US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over::undefined

    • @davidgro
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      10 months ago

      For several decades it’s been 20 years away, and before that 50, so yeah. Progress.

      (No /s, I think the money is finally in place to make it happen, and that was always the bottleneck.)

      That said, NIF is for weapons research, not power, but some of the knowledge they gain is probably transferable.

  • rustydomino
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    2110 months ago

    I can’t believe that “Secretary of State John Kerry” passed editorial review in 2023. In Nature. Makes you wonder why academic institutions are paying these journals exorbitant subscription fees for alleged editorial rigor.

  • @[email protected]
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    810 months ago

    The use of “over and over again” gives me amusing Homer Simpson thoughts, “Oh yeah baby fuse me so hard! Just like that!”

  • @Womble
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    610 months ago

    The article glosses over it a bit, but I think it’s important to stress here that this isn’t energy gain in any real sense. Its more energy being created from fusion than laser energy gets to the target, but before then 99% of the energy input is lost in creating the laser beams.

    So to give one of the examples used in the article, 2MJ of laser energy is delivered to the target and 3.9MJ is released. But to create this 200MJ was consumed to create that laser pulse.

  • Sibbo
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    410 months ago

    Did they already build cooling?

  • @n3m37h
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    310 months ago

    Let me know when it actually produces electricity then I’ll be happy till then we should have been working on MSR

    • @davidgro
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      1110 months ago

      This one is for weapons research, nothing like the ones that are doing power research, but some of the knowledge might transfer

      • @n3m37h
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        1110 months ago

        Oh of course it is, 7000 nukes aren’t enough