Hearted Youtube comments on Ziroth (@ZirothTech) channel.
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A wonderful SCIENTIFIC achievement — Optical Breakeven — from LLNL/NIF but not a very useful result from the TECHNICAL perspective of the topic.
Using Nd:Glass lasers with so low conversion efficiencies for electrical energy into optical laser beam energy means you need a thermonuclear output enegy several hundred times higher. There is no other laser types with the suitable frequencies and power stability; the hope we had in the mid 1990s for Semiconductor very high power lasers has never realized.
Besides there are a huge number of other overwhelming optical, material, electrical, thermal, even mechanical* engineering issues that have to be solved to get a practical, affordable and profitable Inertial Fusion reactor.
There are not enough brainpower employed in these problem anywhere, and ICF funding is mostly provided by the military budget of the DoE, so the predominantly foreign (~2/3) High Energy Density Physics graduating from UoRochester, UCDavis, UCSD, UNevada-Reno are usually excluded from ICF R&D.
In the USA, ICF is predominantly a military-oriented program — to research, test, homologate, validate R&D for Thermonuclear and Directed Enegy Weapons — so to avoid traditional Nuclear Testing.
Profitable Energy generation is not a priority — results like this ignition are predominantly budgetary PR and PC propaganda for DoE's Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs.
The bad thing about all this brouhaha is that material, financial and BRAINPOWER resources are diverted from better latter Generation (7th? — it was 5th in the mid 2000s) Nuclear FISSION Reactor Technology (including Thorium-232 one) to pursue this Rube Goldberg-like nonsense.
* My last job at ICF in UCSD, after getting a Ph.D. in HED Physics at UoR.
I got into HED/ICF/Plasmas because I wanted to build Fusion/Plasma propelled Interplanetary Spaceships and retire in Tethys (a moon of Saturn) ...
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"If we want people to go electric, we need electric vehicles which travel further per charge."
Wrong. People in the UK don't want range.
If we want people to go electric, we need two things:
. cheap EVs such as BYD Dolphin and Seagull, hopefully cheaper in the future by using sodium-ion battery
. reliable charging infrastructure, something we lack in the UK, where instead of range anxiety, we have charger anxiety.
I also say, let's get people onto trains. For America, where trains and transit don't work, and neither does cycling? Well, it's because America is built totally wrong; read Strong Towns to know what I mean. A little density is more than good for you, and when I say a little density, I don't mean Asian levels of crowding, but something more akin to the Netherlands, Paris, or London.
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