Mr. Fusion on the way?

Apparently the secretary of energy is supposed to make a big announcement on Tuesday.


US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough

Spock mentions "the fusion era" in ST4, so that universe got saved by fusion too.
Fingers crossed.

The enormity of this will naturally depend on how much energy you get over the input. Enough to power a lightbulb for 20 minutes doesn't justify the costs. Enough to run a small town for a month might.

Either way, good as a proof of principle that we can GET net output, but expectations may need managing.

Here's the announcement. They produced fusion in a lab. Bye bye Saudis.

Enough net output to boil 10-15 kettles. Not factoring in the energy cost of making the lasers, just powering them.

The House of Saud is probably safe for a while yet.

As I said upthread - great proof of concept. Much work yet to do before this is powering homes or nations.

It's a huge step closer to an end to a lot of our problems.

In the same way that stepping foot on the moon showed we COULD leave Earth for other planets.

Are we on Mars yet?

Solar for the lasers, then once the reaction's going, it's going.

Estimate I heard, if we started right now, it would take at least a decade to get the infrastructure up.
So we still have to rip our hair out for these horrible 2020's.

We're going back to the moon, we're getting a breakthrough in fusion, it's finally starting to look like the future.

The fact that we've finally proven that net output fusion can be done should not be so easily dismissed.

Yes, we're probably two decades away from practical commercial application, but you have to start somewhere.

It took fourteen years from the Soviets shooting a ball into orbit, to an American stepping foot on the moon.

I believe I covered that with "great proof of concept".

To be fair, we kinda faffed around after Appolo concluded, and unfortunately, Challenger and Columbia slowed us down.

ITER has hit some setbacks that could delay it years.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...lth-world/international-nuclear-fusion-delay/

AL_A wins approval for world's first magnetised fusion power plant

Scientists unable to replicate fusion experiments.

https://finance-yahoo-com.cdn.amppr...0923943.html?amp_js_v=0.1#webview=1&cap=swipe

Flashback to my visit to the National Ignition Facility waaaay back in 2012. The photos are gone, unfortunately.

http://wordforge.net/index.php?thre...upercomputer-this-weekend.96174/#post-2393765

I'm confident commercial nuclear fusion will eventually be a thing, but I think it's still decades away. The technical challenges are extremely daunting.

I know it's extremely unlikely, but I'm hoping that Helion has a bunch of positive results they haven't gone public with yet to avoid spurring on competition, and that's what prompted the big recent investments.

However more likely they'll just be another failed company in a decade.

Yes, we can always hope that someone working away in secret has cracked it, but I doubt it.

Of course, it isn't just a matter of coming up with a reliable, continuous way to generate significantly more power from the fusion reaction than is put into it, it's also the economics of the fuel supply for it.

Nuclear Fusion Scientists Successfully Recreate Net Energy Gain