They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature-ally.
The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:
The "1%" energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).
[a] I'm referring to this: "while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel."
(update: from yosyp's link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature-ally.
The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289
[WaPo] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion...
The "1%" energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF...
[a] I'm referring to this: "while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel."
(update: from yosyp's link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950