Excluding all the ancillary services, including the lasers that maintained the plasma, which was the principle part of this latest test.
Factoring everything in, they’re at about 15% return.
This is still very good for this stage, but the publications are grossly misleading.
We’ll probably be able to harvest solar power from space then beam it to Earth in a practical way first, than nuclear fusion becomes practical.
There is a very efficient way to beam solar power from space. It is called light.
It’s not efficient, a huge amount of it gets diffused or absorbed
Wow, you’re right! We should just build a Dyson sphere around the sun. 100% efficiency achieved. What could possibly go wrong?
Did you understand the person you respond to as saying its inefficient because the sun shines in other directions than the array proposed?
I’m pretty sure the person talked specifically about the beam from the array to earth being inefficient.
It doesn’t need to be efficient. Capture all the light that hits earth for 5 minutes and that’s the world energy demand for a year.
How would you store it though?
solar george
Maybe one day we will produce a civilization capable of using technology as it comes out instead of one that decided to call it quits decades ago. Oh sure we got cellphones but we are still burning coal. Because nuclear is scary.
I think nuclear energy is a great idea in theory, but I have absolutely zero trust in companies handling nuclear waste responsibly. It’s not like they have a great track record.
That being said, pretty excited about this if it’s as safe as they say.
So nationalize them. Problem solved.
Do you trust our current governmental structures to manage something with that much potential for harm when it goes wrong? I sure don’t. Sure, it might go great for a long while, but then you get one far-right administration that wants to cut regulations.
I trust them far more than greedy corporations run by greedy billionaires, absolutely. For many reasons, not the least of which is the elimination of the profit motive.
You’re acting like we don’t already have these. This isn’t new and we have tons of prior experience to learn from.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are.
Lol if only you knew how wrong that statement was.
Firstly, the energy output falls far short of what would be needed for a commercial reactor, barely creating enough to heat a bath. Worse than that, the ratio is calculated using the lasers’ output, but to create that 2.1 megajoules of energy, the lasers draw 500 trillion watts, which is more power than the output of the entire US national grid. So these experiments break even in a very narrow sense of the term.
It’s so refreshing to see an article at least mention the way these tests are measured are based on the energy just in the laser itself and not the total energy used.
I agree it’s good that the article is not hyping up the idea that the world will now definitely be saved by fusion and so we can all therefore go on consuming all the energy we want.
There are still some sloppy things about the article that disappoint me though…
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They seem to be implying that 500 TW is obviously much larger than 2.1 MJ… but without knowing how long the 500 TW is required for, this comparison is meaningless.
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They imply that using more power than available from the grid is infeasible, but it evidently isn’t as they’ve done it multiple times - presumably by charging up local energy storage and releasing it quickly. Scaling this up is obviously a challenge though.
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The weird mix of metric prefixes (mega) and standard numbers (trillions) in a single sentence is a bit triggering - that might just be me though.
Electricity stuff is funny because it combines metric and imperial units sometimes to make bastard measurements
Huh? Whatchu talkin bout Willis?
Watt is a Joule per second
Volts, Amps, kWh, MJ… These are all metric.
Sssch don’t tell the Americans or they will try to wrangle in BTU in nuclear power plants
WE INVENTED IT AND BUH GAWD, WE WILL MEASURE IT IN MURICA UNITS!
Ignore how nonsensical BTUs are: Gonna shove energy and weight into a single measurement and it changes based on the initial temperature of the water.
Y’all do know what BTU stands for, right?
British Thermal Units. It’s the energy needed to heat 1 lb of water 1 degree F.
The bad part is that no one bothered to set the starting temp of the water so there’s 5 separate standards for what the hell a BTU actually is, which makes it a really bad standard.
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Should quit wasting time with this tech that’s always 30 years and many billions of dollars away and focus our efforts on building as many new fission plants as possible.
