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.
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