quot;, no, you actually go ahead and criticize work that you know nothing about, and when confronted, you &lt;i&gt;double down&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;On some level, you must know yourself that it might be better to ask as many unloaded questions as you want, but otherwise sit this one out in terms of assessment.</text></comment>
<story><title>US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved</title><url>https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>It just seems a little strange to take credit for a milestone when the milestone everyone cares about is yet to be reached. (More energy out than in.)&lt;p&gt;Good to hear that there&amp;#x27;s a laser design that might achieve that.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>This tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;latzenpratz&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1602686252486217728&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;latzenpratz&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1602686252486217728&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5 megajoules out, that&amp;#x27;s still far less than the energy they originally needed for the lasers,&amp;quot; says Tony Roulstone of the University of Cambridge.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s good to finally see progress. Very few technologies can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor could.</text></item><item><author>jkelleyrtp</author><text>&amp;gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we&amp;#x27;re working with 3.15:2.05.&lt;p&gt;With modern lasers, that&amp;#x27;d be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.&lt;p&gt;The jumps to get here included&lt;p&gt;- 40% with the new targets&lt;p&gt;- 60% with magnetic confinement&lt;p&gt;- 35% with crycooling of the target&lt;p&gt;The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simplicio</author><text>I think the confusion here is at least partially due to most articles obscuring the primary purpose of the NIF.  Its not supposed to support commercial energy development, its supposed to support nuclear weapons development under the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, where testing bombs via setting them off is banned.&lt;p&gt;So the NIF is supposed to give a testbed to study implosion created fusion reactions that produce enough energy to &amp;quot;ignite&amp;quot;, that is, propegate the reaction to the rest of a hypothetical bomb.  In that case, the amount of energy needed for the infrastructure to produce the initial implosion doesn&amp;#x27;t matter, what matters is that the energy coming out is more then the actual energy that triggered the reaction, so that the hypothetical bomb would blow up and not fizzle.</text></comment>