Re:US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
by lambdatronics on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @02:46AM
(#33981042)
The bigger the target, the more energy is needed to compress it. So it would require more laser energy to get to 100 MJ or 1 GJ, I think. But maybe only a few times more powerful. (Pity they didn't build in some head room!)
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Re:US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
by tgflynn on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @09:31AM
(#33983947)
The question is whether once ignition is achieved there could be a way to design the target/geometry in such a way that the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining/self-propagating.
The history of thermonuclear weapons leads me to think that the answer may be yes. There does not seem to be any real upper limit to how large a thermonuclear weapon can be made. In the 50's and/or 60's there were proposals to build GT devices. I don't think the fission trigger for such a weapon could have scaled by nearly as much.
So by analogy if a relatively small fission trigger can cause a fusion explosion that is many orders of magnitudes larger maybe one or more tiny laser induced fusion reactions could be used to trigger a much larger one.
If that were the case the efficiency of the laser trigger would be of little importance.