Reply To: Slashdot and Scientific American

[Augustine]

Dr_Barnowl wrote: Slashdot has a topic on NIF

I couldn’t resist a few posts about Focus Fusion…

Someone mentioned this article in Scientific American : Fusion’s False Dawn, which is pretty negative about the engineering challenges of DT fusion (and I agree with much of it, in that context)

I liked the paragraph on DT fuel pellets for the proposed LIFE reactor ; Rochester university makes similar pellets and they cost about $1 million dollars each.. and you’d need almost 90,000 a day for a NIF-like facility.

I also like the LIFE reactor not just because it burns the nasty nuclear waste but because it is a 3GW power plant. Yes I know that smaller is better but you have to admit that 3GW is a staggering number on the order of the Palo verde power plant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station

As MSimon says at talk-polywell, it doesn’t matter if the science for tokomak fusion works if the engineering is impossible. Hopefully FF can sustain the desired rate of pinches without destroying itself.