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The National Ignition Facility, after 30 years of various experimental configurations, the latest of which cost over 3 billion dollars, created a fusion reaction that produced 50% more energy than was used to create it.  

That has never been done before on earth. 

This configuration may not be able to be scaled up, and will probably only ever be "bursts" where distinct capsules are fed into the chamber, compared to existing boiler processes that can operate indefinitely with a continuous feed of fuel, but despite that this might be a true watershed like the first internal combustion engine or the first rocket was.

The reporting so far is still not clear to me.  It is not clear to me if they included the energy it took to purify the fuel in their calculation or not.

You know what else is the future? LINKS!!

(12-14-2022, 01:58 PM)homebiscuit Wrote: [ -> ]You know what else is the future? LINKS!!

I hope so.  I didn’t find any one link, among those that aren't paywalled, that really dug into the first and second laws of thermodynamics as they relate to this story.

It seems we got similar headlines out of the NIF in 2013. Those claims neglected the energy absorbed by the pellet walls (I think). In the past 8 years, apparently, they've built a more transparent pellet and lenses that reduce these losses 99%, two orders of magnitude. So 8 years and a few billion per year gives a 2 order of magnitude reduction in one obstacle.

But the process of charging the laser capacitors is still inefficient, and those losses also have to be reduced by at least two orders of magnitude before commercialization.

And it's not clear if any of the exotic tricks they used to make the pellet could ever be mass produced or what the energy input of that process might be.

Meanwhile, the ITER and W7-x experiments are using very different physics to make plasma, and none of the stuff at NIF is likely to help their efforts.