As a European, I am finally really impressed with your great country. First, with how you support Ukraine, and now with this wonderful achievement. Much improvement on the era of the stable genius.
and the transistor, and the light bulb, and the Air Conditioner, and the NIH, and putting humans on the Moon, and putting an end to two world wars, and rock 'n roll. The list is endless. Thank you.
@@markbeames7852 Very true. But recently I've only been hearing of abortion bans, Christian nationalists and what a shame that Jan 6 wasn't a success. This news is a reminder of what your country has done for the world. Undeniably great things.
I remember, as a kid in the 70's, reading a Spiderman Comic where Doc Oct was talking about this very process of focusing lasers onto a piece of Tridium. Pretty freaking awesome to be alive when this breakthrough occurred
People say this technology (when viable) needs to be nationalized, but that's not far enough. It needs to be *globalized* . Humanity could do so much better if we stopped hoarding.
No Renato, it means America will become the dominate Super Power in the 21th Century. They will not give out such technology to other countries. Unlimited clean energy from water. Wow.
don't worry , they're trying, whether we like it or not. Beijing's top Honey-Trap beauties are already on their way to Livermore to seduce these smart-but-lonely physicist guys (& let's not forget, Livermore is in Rep. Swallwel's district :-O )
This is Murika. We need to make sure that only a few oligarchs have control of this and can make ludicrous amounts of money off of it. They can also make it so that poor people don’t have access to it. Now that’s FREEDUM!!!
This is a bigger deal than sending a man to the moon. Once this is scalable, it will completely change the world. That's not an exaggeration. It's not just powering our electric grid. This could revolutionize space travel and get people to Mars in 2 weeks at 1G of thrust. In the next several decades we will see things that we never could have imagined.
We have no reason to go to the moon - if Elon Musk is such a whoopy inventor - why isn't he working on energy production instead of selling his Mars Mission (which are suicide missions) - the fact is, this tech has been around for nearly 80 yrs, already - but has been crushed by the Oil/Energy cartels on anything that would harm their profits ... Mars is a dead planet, has no magnetosphere - that's a pipe dream, the moon has Helium 3 - which is a mining resource, but its energy use would be weaponized to making the worst kind of weapons that would destroy off of humanity ~ making nuclear bombs look like firecrackers. Governments have been lying for years, this is not "NEW"
The boost to construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and material industry will be almost unthinkable. We'll be able to grow food in buildings with constant artificial lights because it will cost basically nothing to power the lights. We'll have more energy to use for mining, so material costs will go down, and we'll have basically unlimited energy to throw at material manufacturing, so we'll be able to produce strong, exotic materials that are expensive now for almost nothing. Buildings will get bigger and cheaper, there will be more space for housing, transportation costs will go down dramatically, almost everything you could think of will be revolutionized.
Dominushydra This is about our common humanity. The scientists involved come from all over the world. This is a human achievement, not an American achievement.
@Tycondaroga100 It’s been a global quest for decades. A lot of the work has been done in the Cern large hadron collider in Switzerland. There are labs around the world working together on this.
A gigantic reactor is being built in the south of France, an endeavour that includes most countries in the world including the US, which will arguably provide a better way to achieve fusion technology at a large scale. It's not about a country, it's about humanity coming together and solve a global issue that is limiting our growth and making the freeworld hostage from autocrats.
The hardest thing to do with net-positive energy fusion was to prove that it could be done in a controlled fashion in a man-made facility at all. The fact that we now know it's possible means that all that's left is to keep doing it better over time. Welcome to the future, people. 2022 has been redeemed.
China has already achieved the goal. But it is a futuristic affairs to take shape. Fake news to fool the international audience. Liberal colonists democracy boast for rule of law and freedom. What's about Julian Assange?
@@burmy1552 Look brah, it takes a temperature of 100 million degrees to sustain a fusion reaction--and it's not a self-sustaining chain reaction that goes on and on by itself like nuclear fission. So, what's the chances this can be sustained for an everyday, 24-7 energy plant? (Answer: 0.000001%.) You have to put so much energy powering a laser to heat a pinpoint of the "nuclear fuel" that you're not going to get much back. That's why a hydrogen bomb is really powered by full power of 3 nuclear fission bombs in 2-stages (the Core, the Spark Plug, and the Tamper) and why it's really called a "thermonuclear" bomb) and why the Sun has to be so massive to sustain the pressures and temperatures in its core to sustain nuclear fusion reactions. This sounds like the "Cold Fusion" scam all over again from a woke administration that is so desperate to tout an SBF/FTX-style solution to a very difficult--if not impossible--problem with getting free, non-carbon-based energy.
