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The purpose of NIF is to investigate the practicality of inertial confinement, not "be a production fusion reactor". They don't use bleeding edge laser tech, no
by OkayPhysicist 4y ago
The purpose of NIF is to investigate the practicality of inertial confinement, not "be a production fusion reactor". They don't use bleeding edge laser tech, nor are they really built to generate significant amounts of power. For context, modern lasers are ~20x more efficient than the ones that NIF is using.
Reporting based on the energy put into the reaction itself (the lasers) reflects far better the feasibility of the confinement tech than spending an inordinate amount of budget on an already incomprehensibly expensive science experiment to try and optimize every last edge condition.
- lordnacho 4y agoAha that makes sense, it's a jumpstart basically?
- ep103 4y agoproof of concept, yeah.
- jboy55 4y agoThe purpose of NIF is primarily to study the effects of age on our nuclear weapons stockpile by simulating the x-ray blast of the primary nuclear device on the secondary fusion stage within an h-bomb in a controlled environment. Then we can tell how the hydrogen stage will be affected by age, and probably how we can optimize the contents and casing of that to be smaller and last longer. Any benefits to the future of power generation is a secondary goal.