Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Source: The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Preface. Anyone who thought the recent headlines about a “Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough” were true, might be surprised to know that most media left out one or more of the following important information:

• That the purpose of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) is to test nuclear bombs to be sure they’ll explode and make better nuclear weapons in the future
• There is no goal of generating electricity from fusion, only testing weapons at LLNL
• That 100 times more energy was used to charge the lasers (300 MJ) than came out
• The huge size of the facility required — three football fields containing 192 lasers to blast a sphere the size of a peppercorn that needs to be made of diamond and perfectly round and blasted at exactly the same time from all lasers
• A power plant based on this method would need to make 10 shots per second on one million capsules a day that are made, filled, positioned, blasted, and cleared away (Clery 2022)
• That attempts usually fail because the peppercorn sphere must be absolutely perfect plus the lasers must all fire together within 25 trillionths of a second
• That most tests fail because of the perfection required
• Each capsule costs hundreds of thousands of dollars paid for with $349 million a year of government money, $3.5 billion since 2010 (Hunt 2022).
• It takes a day for the lasers to cool down after a single shot, but fusion electricity would require the lasers to fire 10 times a second

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