this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.
This particular experiment didn't do that but that likely wasn't the goal... They managed a 69MJ output over five seconds... the NIF experiment was less power but over "a few billionths of a second".
69MJ over five seconds is 13MW which is a very usable amount of power. About on par with the typical output of a real world utility power generator, compared to the old one which was similar to a small lightning strike - impressive but not useful. It's not enough to power an entire city, but you kinda don't want that anyway since a city should have redundancy. Several 13MW generators could power a city with enough excess production to take one or two of them offline for maintenance. If you combined this with solar/wind(*), you could have two or three fusion reactors for a large city.
The tech is still not ready of course, but it's getting closer and seems to be accelerating too - those two breakthroughs were a year apart. This generator is right in the sweet spot, now they just need to improve efficiency / reliability / reduce costs.
(* I seriously doubt fusion is ever going to be cheaper than solar / wind / hydro - but it could be more reliable making it a great "baseload" option - enough to keep the lights on, fridges cool, etc)
Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn't hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.