Joe Biden loves windmills and solar panels. He’s happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building them and hiding the actual costs associated with creating and maintaining them and hiding the actual real-world electrical capacity they represent. And he underwrites temporary discounts to power companies and private citizens who fall for his grift.
But on a much smaller basis Joe Biden loves him some nuclear fusion. And the basis is smaller because all the fusion he can buy is laboratory fusion. Laboratory fusion is a research and development creature. Large universities with generous DOE and DOD funding get millions (not billions) of dollars to build very powerful lasers to shoot at really tiny pellets of various isotopes of hydrogen and lithium and helium, trying to get them to fuse together to form heavier elements and thereby releasing relatively large bursts of fusion energy.
In 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was able to get more energy out of a fusion event than the amount of laser energy put in. I believe the ratio was 1.5/1. So, it got out 50% more energy than it put in.
And of course, the crowd went wild! Yay!!!!!! Unlimited energy! Almost for nothing!
Yeah sure. What is neglected isn’t mentioned until the end of the article:
“Plenty of other obstacles remain than those noted above, too. Current calculations compare energy generated against the NIF laser’s output, but that brushes over the fact that the lasers draw more than 100 times the power from the grid than any fusion reaction yields. That means either energy gains or laser efficiency would need to improve by two orders of magnitude to break even in any practical sense. The NIF’s fuel pellets are also extremely expensive, says Kritcher, each one pricing in at an estimated $100,000. Then, producing a reasonable amount of power would mean dramatically increasing the frequency of NIF’s shots—a feat barely on the horizon for a reactor that requires months to load up the next nanosecond-long burst.”
So, let’s review. They put in a hundred times more energy than they produce. Each tiny pellet costs $100,000. They only fuse a few atoms every few months. The infrastructure is state of the art “giant lasers” that probably cost a cajillion dollars to build and ten cajillion dollars to maintain.
Based on these “obstacles” my engineering intuition says the likely date of commercial implementation is about five years after the heat death of the universe. Give or take.
Joking aside. Give me a break. This is right up there with world peace and practical communism for impossible dreams. But the author ends off this depressing list of obstacles by saying:
“Those are the biggest challenges,” Mordijck says. “But I think if we overcome those, it’s really not that hard at that point.”
Here he sounds like every crackpot who wants money to invent time travel or faster than light space craft or perpetual motion.
In the far future I think we’ll extract energy from geothermal sources. In the immediate future we’ll use fossil fuels and nuclear fission reactors. Nuclear fusion will require breakthroughs in physical science and engineering that currently aren’t even imagined.
When I was a kid, the Scientific American articles said we were fifty years away from commercial nuclear fusion. That was fifty-five years ago. I’m still waiting for my cup of fusion.