@George-K said in Fusion breakthrough:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-energy
But this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment. It took about 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to get a hundredth of the energy back in fusion.
“The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”
Despite that, it’s a potential turning point in the technology comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight, says Collins. “We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly,” he says.
IOW: I now have $3 in my right pocket, and I used to have only $2. Of course, it cost me $300 to move that $1 over. Or, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
I'm not saying this isn't a big deal - I don't pretend to know enough about it to say that. I AM saying that perhaps the hype is a bit premature.
Another contrarian view:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-fusion-energy-breakthrough-is-still-decades-away/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=earned
The difference, he says, is in how scientists define breakeven. Today, the NIF researchers said they got as much energy out as their laser fired at the experiment—a massive, long-awaited achievement. But the problem is that the energy in those lasers represents a tiny fraction of the total power involved in firing up the lasers. By that measure, NIF is getting way less than it’s putting in. “That type of breakeven is way, way, way, way down the road,” Cappelli says. “That’s decades down the road. Maybe even a half-century down the road.”
The trouble is inefficient lasers. Generating fusion energy using NIF’s method involves shooting dozens of beams into a gold cylinder called a hohlraum, heating it up to more than 3 million degrees Celsius. The lasers don’t target the fuel directly. Instead, their aim is to generate “a soup of X-rays,” says Carolyn Kuranz, a fusion researcher at the University of Michigan. These bombard the tiny fuel pellet consisting of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, and crush it.
Also Horace from TNCR was notably pessimistic about the development.
