...the runner up to magnetic containment is laser confinement but no one has a good way to actually get energy out of laser confinement...
Um.. not sure what you mean. The energy out of inertial (i.e., laser) confinement is thermal. You implode and heat a ball of D-T, causing fusion, releasing heat energy, which is used to generate steam for a turbine.
Fusion has a bad rap, because the high benefits that would accrue if it were accomplished encourage wishful thinking. But that doesn’t mean it’s all wishful thinking. Lawrence Livermore has seen some encouraging results, for example.
Yeah, but a lot of that energy that is released isn’t in happy forms. D-T releases not just high energy photons but also neutrons which are carrying away a lot of the energy. So what you actually need is something that can absorb the neutrons in a safe fashion and convert that to heat. Lithium blankets are a commonly suggested solution since a lot of the time lithium will form tritium after you bombard it with neutrons (so you get more tritium as a result). There’s also the technically simpler solution of just using paraffin. But the conversion of the resulting energy into heat for steam is decidedly non-trivial.
Um.. not sure what you mean. The energy out of inertial (i.e., laser) confinement is thermal. You implode and heat a ball of D-T, causing fusion, releasing heat energy, which is used to generate steam for a turbine.
Fusion has a bad rap, because the high benefits that would accrue if it were accomplished encourage wishful thinking. But that doesn’t mean it’s all wishful thinking. Lawrence Livermore has seen some encouraging results, for example.
EDIT: for fact checking vis-a-vis LLNL.
Yeah, but a lot of that energy that is released isn’t in happy forms. D-T releases not just high energy photons but also neutrons which are carrying away a lot of the energy. So what you actually need is something that can absorb the neutrons in a safe fashion and convert that to heat. Lithium blankets are a commonly suggested solution since a lot of the time lithium will form tritium after you bombard it with neutrons (so you get more tritium as a result). There’s also the technically simpler solution of just using paraffin. But the conversion of the resulting energy into heat for steam is decidedly non-trivial.
I see, thanks.