Great news - if true.

"As first reported yesterday by the Financial Times, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to announce that researchers have ignited a small fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. The federal government is calling this “a major scientific breakthrough,” and if the rumors are true, that description will in some sense be justified." https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ermore/672439/

and:

"The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed." https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-...reType=nongift

It seems to me that whether or not this event is easily repeatable in the short term, the advent of testing by quite a few important startups exploring the equivalent of Pulse-Width Modulation and Pulse-Duration Modulation, is about to trash the joke meme of Fusion always being 30 years away. Besides the obvious improvement in human future of mitigating Anthropogenic or otherwise climate change, the nation that first succeeds with fusion generation will almost instantly rise to the top of the food chain with a more stable, more productive, as well as a far more profitable infrastructure and resulting economy and quality of Life. This is HUGE.

Personally, I think that there was something to "cold fusion." We do not understand it yet and have had difficulty reproducing it, but intuitively I suspect that "nuclear fusion reactions" happen more often than we realize.

i have checked national ignition facility's website maybe a once a year from year 2010 or close to it.

its nice to see that they have had some success

While it is true that as usual most news sources going for the lurid click bait have overstated the fusion breakthrough it is nevertheless a very important event as proof of concept, and perhaps more importantly to begin gathering support momentum. When the firrst fission reaction made theory into fact, it only took 20 years before the first sustained fission reactor was invented, Fusion is a LOT harder so it will probably take longer but the very difficulties that must be overcome will affect numerous important offshoots barely related. It's still a HUGE event.

Agreed, at this point Proof of Concept is a breakthrough on its own. Curious if this will start a new energy race similar to the "space race" etc... Do you think the energy expended justifies the energy produced though, or will that scale down over time like other technologies? I would like to think so.

That, of course depends totally on what you choose to tally up as "expended". If we only look at directly responsible energy in vs/ energy out it is 150% which is quite substantial. With this current phase of the technology there is a high degree of support structures that expend energy so it can be argued it isn't a truly net gain, but so much of that support structure is speculative and cautious that it will surely be reduced rather quickly, especially if it can be easily repeated. That, currently, is not a trivial accomplishment but the quantum leap of enthusiasm could well be like an avalanche.

Additionally, this isn't the only outfit trying nor the only process being experimented with. Tokamak isn't done in and there are a handful of new startups testing with scale and pulsing among other concepts, so it would seem "the ball has legs".

Personally, I feel it will never scale up, because the materials available to us will never take the temperatures involved. The "progress" seems to be increasingly clever ways of getting fusion started without coping with temperature excess. Hence all burns are time limited.

It's a pipe dream. Scaled up fusion can only be done at huge scale, where gravity holds it together, like the sun. We can harness the light & heat of that even as far away as we are.

Actually a Korean Fusion Reactor achieved 30 seconds at 100,000,000 degrees Centigrade, roughly equal to the core of our Sun and many times hotter than the Sun's surface. While gravity isn't magnetism, they can create similar effects. The steady increases in temperature and duration have been mainly achieved through better, more powerful magnets. Recently a few startups have been experimenting with burst energy, plasma in pulses. Much like a Push Pull amplifier, a down period allows for a cool off period even if that pulse is in fractions of a second.

I seriously doubt Fusion Power is a pipe dream. Now that we have proof of net gain, it's just an engineering problem to manage the heat effectively. Just searching for new ways will no doubt create spinoff science and engineering.

I have read articles from those who theorize that iron acts as some kind of "nuclear catalyst." Very interesting.

Interesting indeed, sundiualsvcs. Are you referring to the tipping point in nucleosynthesis when stars near EOL start fusing Iron, or something else?

Be realistic please. Even as little as 1 GW 24/7/365 from one power station?

I'm not at all sure what you mean or are asking. Are you asking if it is likely that fusion energy will ever be able to produce that level of energy production? Whether we will or not is subject to a lot of variables, but this recent event is a tipping point of proof of concept that IF we continue to pursue it's development should surely have no practical limit with the limit ever-changing due to other advancements and environments.

"A high-density and high-confinement tokamak plasma regime for fusion energy"
Published: 24 April 2024


"...Here we report the demonstration of stable tokamak plasmas with a line-averaged density approximately 20% above the Greenwald density and an energy confinement quality of approximately 50% better than the standard high-confinement mode, which was realized by taking advantage of the enhanced suppression of turbulent transport granted by high density-gradients in the high-poloidal-beta scenario14,15. Furthermore, our experimental results show an integration of very low edge transient perturbations with the high normalized density and confinement core. The operating regime we report supports some critical requirements in many fusion reactor designs all over the world and opens a potential avenue to an operating point for producing economically attractive fusion energy."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07313-3

Reminds me of something I wrote in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek university project report