Scientists in Britain announced Thursday they had smashed a record for generating fusion energy in the final experiment using the Joint European Torus (JET) machines.
Nuclear Fusion World Record Smashed in Major Achievement::undefined
That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.
This particular experiment didn’t do that but that likely wasn’t the part of the task they were trying to work on… this one had 69MJ of output. It was also over five seconds… the NIF experiment was “a few billionths of a second”.
69MJ over five seconds is a usable amount of power. About on par with the out put of some real world power stations. The tech is still not ready but it is getting closer to being ready.
NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn’t hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.
That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.
This particular experiment didn’t do that but that likely wasn’t the part of the task they were trying to work on… this one had 69MJ of output. It was also over five seconds… the NIF experiment was “a few billionths of a second”.
69MJ over five seconds is a usable amount of power. About on par with the out put of some real world power stations. The tech is still not ready but it is getting closer to being ready.
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn’t hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.