This is inertial confinement. Each “shot” is a separate ignition and power-generating (not that harvesting energy from this is easy) event, as opposed to magnetic confinement (tokamak), which is intended to keep running, assuming you can get more fuel in.
There are other methods too.
Ah! Thank you.
I think they said there were others working on magnetic confinement. That sounds more promising.
So far, gravity confinement seems the most promising.
On the other hand the stellar-mass is constantly beaming power to us and we know how to catch and use it.
We have actually been doing that for a few alautuns now.
“And with strange alautuns even death can die”
(what’s an alautun?)
It is the sixth extended order of the Mayan long count calendar. Each order is 20 of the subsequent order: a katun is 20 tun, or just under 2 decades; a baktun is 20 katun (close to 4 centuries), etc. The alautun is the highest named order, a bit under 64 million years.
Thanks! Ignorance fought.
They were referring to government funding.
Thread win.
This Article on BBC describes inertial confinement fuel pellet manufacture. It is a very exacting artificial diamond process that yields as many as 40 pellets every 2 months. Each pellet represents about a millisecond of fusion reaction, so, if this is the way to go, they had best be improving the efficiency at this end.
Does this have anything to do with anything?
Aside from being a sloppily written article with little substance, it is just saying that LLNL did again the thing they did before; produced slightly over-unity fusion power (compared to the power that went directly into heating the plasma via an enormously inefficient laser ignition system) with no way to extract the output energy or convert it into electricity, nor is this a method which can be ‘scaled up’ to provide continuous power or operated at some marginal cost even if it could generate usable energy. The article finishes off with mentions of COP28, climate change, and quotes from John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to give the impression that viable electrical power production by nuclear fusion is virtually around the corner even though this is as far from the case as ever.
Stranger
The article failed to mention the secondary energy generated by the hot air of politicians.
Which differentiates it from every fucking other article on the subject – how? Where can you find well written, substantive, realistic articles on fusion power, outside of maybe the likes of Sci-Am? And who even reads Sci-Am?
Practical nuclear physics is difficult and expensive, so the researchers have a tendency to feed us pies taken directly from the ionosphere, heavily seasoned with BS so that we will fund their work. They are not per se scam artistes, but they kind of are, by necessity. We need to convince the press to keep away from these stories.
Wait, what? We need good science press. Apparently this wasn’t that, but not reporting at all is stupid.
Not reporting at all sounds more sensible to me than reporting ignorant bullshit. Good science press is all well and good, but this material needs to be kept away from NYT, CNN, et al, because they end up distorting the hell out of it.
That would be the communications teams that the researchers’ bosses hire. I try not to interact with them.
Exactly too many resources are being thrown at low potential projects just to satiate peoples need to do " Something"
Yepper. Isn’t it frustrating to have a technical question and get routed to a sales rep, PR person, or account exec, rather than the person who really knows the answer?