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I thought laser fusion only exists for nuclear weapons research, and there isn’t any path from the current experiments to a power plant.
by fanf2 2y ago
I thought laser fusion only exists for nuclear weapons research, and there isn’t any path from the current experiments to a power plant.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThat’s what I think. The efficiency of lasers is awful and they take hours to cool off after a shot whereas a commercial fusion power plant needs a shot rate between one every few seconds to several per second. A heavy ion power plant is possible in terms of the physics but needs to be the scale of a fission power plant to work at all and is projected to cost maybe 2x what an AP1000 costs assuming everything goes well and we know things usually work worse than you expect. So nobody is interested in funding a full-scale prototype, a reasonable development plan is you build several linac barrels and a test fusion facility and expect to rebuild that and add more barrels. It probably costs about what Musk spent on Twitter in the end.
- api 2y agoThat’s the funding pitch but I’ve heard the scientists claim they want to study it for possible power use.