And they mention this right in the press release. Quote:
“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of result about once a day – a fusion power plant would need to do it ten times per second. However, the important takeaway point is that the basic science is now clearly well understood, and this should spur further investment. It is encouraging to see that the private sector is starting to wake up to the possibilities, although still long term, of these important emerging technologies.”
While this spins it in an optimistic way, the challenges to make this work are significant. The laser is quite inefficient, so the gain must be much much larger before you have net energy gain. To scale it up to implode a capsule tens of times a second rather than a few times a day, is in the order of 100.000 times more frequent than today.Thus this is a long way from commercial production.
The NIF uses lasers produced in the 90's because their core mission isn't to make lasers better. We already have lasers which are 20x more efficient, and hitting a pellet 10*s is a trivial task. Those lasers can fire a 1khz or better. The EUV light sources for semiconductor lithography do this tens of thousands of times a second.
The goal of the research being done at NIF is to understand inertial confinement fusion. "Solving" these other problems isn't as important, other folks are solving these all day long for commercial industries already.
“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of result about once a day – a fusion power plant would need to do it ten times per second. However, the important takeaway point is that the basic science is now clearly well understood, and this should spur further investment. It is encouraging to see that the private sector is starting to wake up to the possibilities, although still long term, of these important emerging technologies.”
While this spins it in an optimistic way, the challenges to make this work are significant. The laser is quite inefficient, so the gain must be much much larger before you have net energy gain. To scale it up to implode a capsule tens of times a second rather than a few times a day, is in the order of 100.000 times more frequent than today.Thus this is a long way from commercial production.