[ExI] Fusion breakthrough

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Grigg via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Fusion breakthrough

 

>…When will peak oil end for us? 2050? And so this astounding breakthrough happened just in the nick of time! AGI and the first fusion reactor may be appearing right around the same period. But l will unfortunately be shuffling off the mortal coil around then...

 

John  

 

 

 

John it wasn’t really a breakthrough.  It was a milestone, but it looks like they oversold it (possibly intentionally) by writing the report in a way that the nontechnical mainstream press would be misled and write misleading articles.  If that was the intention, it worked.

 

Reasoning: Lawrence Livermore didn’t build a working fusion reactor.  They calculated the energy that went into a sample and measured the amount of energy coming out.  They got more out, which proves that fusion took place.  But their report didn’t make it clear that the energy going in was what came out of the business end of the lasers, not the energy going into the lasers.  So they still put a coupla orders of magnitude more energy into the ignition lasers than came out of the sample.

 

That subtlety was lost in every popular press article I saw.  Also lost is the fact that they didn’t attempt to recover the energy coming out, they only measured it.  So no, we are not ready to build fusion power plants.  But we can build the hell outta fission plants.

 

spike

 

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