Oh for goodness sake. 400MJ in for 3.15MJ out is not a net energy gain. I wish just once they’d be honest about what they do, it’s ok to do basic physics research without pretending you’ve saved the world every six months.
Where do you get those numbers from? They don’t seem to match the figures in this article or the article it links to. I get that you’re saying they leave out some important facts about the total energy used in the experiment, but I’m curious about exactly what’s not documented here.
Wikipedia’s figures for the last time they made this claim. The exact figures might be a bit different this time round, but I doubt they’ve found 99% efficiency gains. Livermore sends out this sort of press release pretty regularly and it always comes down to the same creative accounting
Basically, there’s a whole load of input energy that they just don’t count. Heat? Doesn’t count. UV? Doesn’t count. Plasma? Doesn’t count. this diagram from the wiki might be instructive. There may be decent justifications for counting it like this - I don’t know, I’m not a nuclear physicist. But I think the way they continue to report it to the media is simply dishonest.
The logic is that they don’t count ignition costs because they only have to be paid once. So it’s producing more than it consumes, and would eventually start netting a surplus.
Oh for goodness sake. 400MJ in for 3.15MJ out is not a net energy gain. I wish just once they’d be honest about what they do, it’s ok to do basic physics research without pretending you’ve saved the world every six months.
Where do you get those numbers from? They don’t seem to match the figures in this article or the article it links to. I get that you’re saying they leave out some important facts about the total energy used in the experiment, but I’m curious about exactly what’s not documented here.
Wikipedia’s figures for the last time they made this claim. The exact figures might be a bit different this time round, but I doubt they’ve found 99% efficiency gains. Livermore sends out this sort of press release pretty regularly and it always comes down to the same creative accounting
Basically, there’s a whole load of input energy that they just don’t count. Heat? Doesn’t count. UV? Doesn’t count. Plasma? Doesn’t count. this diagram from the wiki might be instructive. There may be decent justifications for counting it like this - I don’t know, I’m not a nuclear physicist. But I think the way they continue to report it to the media is simply dishonest.
The logic is that they don’t count ignition costs because they only have to be paid once. So it’s producing more than it consumes, and would eventually start netting a surplus.