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Breakeven

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Breakeven is not one line but several, and which one is meant changes the meaning of any claim built on it. Scientific breakeven with respect to energy delivered to the fuel or target is what NIF crossed on 5 December 2022, when 2.05 MJ of ultraviolet laser light on target produced roughly 3.1 to 3.15 MJ of fusion yield. Wall-plug or engineering breakeven asks whether the facility produced more energy than it drew from the grid; NIF did not come close, having stored on the order of 330 MJ of electrical energy in capacitor banks to fire that shot, an overall efficiency of well under one percent. Commercial breakeven adds capital cost, availability and the parasitic load of a real plant, and no device has approached it. The 2022 result was a genuine scientific first and was correctly described as such by the researchers; the popular framing of it as a power-generating milestone was not their framing.

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Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 18 blocks · 3 evidence · 16 related

  1. Story
  2. Breakeven is not one line but several, and which one is meant changes the meaning of any claim built on it. Scientific breakeven with respect to energy delivered to the fuel or target is what NIF crossed on 5 December 2022, when 2.05 MJ of ultraviolet laser light on target produced roughly 3.1 to 3.15 MJ of fusion yield. Wall-plug or engineering breakeven asks whether the facility produced more energy than it drew from the grid; NIF did not come close, having stored on the order of 330 MJ of electrical energy in capacitor banks to fire that shot, an overall efficiency of well under one percent. Commercial breakeven adds capital cost, availability and the parasitic load of a real plant, and no device has approached it. The 2022 result was a genuine scientific first and was correctly described as such by the researchers; the popular framing of it as a power-generating milestone was not their framing.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Breakeven
  5. Plasma-facing materials and first wall
  6. Connections
  7. National Ignition Facility
  8. Fusion energy gain (Q) and target gain
  9. Plasma-facing materials and first wall
  10. NIF achieves target gain greater than unity for the first time
  11. NIF reaches 8.6 MJ yield and a target gain of 4.13
  12. ITER
  13. Breakeven
  14. ITER presents an updated project baseline to the ITER Council
  15. Evidence
  16. Sets out the physics design changes — reduced coast time and maximised hot-spot internal energy — behind the first laser indirect-drive experiment to exceed target gain of unity, and frames the result explicitly as scientific breakeven
  17. On 5 December 2022 a NIF indirect-drive implosion achieved a target gain of 1.5, with 2.05 MJ of 351 nm laser light producing about 3.1 MJ of fusion yield and significantly exceeding the Lawson criterion for ignition
  18. The energy actually drawn from the grid to fire a NIF ignition shot exceeds the fusion yield by roughly two orders of magnitude, so target gain above unity is not wall-plug breakeven
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