Talk:National Ignition Facility

"Test the theory of fusion power"

Orly? ~~

Scientific Breakeven

I think this article needs to account better for the fact that the NIF itself proposed this "scientific breakeven" measure, and that getting more energy than the lasers put in is not equivalent to getting more energy than was put into the lasers. Tangle10 (talk) 16:34, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes I think they should for the time being just state that DOE/NIF claims to have had this success. It will take some time to sort out what level of significance this test really had. No evidence but for all we know this may one day be found to have been a ploy to boost electric car related stocks, or to get more procurement dollars for weapons grade materials.

https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/12/11/fusion-energy-breakthrough-scam/ Jessica-albatross (talk) 11:03, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

I think it is disingenuous to claim breakeven when excluding the energy into the lasers and so much of the energy cycle was left out. They claimed forty years ago, that commercial fusion was a decade away and thus fission nuclear power plants must not be built or there would be no room for fusion power plants. (I worked at GE and talked to the second in command at LLL.)

The lasers didn't produce X-rays; hitting the hohlraum produced the X-rays. Later calculations showed that the hohlraum produced more X-rays than expected, thus diluting their made up breakeven definition.

The energy into the lasers and the building lighting and cooling was not included.

They are hiding the obvious energy cycle costs from enriching water with deuterium using fission reactors, energy costs of cooling deuterium down to its solid state, yield in making targets, etc.

People have gone to jail for claiming they could do medical lab tests with a drop of blood. This program has spent more money and produced less than what they claimed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.45.154.60 (talk) 20:02, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Conflicting statements about scientific breakeven in 2022

Our article currently says that the NIF achieved "scientific breakeven on December 5, 2022, with an experiment producing 3.15 megajoules of energy". It then says "The feat required the use of [blah blah blah], yielding 3.88 MJ, an 89% surplus." So which is it? 3.15 MJ or 3.88 MJ? Nosferattus (talk) 19:48, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

The December 2022 shot was 3.15 MJ. 3.88 MJ was July 2023. I'll fix it. Justin Kunimune (talk) 02:39, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Since this was fixed months ago, can we remove the conflict banner now? Vbscript2 (talk) 21:40, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Oops, I didn't notice the banner. I just removed it. Thank you for the reminder. Justin Kunimune (talk) 00:41, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Laser

The laser delivers energy to the target in a shaped pulse of a few tens of nanoseconds (not "a few picoseconds"). The high-powered part of the pulse is a few nanoseconds. Wcmead3 (talk) Wcmead3 (talk) 19:15, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

Are you looking at the first paragraph of the Laser section? That's talking about the synchronicity of the beams, not the duration of the pulse. Justin Kunimune (talk) 21:30, 7 July 2026 (UTC)