as always, yet a tremendous achievement. Hats off to the entire scientific and technical crew!

Full Self Driving Fusion Drive coming next Summer.

Your Name is Elon Musk and I claim my $8/non-IOS based Blue Tick.

As I believe they are basing the >1 gain on the energy delivered to the target. Rather than the total energy needed to actually generate the beams, which is far higher.

Net result, they used far more energy than that produced in the fusion reaction.

Good for fusion research, but it's not going to help with practical fusion power generation.

Also, hardly a sustained output capability. This is a tiny burst of energy for very, very small fractions of a second.

Probably makes Fusion Power about twenty years away.

Now where have I heard that before?

I'll sit up and listen when someone can demonstrate a fusion reactor that not only produces Q well over 1, but can also capture the released energy, turn it into useful work, and do it repeatedly, and frequently, over a period of years, without having to be rebuilt each time. There's a number of very large technical obstacles to overcome between making a tiny capsule go pop more brightly than the lasers pumping it and something that pumps hydrogen isotopes in and electricity out.

Tiny steps, though, and all that...

"Net result, they used far more energy than that produced in the fusion reaction."

I'm sure they will explain shortly, less than 7 hours to wait as of now.

As to whether it's a true net positive I'm not sure that's even very relevant, as mentioned in the article that is more of a symbolic than a real milestone. What's important is that progress is being made and there is a clear path to take to make it deliver useful, consumable energy.

At least seems like it's moved from always being 30 years in the future to always being 20 years in the future. Who knows? Many times a technology that has been 'nearly there' for many many years suddenly achieves a 'critical mass' sudden breakthrough.

Good for fusion research, but it's not going to help with practical fusion power generation.

But it's a start. It also has to convert theory into practice, ie convert the fusion energy into something that we can power X households. We're short of that due to the current light winds, overcast skys and frost on the solar panels.. But let's ask a fusion expert-

"Before people get too excited about [the] nuclear fusion announcement, Q>1 (more energy out than in) was anticipated long ago," said Michael E. Mann...

...I'd be more excited about an announcement that [the] US is ending fossil fuel subsidies."

Or not. Let's ask rent-a-quote. The climate 'expert' who gave the world the infamous Hockey Stick, and helps promote the useless 'renewables' lobby. But he can be very quotable, one of my favorites being this one-

https://climateaudit.org/2007/10/12/a-little-secret/

While paleoclimatologists are attempting to update many important proxy records to the present, this is a costly, and labor-intensive activity, often requiring expensive field campaigns that involve traveling with heavy equipment to difficult-to-reach locations (such as high-elevation or remote polar sites). For historical reasons, many of the important records were obtained in the 1970s and 1980s and have yet to be updated.

The great Mann has often been out of touch with reality, and I don't think ever did any field work. He simply sat in his cosy office and pre-screened samples that others had collected to create his wooden thermometers. Reality is-

Pete Holzmann (Mr Pete), who lives in Colorado Springs, agreed with this satire and this led to what I’ll call the Starbucks Hypothesis: could a climate scientist have a Starbucks in the morning, collect tree rings through the day and still be home for dinner?...

...Altogether (and primarily through the efforts of Pete and Leslie), our project collected 64 cores from 36 different trees at 5 different locations on Mount Almagre. 17 Graybill trees were identified, of which 8 were re-sampled. All the cores are currently at a dendrochronological laboratory, where sample preparation and scanning steps have been completed. Cross-dating is now taking place.

Which is a great article (along with the follow-up) in explaining the science of wooden thermometers.

From starting to design the first commercial plant.

Which will take fifteen years to build, because that's how long first plants take.

JET hit net positive a while ago, so I guess both inertial and magnetic confinement are now "proven".

I still haven't understood how they're intending to get the energy out , or to refuel while the reaction is running.

Same as nuclear, have some water pipes nearby.

Drop shit in, make it go boom gently, heat up water, turn turbine, drop more shit in, make it go boom gently.

In theory you can slow burn a tokamak, and a laser with a pellet - have lots of pellets near each other to go boom within some time frame, could make a cartridge that you then 'reload', and if you are smart, maybe more like a conveyor belt than a cartridge to just keep on booming, like a rail gun.

This is easier said than done. Each shot at the NIF if Q=1 is going to yield about 2MJ. A modern fission reactor yields about 4500MWt. If we're generous and make Q=10 for the ICF side at 20MJ a pulse you need over 200 pulses per second to get comparable output to a fission reactor. That is many orders of magnitude faster than anything anyone has even considered. It takes days to prep a NIF shot.

The massive elephant in the room is NIF really consumes hundreds of megajoules per shot. They count energy into the target, not energy to power the lasers that shoot the target.

The massive elephant in the room is NIF really consumes hundreds of megajoules per shot. They count energy into the target, not energy to power the lasers that shoot the target.

