Originally Posted by
JamesNoBrakes
It's a sham. They are using Qlaser/plasma figures instead of Qtotal. So they are saying x amount of laser energy yielded y amount of fusion energy...but they are not telling you how much it takes to power said laser to get to that energy...and lasers, especially of this magnitude, are far from "efficient". So the total power in is way way more than what they are claiming, what was produced was only a fraction of that.
More on this here, although she was referencing the latest round at the time of her video, I've gone back and looked carefully at this latest breakthrough and they appear to be referencing the power of the laser, just like she is talking about, not the total power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
Yes the lasers are about 1% efficient so you can just add a couple zeros to the actual input energy.
I suspect lasers are an evolutionary dead-end as far as fusion goes. Super-conducting electromagnetic compression/containment looks a lot better to me given advances in cryogenics and magnets.
This experiment was a step in the right direction, but only a step. Not sure why DOE blew it out of proportion. Maybe to distract from their non-binary luggage theft problems?
Government fusion research is slow and plodding. Sabine's commentary on that is entirely rational. She pointed out sort of correctly that you're only going to convert ballpark 50% of heat to electricity... reality is that conventional power plants have dramatically increased their efficiency in recent years, and all of that would apply to fusion as well since heat is heat once you generate it. I suspect ballpark 70% might be achievable. Plus you have the opportunity to use low-grade waste heat for industrial processes or even campus HVAC.
And the Helion concept, or anything similar, would dispense with heat conversion entirely... my gut says that's the way to go since the nature of magentic containment is that it works both ways. Exactly like we have starter/generators on some airplanes... if you need a motor anyway, why not use it as a generator too?
We also now see private money entering the process... much of that will of course be doomed to failure but the potential does exist for a SpaceX style disruption from the private sector. One can hope.