The positive about this is that it's inertial confinement. The tokamak design as is being built in the massive boondoggle that is ITER is (IMHO) fundamentally flawed. When dealing with a superheated plasma, you fundamentally have the problem of turbulence. So as neutrons escape (and lose energy while they do it) they destroy your container (aka "neutron embrittlement", one of my favorite terms). Add turbulence for something at 100 million degrees and I just don't see how that's viable.
Inertial containment essentially wraps the fusing mass in something to absorb the neutrons.
Still, even though exceeding the laser energy as direct energy output is significant, we're still nowhere near positive electricity output. There's efficiency loss with lasers, operating costs and degradation with lasers and efficiency loss in converting that energy to electricity.
The most obvious way is boiling water and turning a steam turbine. It's tried and true but is also a process with its own efficiency limits. There's a lot of talk of direct energy conversion but this still seems like pie in the sky.
For the record, the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines.
I personally support non-ITER methods of further research in this area. Hopefully something will come of it. I'm not yet convinced commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic but I'd like to be proven wrong. I still see space-based solar power collection as the most likely future of humanity's power generation.
> the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines.
For wind and hydro, the fluid motion is directly coupled to the rotor of a generator. Coal, gas, and nukes produce only heat, that must drive a heat engine to drive the generator. The lossy step is the heat engine. The turbine is incidental.
That said, the steam turbines used with coal and nukes require frequent expensive maintenance, a thing not true of water or air turbines. This is why coal and nukes are today uncompetitive, and daily fall further behind.
There's quite a lot of muddled or misunderstood things in this post.
ICF targets don't absorb neutrons.
Direct conversion is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator We use steam turbines because they're both efficient and convenient engineering wise. They aren't bad at what they do by any means, so I don't understand why you're saying all these generation technologies using steam is some sort of big criticism.
Thermionic generators are an option when you want to minimize size and complexity however. The reactors the USSR launched on radar satellites used them for example. NASA is considering similar designs for Mars and deep space missions (no, I'm not talking about RTGs, but rather single digit Megawatt scale mini reactors under the MegaPower program).
Not that I'm any expert, but given that these giant lasers are the definition of niche products I imagine they're also the least optimized.
From some quick googling, apparently the overall efficiency of a steam power station is around 29% (https://www.eeeguide.com/steam-turbine-efficiency/), measured by heat-in vs heat-equivalent-electricity-out. So once we get past the laser inefficiencies, we get 29% of net power.
From my completely lay-person understanding, the "hard part" was getting more energy out of the reaction than was put in. Now it's an optimization problem, unless there's a hard constraint on the design of these lasers that can't be improved beyond a certain point
As I understand it, yes that's exactly how it's meant to work... You drop in a pellet, blast it to the point of fusion, capture the energy, then repeat.
Fuel cells store and release energy chemically (analogously to batteries), they do not generate it. So they aren't comparable to methods of electricity generation.
Inertial containment essentially wraps the fusing mass in something to absorb the neutrons.
Still, even though exceeding the laser energy as direct energy output is significant, we're still nowhere near positive electricity output. There's efficiency loss with lasers, operating costs and degradation with lasers and efficiency loss in converting that energy to electricity.
The most obvious way is boiling water and turning a steam turbine. It's tried and true but is also a process with its own efficiency limits. There's a lot of talk of direct energy conversion but this still seems like pie in the sky.
For the record, the only power generation method with direct energy conversion is solar. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and fission all ultimately turn turbines.
I personally support non-ITER methods of further research in this area. Hopefully something will come of it. I'm not yet convinced commercial fusion power generation will ever be economic but I'd like to be proven wrong. I still see space-based solar power collection as the most likely future of humanity's power generation.