Fusion Ping!.................
I think the headline needs the word “contained” or “controlled” before the word fusion.
The pentagon several thousand fusion reactors that provide more energy than put into them.
And hopefully it won’t be accompanied by a really loud BOOM!
This fuel capsule is placed in a hollow gold chamber
I remember seeing a movie called Harry Potter and the Hollow Gold Chamber.
“Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than ABSORBED by The Fuel”
But not of the energy input (the energy used to power the lasers). A step forward but still a ways to go.
1.9 megajoules input from the laser to yield 1.3 in the reaction.
So how many kilowatt hours were consumed in the power supplies for those lasers and control magnets and cryogenic subsystems.
This is a nice experiment, but still a net loss against the power consumption to produce the reaction.
1.3 megajoule = 0.361111 kWh, or about 5 cents at my residential rates.
And they need to expend a “pencil eraser” sized, precisely machined gold object each time.
They may have achieved energy break-even, but they will need to improve this by at least three or four orders of magnitude to achieve financial break even.
Imaging if we spent trillions on cold fusion instead of money laundering to politicians’ friends: Perpetual free clean energy for the world.
We could probably do it for less than 1 trillion.
So now we spend billions more to perfect this, trillions more to build plants, and at the exact moment they are to throw the switch Democrats will demand it all be torn down and scrapped because of ...something. It doesn’t make any difference what so long as tons of time and money are wasted and civilization gets ground down just a little more.
The article is so poorly written that I can’t make heads or tails of it. It seems the reaction produced more energy (1.3MJ) than PART of the input, but not the overall input. (1.9MJ), but I can’t tell.
Bkmk
BTW, what ever happened to the ARCCAT that was such a hot topic here on FR a decade ago?
More energy out than in is, yes, a tremendous breakthrough.
Next hard part: gathering enough of the “out” energy to put back in for the next cycle.
Isn’t this stuff supposed to be about Kevmo and Chet99 and Staffordshire Terriers?
What ever happened to small Thorium reactors? They sounded like a viable alternative.
The eco-freaks will find something that makes fusion unacceptable. Just a prediction.
Fusion for electrical power is only ten years away. ;^)
If this is true, than that is very big news.🤔