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Sodis42 t1_j24wawj wrote

Reply to comment by Rough-Lavishness-401 in Will Nuclear Fusion Dump Clean Energy? by Rough-Lavishness-401

There are different fusion reactor designs, that are currently investigated. For the Tokamak, where the plasma is confined by magnets in a donut shaped vessel, they are currently building a prototype in France called ITER. With the results of this, they want to build the first fusion reactor DEMO, that actually produces energy.

The headline from the current experiment was from a facility, where the plasma is confined by lasers. This technique was not on the original roadmap of fusion plants, so it's quite surprising, that they already got that far. Unfortunately, it scales really badly, because they use special containers with hydrogen inside as fuel and you can't really make those bigger. As far as I know, they already use state of the art lasers already, so that's another bottleneck there.

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Rough-Lavishness-401 OP t1_j24z8iz wrote

So what we should look out for in the future isn't the breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but reactors like the Tokamak as you mentioned?

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Sodis42 t1_j257uv5 wrote

At this point, the laser driven approach might be faster. It's not clear, if the tokamak design will be economically feasible, while for the laser-confined fusion plants, you "just" need more efficient lasers.

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