Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion

Re:Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion by hugh3 on Thursday May 05, 2011 @06:56PM (#2519240)

Actually, I think the National Ignition Facility will have no trouble in getting net power out, very soon. The real challenge is getting a significant amount of power out at some non-insane cost, since the NIF in its present form costs billions of dollars and can only do one fusion shot every couple of weeks.

The NIF's plan for a commercial inertial confinement fusion reactor looks like the NIF, except that shots occur ten times a second. At the moment they have no way of firing the lasers that often, or of extracting all the energy thus produced.

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Re:Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion by Retric on Thursday May 05, 2011 @08:46PM (#2519561)

Is NIF getting close to breakeven in terms of laser input energy, energy generating the lasers, or thermal energy to power a turbine to power the lasers? Because, useful power generation requires ~30-100x breakeven in terms of laser energy and last time I checked they where several orders of magnitude from that standpoint.

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