But not over and over and over again.<p><i>"Scientists at the laboratory achieved ignition during two further attempts in October. And the laboratory’s calculations suggest that two others in June and September generated slightly more energy than the lasers provided, but not enough to confirm ignition."</i><p>It's not like they're running an engine.<p>Nobody has claimed that this approach is a useful power source since the 1970s. There was, at one time, talk of systems where pellets are injected, zapped with lasers, some fusion and heat results, and this is cycled at some high rate, maybe a few times per second. But that was really political cover for the National Ignition Facility, which is really for studying what happens in an H-bomb without setting one off.<p>There's an pulsed fusion startup.[1] This is not laser-triggered fusion with inertial containment; it's a combo of magnetic containment and inertial containment, triggered by a huge electrical pulse applied to a plasma. Like the Z-machine at Sandia.<p>They were supposed to have a demo by the end of 2023. Press releases stopped in July. Uh oh.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.f.energy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.f.energy/</a>
To be clear, NIF's ignition is getting more energy out of the fuel than the laser they hit it with put in, but there are other energy drains and inefficiencies in the system that make it nowhere close to break-even fusion energy. That requires building a new machine designed for continuous fusion detonations.<p>So it's a scientific accomplishment, but not <i>that</i> scientific accomplishment.
Certainly a cool achievement and something to be proud of. Maybe even a very important step towards real usable fusion power plants.<p>But:<p>> The facility’s laser system is enormously inefficient, and more than 99% of the energy that goes into a single ignition attempt is lost before it can reach the target.<p>So it's still two orders of magnitude off hitting break even. And that's <i>without</i> a suitable device to actually <i>capture</i> the released energy and it <i>does not</i> account for pellet production. For all we know, it might very well be three orders of magnitude away from a real powerplant.<p>That being said, making more efficient lasers and working on capturing energy might be more fruitful than trying to improve a Tokamak design. So it's good to have options.
Helion's design seems way more promising than the NIF one which doesn't seem to have any clear path to being a "continuous" operation production design.<p>Helion's design also works essentially by brief inertial confinement, thereby avoiding the issues of Tomahawk continuous confinement designs. However, in the Helion design rather than having pellets of fuel which would need to be replaced for each shot, it uses injected gaseous fuel (deuterium + He-3) which is heated into two plasma "donuts" which are magnetically fired at each other to (together with brief magnetic compression) achieve fusion conditions.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaQLZaaHWo</a><p>Helion have a contract with Microsoft to build a production model for them (to power a datacenter) by 2028.<p><a href="https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world...</a>
Does anyone know the triple product of their experiments? I've seen values ranging from 10^22 to 10^25.<p>I was hoping to find an updated chart of the triple product over time but can't find anything more recent than 2019.<p>See wiki: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion</a><p>And this chart: <a href="https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-in-fusion-energy-the-triple-products" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-...</a>
I'm looking forward to the Boron-11 based ones. Or any of the Aneutronic ones, as they used charged particles directly rather than by heat transfer and electric generation.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion</a>
The article is hinting that there are weapons applications for this. What types of weapons would those be? Bombs? Are there any other countries with research programs similarly far along?
> Developing more efficient laser systems is one goal of the DOE’s new inertial-fusion-energy research programme. This month, the agency announced US$42 million over four years to establish three new research centres — each involving a mix of national laboratories, university researchers and industry partners — that will work towards this and other advances.<p>In other words, the government is spending enough to keep the lights on.
It’s a high-flux isotropic neutron source intended for things that have nothing at all to do with power generation, but, possibly great improvements over spallation sources for certain applications.<p>Or, from the more bureaucratic viewpoint, it’s a successful sale of ‘science’ to the congress for your money. You paid about 0.1% of your gross income for it (ROM).
Can somebody explain, what exactly is "ignition"? If even a single helium atom is fused you have "more energy than you have put into it". That does not seem impressive.
I guess that means we will have another round of "this interesting result in basic research that has no relation to practical use of fusion energy shows that practical and commercially viable fusion energy is basically just around the corner".
I find it frustrating the the US Govt spends > $800B/yr on our "defense" while we run out of basic supplies like ammunition and all of our tanks and ships are falling apart.<p>Meanwhile, that same Govt spends < $1B on fusion, which could change the course of humanity.<p>I'm usually the last person to suggest that the govt should spend money on things, but for goodness sake I wish we could at least get our priorities straight as far as what to spend the money on.<p>If I didn't know better I'd think that the whole point of the defense department was to funnel money to well-connected corporations and execs.