>>12110989>How come no one has tried to use a fissile reactor to ignite fusion fuel for a fusion reactorThis is called Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and it IS being tried (at the National Ignition Facility, for example) - it just sucks relative to magnetic confinement. For a thermonuclear weapon you don't need to confine anything. You just let the fuckin' thing blow up. For a reactor it's obviously different. With magnetic confinement, you use magnetism to confine the plasma so it doesn't touch something and get contaminated and cool down too much. The beauty of this is that you can easily scale up with bigger magnets and bigger tokamaks, and increase the efficiency of your reactor. Magnetic confinement's problem is that in order to reach high enough energy to sustain the reaction with low density (as opposed to high density reactions like star's gravitational confinement or a nuclear weapon's inertial confinement), magnetic confinement plasma needs to be 5-10 times hotter than the sun. These problems have more obvious heuristics though (do a bunch of research to find the best tungsten alloy, scale up, take more data and refine the physics). ICF's problems are harder to explain, and there's many more of them. You need to repeatedly send extremely precise laser pulses to EVENLY heat the outside of the entire TINY spherical pellet, perfectly evenly, and you need to capture enough energy from that for that to drive the next pulse to heat the next pellet (if the pellet is suspended in a tiny cylinder how do you do that without disturbing anything? and thne doing it again?) as i understand it. i still dont understand how they suspend the capsule inside the hohlraum, i always just assumed it was a kind of outer magnetic confinement or it was suspended in a liquid somehow. also each pellet shot of fuel at the moment only produces like 1 cent worth of energy, and costs 10 cents, so economically its not viable with no clear path forward (unlike with mcf).