The other slight snag is if the fuel pellets are tritium, or it's just aneutronic fusion. Availability and cost of tritium currently being a bit of an issue. Then again, there are some projects looking at neutron wrangling, and ways to slow down fast neutrons and steal their energy. But that's also a non-trivial challenge.

Is that measurable output, or capturable output? If Q=1.1 and it has an energy conversion efficiency of 80% to electricity it's not worth doing right now.

With my cynical hat on, this announcement looks like good timing with the energy crisis to make sure there's no budget cuts in this area of research.

With my optimistic hat on, it's a step towards limitless clean energy.

With my pesimistic hat on, that limitless energy will produce so much waste heat that you might as well be burning coal.

I need a new hat.

I was with you until you started talking about waste heat, because in power generation, heat is the thing you are after, and it is only "waste heat" once you have extracted useful work from it (e.g. via a turbine) and the remaining temperature difference is too low to get any more meaningful use out of it (there's a reason the laws of thermodynamics are called the laws of thermodynamics , and it's tied up with the industrial revolution and the drive to make steam engines efficient).

So-called "waste heat" from power generation is something you get from any generation method, and it's not the problem we have from coal. Coal has a number of very significant issues from the simple greenhouse emissions, to production of sulphur dioxide and toxic ash, and also radioactive fallout (what, you thought coal was pure carbon? How sweet).

If a method of power generation is "clean" and safe enough, there's no reason why it can't be interspersed with other buildings, where that heat can be put to good use as district heating in commercial and residential properties.

In other words, if we're worrying about what to do with the waste heat, we've probably already cracked the problem of getting enough of it to generate power.

If there was a real story behind this, which there isn't, Peer Review would come first and Cold FUSION PR would come never. We are somehow expected to believe that these US Gov labs are at the forefront of technology. That's just not the case. For example, the trillion-dollar medical lab and research system of the US Government has never produced a cure for a single disease no a drug of any kind that cures any disease. A big fat nothing.

During the great Government Human Genome lunacy, the Government had a plan that would take 40 years. That's a lot of long lunches. Forced through funding cuts and mismanagement, the government had to go to the private sector where physicists applied algorithms to sequence DNA over a Government scientist's lunch hour.

Cold Fusion was a fiasco. It was the first time that a research group went public without Peer Review and analysis. And the Bromide public went wild over it with even greater enthusiasm than Ivermectin.

Enjoy your Cold Fusion II propaganda... Looks like Lawrence Liverspots needs more funding...

I'm pretty sure this is very, very hot fusion, and nothing at all to do with the miniscule, and irreproducible effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons.

Anyway, the whole "X is a waste of money therefore Y is a waste of money", where the only connection between X and Y is tenuous at best, isn't exactly a strong demonstration of causal reasoning.

tl;dr: you're talking bollocks, mate.

If fusion power were to become available as a true self sustaining process with excess energy out and it was scaled up to provide a source of energy to the world, this could have a massive destabilising effect. The order of things with all this money being funneled toward oil producers would dwindle and some parts of the world would become more volatile as a result. It would be like a pole reversal in the Earth's magnetic field.

Some forethought and careful planning required.

Certainly, Western democracies would stop having to pretend to be friends with certain Middle-Eastern autocracies.

... with all this money being funneled toward oil producers would dwindle ...

... like a pole reversal in the Earth's magnetic field.

Indeed ...

Which is exactly the reason why we do not have a solution to all this yet and probably will not have it for the longest while.

There's still an unimaginable amount of money to be made from oil and an equal amount to be lost (or not made) by the transnational corporations who control oil, from production onwards, if a suitable energy production method were to be achieved.

Not to mention the unfathomable geopolitical consequences that such a discovery would have for the likes of Chevron, Total, Shell, Exxon, BP, etc. which would lose their power/value overnight and that all the scaffolding built during the last 100 years to back them up would crumble.

Or is anyone daft enough to think it has not already been found and properly shelved?

O.

This is important, but bear in mind two key and so-far underreported facts. The first is the science. NIF are measuring energy input to the target vs energy out, not energy input to the system vs energy out. Overall efficiency is still going to be nowhere near 1: as mentioned the real target is Q>10, not Q>1.

The other is the "reactor" and what it does. This isn't a steady state reactor like the toruses at JET or ITER are meant to be. This monster of a facility shoots a 1.5km long, megajoule class laser beam at a millimetre-sized capsule. That's because this place is not designed for fusion power research. It is designed as a nuclear weapons research facility to enable the US to study what makes things go bang without making things go bang. Its very occasional press releases in the civilian domain are mostly PR.

The techniques being developed there have no path to being practically exploited to generate electrical power, nor were they ever designed to. Some of the fundamental science will, but this isn't the overwhelming breakthrough many of the headlines are making out, unless you're in weapons development at Los Alamos.

Baby steps....