Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by gene-h on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @03:11PM (#28843811)

This report found that ICF could reach LCOE as low as $25/MWh "with optimistic but not obviously unrealistic inputs."[0] This does require hohlraums cost about $2 each and are fired every 20 seconds. With mass production and process optimization it may not be ridiculous to reduce hohlaum cost to this amount. However, the yield is about 5 gigajoules which is equivalent to about 1 ton of TNT.

Making equipment that can handle 1 ton of TNT exploding every 20 seconds is an interesting engineering challenge.

[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005...

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Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by tsimionescu on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @03:52PM (#28844264)

"Optimistic but not obviously unrealistic inputs" include reducing the cost of hohlraums from the million dollar range to 10$ (not even sure if that accounts for the price of the gold itself), a reactor capable of resisting 50 million pulses before needing replacement, and a few others.

It also considers the price of a fusion power plant to be less than that of a fission power plant, based entirely on the observation that it would have less stringent safety requirements.

Overall this article may be right in principle if taken to refer to an arbitrarily far away future (hundreds of years away at least, if ITER and DEMO are to be taken as realistic examples of the pace of improvement of fusion power in general, even if they are MCF instead of ICF).

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Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by pfdietz on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @05:14AM (#28849953)

This paper was not well received on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/ja879n/nuclear_fusi...

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