3 ms·

The reason it looks that far away is that NIF uses lasers from the 1990s with only 0.5% efficiency. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient, which would

• LarryMullins 4y ago
  > which would put overall net energy gain only one order of magnitude away. With modern lasers they would be closer to Q=1 without the funny energy accounting. But still several orders of magnitude away from commercially viable, which requires vastly greater efficiency than Q=1.
  • candiodari 4y ago
    Energy return on investment. Some oil extraction is currently at EROI=10, assuming EROI and Q can be made to be the same concept. Higher than EROI=50 is unheard of today, even 40 is pretty rare. EROI for this fusion method would be ~0.015. The worst fusion methods scales with the cube of the radius of the area that can be made to fuse. So we "only" have to get a 10x bigger area to fuse, or have the same area fuse for 10x longer (and make the facility not blow up or melt down from doing that). Working fusion is surprisingly close.