Akkoma

Riley S. Faelan (@[email protected])

@[email protected]: So, the primary problem of fusion power is delivering an extreme energy density in a way that doesn't break the machine beyond repair. Until recently, the only way to get energy out of fusion processes involved using fission detonation devices to rapidly deliver the high energy density, but nuclear bombs have the nasty tendency to break the whole machine into tiny pieces, and you'd need to build a new device if you wanted to do some more fusion. The NIF machine is a great breakthrough not as much because it shoves 2MJ of energy into the Hohlraum and gets 3MJ out, but because once it will have done it, *the machine will still be intact, and can run the next flash the next day*. The machine not blowing up during routine operation is a very useful feature to have. ... but for commercial usefulness, the machine will not need to run once per day, or once per hour, but many times in every second. With advanced confinement techniques, this number can be slightly reduced, of course. But the current machine is at once a great demonstration of useful techniques, yet not nearly capable of doing the great thing that it does often enough to be industrially useful. It's still very much a R&D device: its usefulness is that by having built it, and making sure that it works, people will know more about how the next iteration could be built, not that it can make cheap power.