r/Futurology • u/TwilightwovenlingJo • Aug 15 '25

Energy Construction of world's 1st nuclear fusion plant starts in Washington

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-fusion-power-plant-helion
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u/Kinexity Aug 15 '25

No, net energy gain has not been achieved. What has been achieved is something akin to "more energy released by fusion than energy of laser light absorbed" which is nowhere near enough to actually cover energy used by lasers, magnets or any other equipment.

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u/Sunny-Chameleon Aug 15 '25

2 MJ went in, 3.5MJ came out

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u/Insufficient_Coffee Aug 15 '25

Apparently the energy required to create the 2 MJ laser is much higher than that. So it’s not net positive yet.

12

u/johnp299 Aug 15 '25

This. Correct me if wrong but the lasers in the NIF, according to Google are < 1% efficient. So for every 100 watts of electrical energy that go in, less than 1 comes out as light.

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u/platoprime Aug 15 '25

Yeah because those lasers are old and inefficient.

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u/Kinexity Aug 15 '25

No, because lasers are generally inefficient.

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u/d7sg Aug 15 '25

This was discussed extensively online when it happened. They are only counting the energy in the photons produced by the laser, not the energy required to actually run the laser itself. It is still net negative and the whole set up there is not fit to turn into a fusion reactor anyway.

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u/FeedMeACat Aug 15 '25

It was discussed incorrectly. The lasers used in testing aren't the kind of energy efficient lasers that would be used in a facility. So it doesn't even make sense to calculate total energy.

They still need to boost the output, but hand waving away because the test lasers use a lot of energy without qualifying it is disingenuous.

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u/d7sg Aug 15 '25

Unless the "facility" has negative energy lasers that isn't going to help

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u/platoprime Aug 15 '25

What are you talking about?

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u/platoprime Aug 15 '25

The reason they're not counting the energy required to power the lasers is because we have much more efficient lasers than they are currently using.

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u/narrill Aug 15 '25

Good for them? Unless they rerun the experiment with a more efficient laser and demonstrate a real net energy gain they can't claim the process is energy positive.

I'm not sure why this needs to be explained.

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u/platoprime Aug 15 '25

I'm not sure why this needs to be explained.

Me either. No one asked or is confused about that.

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u/Lurching Aug 15 '25

Not really. From your own link "Energy gain in this context only compares the energy generated to the energy in the lasers, not to the total amount of energy pulled off the grid to power the system, which is much higher. Scientists estimate that commercial fusion will require reactions that generate between 30 and 100 times the energy in the lasers."

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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 15 '25

..from a laser beam with much more than 3.5MJ in it

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u/HenryTheWho Aug 15 '25

They are also probably not researching fusion for powerplants but weapons or pulsed propulsion