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Distant Nuclear Fusion
This item is part of the State of the Industry 2021 SPECIAL ISSUE, click here for more
There are currently two experiments that are designed to reach “break-even” fusion within the next several years, but this means that the experiment will inject as much energy into the inner, or core process as comes out in the form of high energy neutrons. Forget any energy-conversion efficiencies outside of the core – no electric energy will come out of these initial facilities in spite of huge amounts going in.
One of these two projects, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France. The other, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is here in my home town of Livermore, California.
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This post is a brief review of the former and a more thorough review of the latter, including its distant past and distant future.
Discussions
NIF is an amazing facility. 192 lasers can deliver .6 kWh of energy to a target the size of a pencil eraser.
".6 kilowatthours?', one might say. "I pay PG&E 12¢ for that much energy. How much are taxpayers paying for this blasted thing?!".
But it's not how much energy they deliver that's important, it's how fast they do it. The pulse, lasting one billionth of a second, requires 2.15 petawatts of power (2,150,000,000,000,000 watts) - roughly 3 times the ouput capacity of all nuclear plants in the U.S. combined.
Though NIF's research is more applicable to design of thermonuclear weapons today, it all adds to the collective pool of research driving fusion energy research forward. The hard part is containment - sustaining a tiny reaction hotter than the surface of the sun for more than a billionth of a second.
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