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This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and re
by Veedrac 3y ago
This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific.
For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion, but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall out of the sky.
- dale_glass 3y agoThe criticism for commercial fusion is very similar. Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very misleading thing for commercial power generation because not all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can be turned into power, and there's other things that also require power for the whole thing to work.
- Veedrac 3y ago> Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating more heat than power is put into the plasma. Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you. Most news about commercial fusion is ‘X had a big investment round’ or ‘Y made a really hot plasma’, and if we were in the world where a startup's tokamak hit ignition (we're not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even end to end.