An experiment at the National Ignition Facility in California is a major milestone towards commercial fusion power, but there are still massive engineering hurdles to overcome
LLNL director Kim Budil said at the press conference that the delay between the experiment and the announcement was because a team of third-party experts was brought in to peer-review the data. She said that now it has been confirmed, it is likely that a laser-based power plant could be constructed within a “few decades”, but that the technology for tokamak reactors was more mature.
Currently, NIF can be run for an extremely short period, then it has to spend several hours cooling its components before it can be turned on once more. Approaches being tried by new commercial start-ups may prove a better way forward, says Chittenden. In addition to providing invaluable data for engineers working on practical reactor designs, Chittenden says NIF’s results could lead to other advances in physics, as the reactions seem even more intense and rapid than those in our sun and more like those happening in a supernova.
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