NIF is abusing tritium pellets ...

[TallDave]

If it could be seen how it would lead to a working energy source, then experiments would be unnecessary.

Work done at the NIF with respect to Fusion as a power source will be handed off to others, like the University of Rochester in New York State, and the folks musing the Hiper project in England.

Well, we can certainly see how some techs might lead to net power -- there are even designs for net power reactors for some of them. As far as I know, there isn't even a serious PowerPoint net power reactor design for NIF tech, and in fact I'm not sure it's really even intended to be a precursor tech for a fusion power plant-- as best I can tell it's just a science project to get ignition and maybe learn some stuff about high-temp reactions.

The input is 500TW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

[D Tibbets]

horboliums => Hohlraum?

Yes!
With my spelling skills and memory and disinclination to look things up, I'm lucky I got that close.

Dan Tibbets

[Ivy Matt]

As far as I know, there isn't even a serious PowerPoint net power reactor design for NIF tech

You know LLNL can't resist making that justification for NIF. Here is their design, for what it's worth. It's a fusion-fission hybrid.

[Enginerd]

Breakthroughs in extremely powerful short burst lasers and development of some magnetic (or electrostatic) system that positions and holds the target might relax the challenges some.

Such as this....

[Soylent]

How would this concept be used to generate continuous energy?

By attaching "something with inertia" to it.

In an ICE, the "thing with inertia" is the moment of inertia of the crankshaft and any flywheel attached to it.

In a bicycle it is the inertia of the driver and the bicycle frame.

In a wallwart it is the capacitance of the electrolyte filter caps.

In an inertial confinement fusion reactor it is the heat capacity of the coolant. The coolant is most likely the lithium beryllium fluoride blanket salt. There are many advantages to this; FLiBe is a fairly good moderator, molten salts are very good coolants, you need to breed more tritium by exposing lithium to neutrons and beryllium is a neutron multiplier due to the (n, 2n)-reaction.

They need to fire ~10 pellets per second, but only because each pellet only gives ~200 MJ of heat.

If they fired of a ~100 GJ target once every minute the heat capacity would get rid of the spikey output just fine. The problem is that it's impractical to have targets that big(for starters, 100 GJ is as much energy as 14 tonnes of TNT!).

[Brian H]

Breakthroughs in extremely powerful short burst lasers and development of some magnetic (or electrostatic) system that positions and holds the target might relax the challenges some.

Such as this....

I thought I saw some reference to air guns ... Zapping the pellets on the fly. On the time scales of the laser shots, a target moving a few m/s and one motionless are not that different, I guess.