Breakthrough? Or Con Fusion?

It turns out that the "breakthrough" for nuclear fusion I reported on a short time ago, wasn't actually that much of a breakthrough.


From ClimateCrocks

A lot of chatter about a fusion “breakthrough”, and as far as the lab is concerned, that’s probably right.
A reminder that nuclear fission was achieved several decades before a working fission reactor went commercial.

Wilson Ricks, a PhD candidate at Princeton, has a reality check.

Wilson Ricks on Twitter:


The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has achieved net energy gain from fusion! This is incredibly exciting scientifically, but what does it mean for the future of energy?

In all likelihood, very little.

A thread:

NIF uses inertial confinement fusion, which involves shooting ultra high-powered lasers into a small capsule containing a deuterium-tritium fusion fuel pellet. The surface the pellet heats, causing an implosion that crunches the interior until (hopefully) fusion is achieved

n this particular instance, it appears that NIF successfully induced a fusion reaction that generated more energy than was originally delivered to the pellet via the lasers.

This is Net Gain, a milestone that fusion engineers have been pursuing for half a century.

So as a scientific and symbolic achievement, this is huge. But how much closer does it put us to ‘limitless clean energy’?

Unfortunately not much closer at all. For inertial confinement fusion, there’s a VERY long way to go between net gain and viable electricity generation.

To explain just how far, let’s look at the power balance of this experiment. If the reports are correct, the fusion reaction generated 2.5 MJ, compared to 2.1 MJ of laser power.

BUT, the huge lasers at NIF are less than 1% efficient, so to generate more fusion energy than actual input energy to the facility, you’d need to increase the yield 100x…

Plus, the fusion power is in the form of heat and radiation, and needs to be converted back to electricity. Assuming a 40% steam cycle efficiency, that’s another 2.5x increase in required yield. So we need a fusion reaction *250x MORE POWERFUL* to achieve true electric net gain.

Now, future lasers might be able to achieve something like 10% efficiency. That’s still a 25x increase in fusion power needed just for NIF to break even from an electricity standpoint. And to actually *generate* power, you of course need much more

This of course doesn’t even get into the cost of that power, which requires an absolutely enormous facility running shots in rapid succession. NIF’s huge lasers need their optics serviced after only a few shots, but even if it could perform one shot per second…

..the gross continuous power generation at the current yield level would be just 2.5 MW.

NIF cost about $3.5 billion to build.

Basically, we’re many orders of magnitude away from an inertial confinement power plant along every possible dimension.