Laser Fusion Put On a Slow Burn By US Government

Fusion is not going to happen. Ever.

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/

In this case I can get more specific:

The NIF is physically limited to shots up to about 50 MJ. To put that in more familiar terms, that's about 14 kWh.

At current baseload prices here in Ontario, about 3.5 cents/kWh, that shot is worth about 50 cents. That's assuming that we convert it entire to electricity, which is of course impossible. A more realistic conversion with 25% thermal efficiency gets us 15 cents of power.

The fuel target costs tens of thousands of dollars.

$10,000 >> 15 cents

Anyone see a problem here? And don't wave this away, we literally have absolutely no idea how to make the fuel cost less than the power is worth. None whatsoever.

And that's not the only one, of course. The beamlines feed about 1.8 MJ of UV laser light into the chamber. That is generated from 4 MJ of IR in the main beamlines. That's fed from 350 MJ of electrical power. To get 50 MJ out.

350 MJ >> 50 MJ >> 15 MJ of electricity after conversion

So there's that too. At current efficiencies, you're better off burning money.

We have some febrile ideas about how to get this improved by a factor of 10, or maybe even 100. But that's still *below* energy break even. And we don't need break even for this to be practical, we need 10 to 100x.

This is never going to happen. It's a weapons program, always was. Testing we don't need for a weapon we don't want.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/1diZdNYIUMc/story01.htm

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