Very interesting article. For one, the actual ignition occurred a year ago. The event is that they finally published the paper.
Very encouraging, but there is this little tidbit about how this would become a commercial reactor.
That creates a very brief outburst of energy—a tiny thermonuclear explosion—before the burning fuel expands and dissipates its heat. “Fusion energy schemes based on inertial confinement involve repeating the pulsed process over and over again, much like the pistons in an internal combustion engine, firing several times per second to give nearly continuous power,” says Omar Hurricane of LLNL, chief scientist for the NIF’s Inertial Confinement Fusion program
That answered a question I've long had about the hoped for output from any one reaction and how quickly a commercial plant would need to reload the lasers and repeat this. They managed four ignitions that were at or close to this level over the course of 2020 and 2021. So it strikes me that I will still likely be dead before I get a Mr Fusion in my Delorean and will probably be dead before an electron of fusion energy comes down my power line. But it does encourage me that by the end of the century, this could be commercial.
When I was a kid, I did a report on tokamak-style reactors. It looks like they are still 15 years behind the lasers in terms of creating a sustained fusion event, but I wonder if the subsequent path to commercialisation will be easier. Anyway, this was interesting news for me:
One approach is to confine it with magnetic fields into a doughnut shape inside a chamber called a tokamak. This is the method of choice for many fusion projects, including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). for which a global collaboration is building a massive experimental reactor in France that is slated to achieve sustained fusion no earlier than 2035.
And finally, just one of those facts that I see myself throwing out at a future cocktail party (okay, I don't actually see myself at a cocktail party in my future, covid or no, but still... this is a mind boggler):
Fission’s advantage is that it typically occurs in reactors at temperatures of a little more than 1,000 kelvins, whereas deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion starts at temperatures of around 100 million kelvins—hotter than the heart of the sun.
I had no clue the difference was
five orders of magnitude. That really put the engineering challenge in perspective for me.
Great article. Thanks.