Regarding nuclear fusion – I’m aware this problem has not been solved yet but I’m wondering if anyone is familiar with the intended roadmap.
In a tokomak design, fuel can be injected, so I can see how they’d plan on getting a sustained fusion reaction – just keep feeding more fuel into the device.
In laser ignition, you just have a little target sitting on a pedestal of sorts that gets blasted and destroyed. Once they figure out how to generate ignition based fusion energy reliably, what’s the plan to “fuel” such a reactor? How do you get continuous energy out of an ignition fusion reaction? Is the intention for it to be intermittently generating power, like an ICE engine with some sort of ignition, refuel, ignition cycle?
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In inertial confinement (laser) fusion, the idea is to ablate/detonate a pellet, collect the energy, set up another pellet, and repeat, machine-gun style. Like you say, most ideas for commercial-scale magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion instead involve a steady state plasma with continuous injection of new fusable material.
Short answer, this style of laser fusion can’t really be sustained. This is designed to be a science experiment and a test mule for future projects. Continuously running 192 lasers is a recipe for disaster. Just keeping the optics clean would be a dealbreaker.
>What’s the plan to “fuel” such a reactor?
The short answer is there really isn’t one. Whenever NIF comes up, yes it’s very interesting physics and it MIGHT help us with energy someday, and getting to net positive is a big step, and the media says “ooo look fusion might be green power forever!” BUT that’s not the challenge they’re looking into.
You know what else is an inertially confined fusion reaction? A thermonuclear weapon.
That’s what their goal is and that’s what they’re trying to test. See what happens in NIF, plug the data into an enormous supercomputer (Called El Capitan, also in Livermore, very cool thing by itself), and make sure our bombs go boom if we ever use them without nuking some island or ourselves. That’s the goal of this project, not building a scalable fusion reactor for sustained power.
[https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/keys-to-success](https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/keys-to-success)
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