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"Capture the energy". They haven't even looked at that step. Laser fusion is about the least promising, most impractical possible approach to building a power

"Capture the energy". They haven't even looked at that step. Laser fusion is about the least promising, most impractical possible approach to building a power reactor, even if you do manage to get ignition. Since at least the early 1980s, the word on the street has been that the talk about power is just a politically palatable wrapper for the weapons application. And let's just say that some of the people I heard that from, back in the 1980s, were in enough of a position to know that they probably shouldn't have said anything to some random kid like me. Not to say that there aren't a few benighted souls working on it who've managed to convince themselves it's a power source, but notice that nobody but Livermore has ever bothered to put much into inertial confinement... and Livermore is a weapons lab?

cbkeller 6y ago
That's fair enough from a political perspective (after all, as they say in the article, >70% of NIF shots are going to [nuclear] stockpile stewardship now) -- but just to give NIF a bit of credit on the "basic science" front, it has turned out to be quite good for studying the properties of matter under extreme compression more generally. Some mineral physicists I know have used this to write some cool papers about the properties of natural materials at conditions replicating those expected in the cores of giant exoplanets [1-3], for example. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0437-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0437-9 [2] https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00023 https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00023 [3] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaao5864 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaao5864
- noobermin 6y ago
  Funny tidbit, there is a huge scramble and fight over these few shot days from different research groups across the US that can actually be used for non-nuke and non-fusion physics, they're called "Discovery Science" shots and there are only like a dozen or so each year. For example, last year 18 shot days were devoted to DS.[0] [0] https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/next-10-discovery-science-experiments-chosen https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/next-10-discovery-science-exper...

cbkeller 6y ago

That's fair enough from a political perspective (after all, as they say in the article, >70% of NIF shots are going to [nuclear] stockpile stewardship now) -- but just to give NIF a bit of credit on the "basic science" front, it has turned out to be quite good for studying the properties of matter under extreme compression more generally. Some mineral physicists I know have used this to write some cool papers about the properties of natural materials at conditions replicating those expected in the cores of giant exoplanets [1-3], for example. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0437-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0437-9 [2] https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00023 https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00023 [3] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaao5864 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaao5864

noobermin 6y ago
Funny tidbit, there is a huge scramble and fight over these few shot days from different research groups across the US that can actually be used for non-nuke and non-fusion physics, they're called "Discovery Science" shots and there are only like a dozen or so each year. For example, last year 18 shot days were devoted to DS.[0] [0] https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/next-10-discovery-science-experiments-chosen https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/next-10-discovery-science-exper...