3 ms·

I'd like to add that inertial confinement fusion is unlikely to be practical as an energy source, because even though it is closer to Q ≥ 1 than any magnetic co

• XorNot 2y ago
  It's not really here nor there though - the reality is it's an underdeveloped technology. It is technically very interesting that it works, but the big engineering roadmap is just "okay, how do you even build a power plant out of this?" You can certainly imagine that you simply drop pellets into the chamber continuously, and use a heat absorption medium (because you don't have magnets to keep cool) to smooth out the power curve. But all of that is the sort of development work which ITER is designed to prove out for Tokamaks - i.e. everything up to "we have the boiling water now". You'd have to build the ITER-for-Inertial-Confinement reactor project to make progress on it (and a huge chunk of your problem would just be "how the heck do we not spend all our power in the lasers?"). Fortunately we're likely to keep plugging away at it anyway, because the primary goal of NIF is to simulate nuclear fusion reactions in hydrogen bombs without detonating hydrogen bombs - and thus the secondary research can happen anyway. But it's definitely not in the category of "clearly the superior approach" - and more importantly, it wasn't "quick" to do - they've been plugging away at the problem decades.