Scientists in California make a significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.
While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?
I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.
The NIF was founded to research nuclear explosions without the nuclear explosions after nuclear bomb tests were banned. It was never designed for power generation, if you want to do that you build a huge tokamak like ITER.
While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?
I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.
The NIF was founded to research nuclear explosions without the nuclear explosions after nuclear bomb tests were banned. It was never designed for power generation, if you want to do that you build a huge tokamak like ITER.