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Re:Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab by reacharavindh on Monday December 12, 2022 @11:01AM (#33956126)
Not an engineer in this field, so I may have misread/misunderstood, but I read that 2.5MJ out for 2.1MJ of laser energy in, NOT the total energy needed to make the whole thing work.. So, in a layman’s world, it is not a net gain of power, only a small subset of the system yielding more power than it took in.

Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..

Re:Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab by VaxWithSex on Monday December 12, 2022 @11:05AM (#33956192)
No, you are correct.
Re:Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab by galangalalgol on Monday December 12, 2022 @11:15AM (#33956343)
So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar ratio?
Re:Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab by VaxWithSex on Monday December 12, 2022 @11:21AM (#33956461)
Jup. Fusion research is necessary and funding should be provided. But it is not close to commercial or generative viability.

So there is at the moment no working design for a generator as a plant that produces more electricity than it takes in.

Re:Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab by whimsicalism on Monday December 12, 2022 @06:08PM (#33961797)
Yup? Absolutely not, nothing close to this has been achieved with other reactors.