Wie sich der Wettlauf um die Kernfusion beschleunigt hat – Angetrieben durch die neuesten wissenschaftlichen Fortschritte und eine riesige Investitionswelle in private Projekte ist der Traum, Energie durch die Nachbildung der Prozesse zu erzeugen, die die Sterne am Leuchten halten, keine Science-Fiction mehr

From the article

>The truth is that to achieve a viable power plant with lasers, a gain of between 50 and 100 times, relative to the energy input, would be needed. And not only that, it would also need to fire at least 10 shots per second (at the NIF, one shot every seven or eight hours is currently possible) and with much more efficient lasers (the NIF lasers require an enormous amount of energy to start the whole mechanism). And the machine in the Livermore National Laboratory will never achieve this, to begin with, because it is not made for that; it is an experimental scientific facility primarily aimed at studying nuclear weapons. Other labs will have to find technological solutions to engineering challenges that seem like [science fiction](https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-07-04/avelino-corma-european-inventor-of-the-year-controlling-nuclear-fusion-would-be-a-giant-step-towards-the-future-but-its-always-thirty-years-away.html), since they consist of creating a power plant that reproduces on Earth the same processes that occur in the Sun at millions of degrees celsius and with a pressure equivalent to 100 billion Earth atmospheres.

Also from the article

>The company, founded in 2011, is trying to achieve the same goal as Livermore, but instead of using a laser, it uses projectiles launched from a powerful 22-meter-long cannon. The key to achieving the same effect as a laser is an amplifier for the fuel capsule that “increases the pressure and also shapes the energy so that, even if we hit, we get a spherical implosion,” explains Hawke. “It is our key technology,” he adds shortly before offering a tour of the laboratory where the cannon is located.

>When loaded with three kilos of gunpowder, the projectile launcher — nicknamed the Big Friendly Gun — launches projectiles at 4.4 miles per second. These hit the fuel capsule inside a vacuum chamber similar to the one in Livermore, but smaller: the one in California is 10 meters in diameter and this one is 1.7 meters.

>“The engineering of our approach is tremendously simpler, so is the engineering necessary to get to a power plant, too. And it is much cheaper,” says Hawke. The initial design for a pilot plant has already been completed. “Our goal is to achieve this in the 2030s. Just like all private companies. Among public programmes, even the most ambitious ones talk about 2040. I am convinced that a small, agile private company can go faster than these large institutions,” he says.