Fermi,
It’s one thing to be a skeptic; it’s another to call something a “lie” simply because it doesn’t fit into your NIF-centric worldview. Look at the data before dismissing it. An MCNP simulation for a 1 meter sphere of FLiBe with no enrichment and no multiplier showed a TBR > 1.2. Also, a 1 GW plant would consume 6.2 kg of beryllium per year, not skyrocketing quantities.
Your “delusional” comment about “Impossible to Miss” misses the point: BSF doesn’t fire at 200‑mph pellets like NIF. It ignites bubbles inside the medium, and FliBe is clear like water, nothing like a milkshake.
On costs:
- Currently, Laser diodes are the major expense of laser-fusion. Assuming the price of diodes is $1/W, supplying 10 MJ of energy in 1 millisecond would cost $10 billion. However, prices are expected to drop below $0.10/W within a decade.
- Optical switchyards in traditional ICF require miles of precision beamlines; BSF avoids that complexity.
- Thermal management is inherent in a liquid gain medium, unlike solid slabs with lensing and cooling issues.
As for Mie/Rayleigh scattering and thermal blooming, BSF’s short propagation distances and molten‑salt homogeneity mean these effects don’t dominate the physics the way they do in air or stressed crystals.
And the Archimedean Spiral is far more credible than the fragile “final optics” other laser‑fusion concepts rely on—those would be destroyed by neutron flux almost immediately.
— Banana