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On what premise? It just says we can't make it economical anytime soon, but you have to start somewhere - or should we all agree that unlimited clean energy is
by gpjanik 3y ago
On what premise? It just says we can't make it economical anytime soon, but you have to start somewhere - or should we all agree that unlimited clean energy is not worth trying because it's a long shot?
- tootie 3y agoMy impression from previous news was we had passed a barrier, but still had a short way to get net positive on the total system and that we were on the right trajectory. This article makes it sound like we're essentially nowhere. That we've made a nice experiment, but the tech involved is so wildly inefficient we will be back to the drawing board when it comes to building a real generator. I had no idea the lasers were consuming such a massive amount of energy or that they were so expensive to operate.
- gpjanik 3y agoYou falsly assume that the intent of people building that device was to make it efficient - it wasn't. They wanted to make sure the fuel, heated up to the right temperature, will yield energy gain and that happened. You can think of a this as test flight with a plane model vs. building the actual plane. We needed to test the aerodynamics and see if this flies at all, it worked, and now it's the time to build the actual plane. Someone has to do that test at some point. Would make no sense to build a plane without knowing if it's going to work.
- willis936 3y agoI think "this approach" is short for "ICF" rather than "fusion energy".