https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/how-nif-works
They have to prepare a tiny pellet of tritium at 4 degrees Kelvin and stick it inside this big butt chamber. The resultant output of the fusion energy exceeds the total energy in the the X-rays. It doesn't exceed the energy it takes to generate them, but with enough of a constant fuel source they could achieve it. But figuring that out is much further down the road.
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The whole NIF is kinda r-slurred because there's no feasible way to convert it to an actual fusion reactor.
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It's a science experiment to validate a hypothesis, not an engineering project. It's already the size of a few football fields stacked on top of each other. There's just no way to reconfigure the layout to keep a steady flow of tritium fuel going to it.
Plus its delicate. They had to build the laser structure on its own separate foundation with seismic/vibration dampening to keep the lasers from wobbling off target.
I think the next step honestly would be to generate the x-rays from subcritical plutonium charges, and then let the tritium keep self-sustaining.
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zoz
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zle
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zozzle
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well obviously it's a testbed but as far as I know there's no clear way of expanding it out to an actual reactor/facility. The tiny little pellets are like a flash in the pan, you'd need to feed them in constantly like feeding fuel into an ICE except you can't do that without fricking the whole system up.
The tokamak designs are far more realistic but for some reason the US decided to abandon those and left them to stinky euros (ITER).
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I can't wait for the day when you turn the knob on your fireplace, but instead of natural gas, it's sweet sweet tritium, and the ingiter is 1.21 gigawatts of x-rays.
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