<story><title>Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zbobet2012</author><text>This is the third thread today with pithy &amp;quot;this means nothing takes&amp;quot;. If you&amp;#x27;re thinking of posting a one liner on the subject you should probably stop.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s save some time out of discussion now:&lt;p&gt;1. The lasers at NIF are not designed to be efficient, and they are very old. Modern semiconductor lasers are 20x more efficient. The 300MJ wall plug conversation is stupid, stop pointing it out.&lt;p&gt;2. Dropping crystals and hitting them with lasers is not hard, we do it in semiconductors for EUV light source generation all the time. In fact EUV light sources do it at 100khz or more.&lt;p&gt;3. Power extraction from a bundle of hot material is not a particularly unknown problem. It&amp;#x27;s in fact how every power plant on the planet works.&lt;p&gt;Make no mistake there are a lot of engineering problems to solve. The &amp;quot;droplets&amp;quot; are enormously expensive, the &amp;quot;firing&amp;quot; itself creates debries which need cleared from the chamber, dt supply is not something that&amp;#x27;s readily available in large quantities, blah blah. I&amp;#x27;d love interesting conversation about what stands between ICF and a real energy plant, not hot takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cpleppert</author><text>The studies done ten years ago suggested that the best case scenario was about thirty years( one demonstration phase of 15 years and another development phase of 15 years). This was premised on the INF demonstrating ignition using indirect drive soon after operation. There was also an expectation that the INF would transistion to researching other, possibly more promising technologies like direct drive ignition.&lt;p&gt;Instead, it took over ten years to simply demonstrate ignition using the indirect drive method which was chosen specifically because it was seen as being more technologically viable. This &amp;quot;big breakthrough&amp;quot; was supposed to happen immediately after operation!&lt;p&gt;No one knows whether commercialization of inertial confinement fusion is even possible. Laser efficiency is just one small part; the work to produce and develop a system to reliably shoot hohlraum targets is an order of magnitude harder than shooting a static target in ideal conditions.&lt;p&gt;Compared to these engineering challenges demonstrating ignition is the easy part.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zbobet2012</author><text>This is the third thread today with pithy &amp;quot;this means nothing takes&amp;quot;. If you&amp;#x27;re thinking of posting a one liner on the subject you should probably stop.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s save some time out of discussion now:&lt;p&gt;1. The lasers at NIF are not designed to be efficient, and they are very old. Modern semiconductor lasers are 20x more efficient. The 300MJ wall plug conversation is stupid, stop pointing it out.&lt;p&gt;2. Dropping crystals and hitting them with lasers is not hard, we do it in semiconductors for EUV light source generation all the time. In fact EUV light sources do it at 100khz or more.&lt;p&gt;3. Power extraction from a bundle of hot material is not a particularly unknown problem. It&amp;#x27;s in fact how every power plant on the planet works.&lt;p&gt;Make no mistake there are a lot of engineering problems to solve. The &amp;quot;droplets&amp;quot; are enormously expensive, the &amp;quot;firing&amp;quot; itself creates debries which need cleared from the chamber, dt supply is not something that&amp;#x27;s readily available in large quantities, blah blah. I&amp;#x27;d love interesting conversation about what stands between ICF and a real energy plant, not hot takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gwypaas</author><text>&amp;gt; 3. Power extraction from a bundle of hot material is not a particularly unknown problem. It&amp;#x27;s in fact how every power plant on the planet works.&lt;p&gt;Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss.&lt;p&gt;Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale.&lt;p&gt;Unless you can step around the steam turbine I do not see this becoming anything outside of incredibly small niches.</text></comment>