(And even then, it's dubious a laser fusion scheme will be competitive with other energy sources.)
True if you want to replace base load of a civilization size network it needs to be economically viable, but we generate "a lot" of power at higher than market minima. Ironically, "good batteries" are the natural enemy of fusion research.
One fun thing about laser fusion is it theoretically can scale down very low and has a trivial "off" switch making it a good resource for engineering tokamak reactor materials or sensors or similar tasks.
The inner lining of a production fusion reactor is hard to make, so a laser facility would be ideal for research. Which is why we have one...
Is there any calculation to this? What’s the cost of shot? Is there any limetime limit of the laser?
Why wouldn't a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest on capital costs? Other?
The targets are only expensive because they aren't produced at scale yet.
They are the exact kind of thing a machine could churn millions of per day out, and then use them at the same rate.
Even if the targets were made of expensive materials (eg. platinum), most of that platinum could later be recovered from the reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very expensive.
And recovering comes for free?
Every step costs energy (or money).
There is no working design yet. It is waay too early to make any predictions about how scaling could reduce costs. Scaling can even increase costs, if it depletes limited resources like tritium.
The destination will be a milestone for humanity, so we should not give up.
A large, complex machine that explodes the equivalent of 500 lb. bombs to generate heat to drive a turbine sounds like an engineering nightmare.
It’s an incredible milestone, not a solved problem.
What’s the circle or not big milestone here?
Is this the right approach? Who knows. There are many fusion designs in the works, and those may ultimately be the right call. Or some yet-to-be-created design. That's even probable. The NIF is for simulating nuclear weapons, not creating energy. None of that takes away from this breakthrough - we've never had meaningfully more output than input on a repeatable basis. It's proof that contained fusion for energy isn't just hypothetical, which will also mean funding & interest will generally increase from this point on.
I think you're setting too high a bar. It's like saying no milestone should be celebrated until we have a working metropolitan-size plant running that's cheaper than anything else. Punch cards in the 1950s are insignificant compared to modern SSDs, yet they were an important step even though we don't use anything like it now. Breakthroughs are breakthroughs.
That is something personal and unique to each individual. In 1903 when the Wright brothers flew a heavier-than-air machine for 59 seconds, 99.99999% of the people on the planet wouldn't have cared. The airplanes you've flown on are vastly far removed from that original one. Same story for the point contact transistor in 1947. None of that solid state physics is used for modern transistors. Some people like to be early adopters for new ideas and things. Some don't. And that is OK.
I agree that the original press release flubbed the explanation. Here's how I think they should have presented it instead:
From https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7
Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
How does "[It's big b]ecause sustainable positive energy out has never been achieved before in 60 years of research" translate to "because we say it's big" in your head?
You might not consider it big, but a specific reason was provided and it had zero similarity to your rephrasing.
is that because while the obstacles are grave, the consequences of failing to overcome them are much graver still,
and to the best of our collective knowledge,
industrial scale fusion would be the least bad answer to our energy demands for the next epoch.
That is true but also does not obviate the need for other parallel efforts and other technologies whose challenges are also very grave, e.g. the need for very near term very large scale carbon sequestration, for a modern electrical grid with deep redundancy and resilience, the need for effective safe scalable stores for energy from whatever source, etc.
Why is that? Fusion is not needed, although if it turned out to be cheap that would be nice.
Watt went around telling everyone that Trevithick and his compact (ie high pressure) steam engines were too dangerous and would never work.
Yes, some exploded. But then we got steam trains and even today almost all power generation on the planet is high pressure steam-electric power plants.
And using actual bombs and explosives to dig kilometers down and mine coal is not an engineering nightmare? Dying of gas in the mines, fires on oil wells, oil spills, these things are 'engineering simple'?
It's a fusion plasma research experiment. It's not a program that is being run with the goal of creating a usable fusion energy power plant.
If you can process a tanker worth of hydrogen per second, Q can be just above break even and you will still make money.
The higher the Q, the lower throughput needed for feasibility.
What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it does not rely on others for?
Those crazy sci-fi stories from the 30s and 50s where everyone used nuclear power (and it was so cheap they didn't bother to meter it) were all completely accurate from a non-political viewpoint