3 ms·
Laser ICF is not ever going to be applicable to power generation. NIF is first and foremost a weapons research facility, and the primary reason NIF exists is to
by DeIonizedPlasma 4y ago
Laser ICF is not ever going to be applicable to power generation. NIF is first and foremost a weapons research facility, and the primary reason NIF exists is to investigate plasma in regimes similar to the core of a detonating H-Bomb. The ignition results are nice and might provide some useful new experimental data on the behavior of ignited plasmas, but ultimately this has very little bearing on the future of fusion energy. In order to get useful energy out of laser confinement, we would need to do about 1 shot every second. Currently, the hohlraum (fuel pellet) is made of diamond and gold, machined to sub-picometer precision. Beyond the fact that it takes much, MUCH longer to charge up the systems for a shot, you'd need to find a way to manufacture these extremely expensive pellets en masse, load them into the chamber, fire, capture the energy, and also design your chamber to not fall apart after a few dozen shots from ablation.
You should be getting very excited when any of the magnetic fusion approaches achieve ignition, because unlike ICF they are much more straightforward to scale and capture energy from.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIf you like speculative science and technology, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_ion_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_ion_fusion
- noobermin 4y agoIf "laser ICF" won't be applicable to power generation then MCF won't either because they haven't even done ignition yet, might as well pack up and do something useful with your life. My point is that if the scheme that did step 1 is useless the scheme that can't even muster step 1 is even more so useless.
- cpleppert 4y agoThe difference is ignition/break-even in MCF gets you 90% of the way to being able to actually generate power. ITER will get you something like a q of 10 for ten minutes. An indirect ICF like this experiment at the NIF needs to be replicate ignition a million times a day at two magnitudes greater efficiency.
- abecedarius 4y ago> not ever Modern IC production would have sounded absurd in the same way a mere lifetime ago. (It kind of does even now.) The first market for ICs was in the 60s space race (and I guess ICBMs) which could afford the initial milder absurdity. I'm sure you're right about the rest; it's a pet peeve when people round off this kind of thing to "never".
- MattPalmer1086 4y agoI got downvoted for pointing out the weapons research angle in the last post about this. I thought magnetic approaches to fusion have already achieved it, even if only for a few seconds. What does "ignition" mean for a magnetic fusion approach?