Inertial Confinement Fusion Breakthrough (?)

This isn't really a "data hack", nor is it "helpful" to most people in their current daily lives, but we wanted to comment on a December 13th announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy that a breakthrough had been made in one type of controlled fusion: Inertial Confinement Fusion.  While this is a theoretical and technological breakthrough, most media coverage was misleading enough that we wanted to clear up some confusion:

A commercially available Nuclear Fusion Reactor utilizing Intertial Confinement Fusion is still decades away

As Secretary of Energy Granholm says in the Press Conference video link below (emphasis added), "This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant, fusion energy powering our society".  This is a very deliberate statement on her part: it is still unclear whether Fusion Reactors will become a reality, but this breakthrough brings humanity closer to achieving it.

Inertial Confinement Fusion
Image by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Announcement Links

First, some links to announcement articles and videos about the breakthrough:

• U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Press Release
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNL) Announcement
• DOE Press Conference
• DOE Discussion Panel

Overview

Scientists used 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 MJ of energy to a capsule containing a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium, which resulted in Fusion reactions that generated 3.15 MJ of energy.  Stated more simply: more energy was generated by Fusion than was put in by the lasers.  This was the first time scientists had accomplished this in a controlled manner, i.e. - first time it was done outside of bombs.

This is an amazing achievement that built on decades of theoretical and engineering research, but the media reports make it seem like a Fusion Reactor is now just around the corner.  Unfortunately, most reports are leaving out several very serious problems that need to be overcome before this breakthrough can be converted into a reactor:

1. While the lasers delivered only 2.05 MJ of energy to the capsule, they required 300 MJ to accomplish that feat.  This means they were drawing 300 MJ from our current electricity grid in order to generate 3.15 MJ of energy from Fusion.  There is no deception on the part of the scientists here, they freely acknowledge that the lasers they used were not designed for efficiency: this was a Proof-of-Concept experiment, designed from the start to not worry about how much electricity the lasers required.
2. The lasers can only be fired a few times a day, but will need to be fired many times per minute in a real reactor.  As with efficiency, the lasers weren't designed to be rapid-fire.
3. The National Ignition Facility is the size of three football fields.  To power and focus the 192 lasers involved in the reaction required an immense amount of infrastructure, which would need to be minimized for a commercial reactor.
4. None of the produced energy was captured in a manner that can produce electricity.  The fusion of Deuterium and Tritium produces a Helium nucleus and a free neutron, both of which are travelling quite fast.  Most Fusion Reactor designs involve using that kinetic energy to boil water and turn a steam turbine, although other methods of using the energy have been proposed.  None of those engineering steps were attempted in this experiment, and while many designs have been proposed none have actually been built or tested.
5. A single fuel capsule takes months to produce.  A commercial reactor would require thousands of fuel capsules per day, or require an entirely different target.
6. They're proceeding by Trial-and-Error.  Before firing the lasers, they model and predict how they think the reaction will unfold: for this shot, the models predicted a 50% chance for producing more energy than was put in.  But the physics and modelling involved in these processes is so complicated that they're figuring much of it out from the results of previous shots, and unreliable models can result in very uneven and hard-to-predict improvements going forward.

Some of these require improvements by several orders of magnitude (i.e. - factors of 10), while others haven't actually been attempted at all yet.

Media Coverage

The scientists involved are justified in feeling immense pride in what they've accomplished, and they should be praised both for their achievements and for their honesty. In the Press Conference and Discussion Panel, the scientists were very realistic about the problems listed above and aren't trying to deceive anyone.  They openly admit that we are still decades away from a Fusion Reactor.

Unfortunately, the media presents this breakthrough as if we're only 10 years or fewer from getting electricity from Fusion, and they leave most or all of the above technological hurdles out of their articles.  Leading people to believe we're on the doorstep of a Fusion Reactor might result in a short-term gain in funding and manpower, but in the long-term will further erode trust in a system that has promised Fusion for over 50 years.