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Still used orders of magnitude more energy to perform the experiment than the experiment output - plus they have no way to harvest that energy, and they’re mainly a nuclear weapon research facility. I guess the publicity for fusion power is good.
Still used orders of magnitude more energy to perform the experiment than the experiment output
The article literally explains that is not true. All you have to read the first paragraph.
they have no way to harvest that energy
Yes because it’s a research reactor. The first theoretical nuclear reactors also did not have any way to retrieve the energy. That’s what happens in production systems, not research systems. Adding in all of the equipment to capture the energy makes it harder to iterate on the design. It really is not a valid criticism of the research being done.
You are being somewhat disingenuous do not think.
In the 1st paragraph is a link to the previous article of the same experiment a few months ago, that has some more details mentioned:
researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.
the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.
The article literally does not explain that’s not true, you literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
The laser energy. In the beam in the chamber. All the energy to make the situation happen is significantly higher. It’s sneaky.
That’s pure laser energy, not whole system energy. Yeah, they got a slight gain from the fusion output, but nowhere near what the whole experiment used.
Is the assumption that the experiment takes place in a vacuum, including no external energy outside the energy introduced by the laser?
Yes. Not taking into account anything except the output of the laser verses the output of the reaction.
This means we’ll need capture efficiency technology above 66% for this to be a net positive in terms of power generation.
For current fission nuclear power plants: “Nuclear power plant efficiency averages around 33%, which is comparable to other fossil fuel-based generation units. This means that 77% [sic, should be 67%] of the energy produced by a nuclear plant is lost and only 33% is converted into electricity. Some modern nuclear plants may be able to achieve 45% efficiency.”
This doesn’t mean anything, as it’s not actually overall net positive. It just makes for a nice headline. But it’s just that more energy than the late deposited into the pallet came out of it.
But more energy than to run the lasers or the entire facility? Far, far, far from it.
