I understand that, but a lot of progress has happened just in the last 10 years, especially with regards to superconducting magnets which are vital for the magnetic containment.
I see so much negativity regarding fusion power when so much is happening it’s important to show all the positive things happening
Oh I am a huge believer in CFS and their SPARC system. I’ve watched every hour long lecture they’ve posted on YouTube. My whole issue is that this announcement from NIF is not some kind of holy grail so many in the news are making it out to be. It’s a positive step but Neil DeGrasse Tyson is talking about “now engineers need to figure out if they can put this in cars” and it’s like… no that’s very much not the next step. In fact NIF isn’t really trying to be a path to a functional power plant so much as a weapons research system that happens to produce research which might be useful for other systems.
I just really feel like NdT is really misrepresenting the importance of this specific announcement. In particular he’s conflating Q plasma with Q power plant. The NIF draws about 100x more power than it delivers to the target so if they actually tried to harvest the energy they generated they’d be losing 99.4% of what they’re putting in, at least according to comments I’ve read on HN about it. NdT makes it sound like they have actually gained energy when they are two orders of magnitude away from doing that at NIF.
I see so much negativity regarding fusion power when so much is happening it’s important to show all the positive things happening