This is a great update! I hope the authors continue publishing new versions of their plots as the community builds up towards facility gain. It's hard to keep track of all the experiments going on around the world, and normalizing all the results into the same plot space (even wrt. just triple product / Lawson criteria) is actually tricky for various reasons and takes dedicated time.<p>Somewhat relevant, folks here might also be interested in a whitepaper we recently put up on arXiv that describes what we are doing at Pacific Fusion: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10680" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10680</a><p>Section 1 in particular gives some extra high-level context that might be useful to have while reading Sam and Scott's update, and the rest of the paper should also be a good introduction to the various subsystems that make up a high-yield fusion demonstration system (albeit focused on pulser-driven inertial fusion).
I heard that NIF was never intended to be a power plant, not even a prototype of one. It's primarily a nuclear weapon research program. For a power plant you would need much more efficient lasers, you would need a much larger gain in the capsules, you would need lasers that can do many shots per second, some automated reloading system for the capsules, and you would need a heat to electricity conversion system around the fusion spot (which will have an efficiency of ~1/3 or so).<p>Any truth to that?
It should be noted that "breakeven" is often misleading.<p>There's "breakeven" as in "the reaction produces more energy than put into it", and there's breakeven as in "the entire reactor system produces more energy than put into it", which isn't quite the same thing.
This will probably need to be updated soon. There are rumors NIF recently achieved a gain of ~4.4 and ~10% fuel burn up. Being able to ignite more fuel is notable in and of itself.
Why is the last plot basically empty between 2000 and 2020? I understand that NIF was probably being built during that time, but were there no significant tokamak experiments in that time?
Maybe someday we’ll finally achieve the ultimate dream: an extremely expensive nuclear power plant that needs vast amounts of coolant water and leaves radioactive waste behind.