After the spark: How a national lab is helping power commercial fusion
For years, the scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tried to light a fire in a way that had never been done before. A massive team and hundreds of experiments went into the effort without success, until December 2022.
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Physics Today has an article about what went wrong with the LANL/LLNL contract. http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstod...
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The budget has a 20% decrease to DOE office of science, 20% cut to NIH. NASA also gets a cut. This will have a huge negative effect on the ...
9 comments:
Fine let LLNL produce the tritium.
Pure fiction.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Cold_fusion
Inertial confinement and the alternative-concept boom — NIF’s ignition record (target gain 4.13, 2025) is real, but NIF is a weapons-physics facility (negative wall-plug, 2–3 shots/day), not a power path, and the private alternatives each carry an unproven core
https://uthandonethemba.com/2026/07/25/fusion-part2-inertial/
NIF posts an 8.6 MJ shot at gain >4, but commercial ICF hinges on diode-pumped lasers reaching 10–18% wall-plug efficiency.
https://www.fusionenergynews.com/story/yield-scaling-and-wall-plug-efficiency-in-inertial-confinement-fusion
The Livermore “gain” is actually a net loss of well over 95%. Stop promoting fiction and tell the truth. Laser fusion is a complete waste of time and money. Shame on you.
What is the current efficiency of diode-pumped lasers? Also, how are they now handling the cracks in the ice layer?
I wish to point out a common misconception about how fusion works. The coulomb barrier is high enough that if we only have classical physics, the sun and the proposed fusion devices will not produce fusion. The energies of the hydrogen isotope particles is not high enough to go OVER the barrier. In reality the particles quantum tunnel THROUGH the barrier to fuse. One result of this is that you get some fusion even at room temperature, but only a few neutrons. To get significant energy production from the tunneling, you need high temperatures, like 10kev, with the attendant high energies. At these energies the width of barrier and the difference between the barrier height and particle energies are small enough to allow the required tunneling.
“NIF’s ignition record (target gain 4.13, 2025) is real, but NIF is a weapons-physics facility (negative wall-plug, 2–3 shots/day), not a power path”
Not sold as a power path? ~17 years ago, 2009 NIF Dedication…
https://youtu.be/34qRUSrfpiY
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