I always hoped the world would change in my lifetime. And granted, we have seen some amazing things but if this bears fruit... world changing. Mind changing. Everything will change so much and so quick. Congrats and thank you to all the people who have come and gone and those still here who have helped to make this discovery!
World changing like how solar panels make free energy from the sun at zero operational cost? The entire middle east could be powered by solar but isn't. Texas could power the entire country with solar but doesn't. That's reality.
Remember, the Wright's brother flyer lasted 12 seconds. We were told it would be a million years for a transatlantic flight. It happened 16 years later. 60 years after that 12 seconds flight, we were on the moon. Never say never.
The “more out than you put in” is the critical piece. If the process continues to pan out, it can be an unbelievable change, like the difference between horse-and buggy vs. motor vehicles.
Blessing to all the scientists that achieved this milestone, their is hope for our children. I now imagine faster flying vessels to explore the galaxies and even possibly visit other earth like planets ,cleaner cars , airplanes and transportation overall . I think of the possibilities which are endless with this achievement.
Getting more energy from the fusion than you put in is a _major_ milestone, but an economically viable fusion energy generator will require quite a bit more scaling and engineering refinement.
OPEC can no longer be tolerated and suddenly the western governments have stopped stalling the development of nuclear fusion .. It was always a matter of scaling instead of running around the problem for decades.
Probably less significant than taming fire or inventing writing, but most likely more important than the wheel, electricity or the internet - although it obviously would not have happend in a world without any of those inventions.
Correction. The process did not generate more energy than the lasers used. The lasers used 500MJ of energy, because they're inefficient. But they produced 1.5 MJ of heat energy and the fusion produced 1.8 MJ of heat energy.
My research suggests it was more like 300 MJ rather than 500 but your point still entirely correct. The fact that the energy secretary doesn’t even allude to the is fact is tragic.
Oh d*** they lied to us again. So glad we have You to correct them. I can't understand why you're not on the panel of engineers from the lab. Maybe you should put in a resume. I'm being very sarcastic to you morons if you don't understand that period
@@aleonyohan6745 yeah, but you're wrong though. The claim that more power was created than invested is incorrect. More energy was created than what lasers put into the process, but the lasers are so extremely inefficient, that the actual overall invested power was some 100x higher than the output (300MJ vs. 3MJ)
This is equivalent to a spectator of the Wright Brothers first flight asking “so when will be be able to fly commercially”. A long time. Solar and other renewables will outcompete economically and gain substantial market share before fusion is viable.
CONGRATULATIONS! Utterly awesome. I'm guessing every value and all the sensor data from that prior 'lucky shot' was intensely scrutinized to make the lucky shot every shot now? I read an article somwhere regarding using a hybridized approach to inertial confinement fusion, applying a magnetic field to the hohlraum somehow... Seems VERY interesting. How about applying a nanoparticle lattice system that levitates into position right before the shot to the hohlraum as well? At least all of this doesn't seem 'always 30 years away' now! Thank you all for your decades of hard work and perseverance. You are one of the most important bastions of humanity's future!
IF this ever becomes a commercially viable method to produce energy for the grid, it will take decades. By then we have covered the grid's needs with renewables and various energy storage solutions.
You are probably thinking about giant Tokamaks using magnetic containment to achieve fusion costing many billions while taking years to build and improve. This method involves laser compression, which may prove to be way easier to develop and it might cut our timeframe of achieving sustainable energy from decades to just years, so the 10 year plan to bring a commercial solution is very achievable using lasers to sustain fusion.
@@KB-sv7fm the lowest Carbon emissions in America for the last 22 years occurred in 2019 and 2020. Under Trump. This fusion news is wonderful, but it will do nothing for anyone for many more years. Shipping crap from overseas is a braindead idea. It causes freakishly high amounts of Carbon fuel emissions. It is not a partisan issue. It is a common sense issue.
@@jantzfitzgerald6115 Trump is no environmentalist. Stop trying to make it seem things happen BECAUSE of Trump rather than IN SPITE of Trump. What is the Republican version of the Green New Deal ?
Well, this is a great achievement, no doubt about it. Electricity from fusion has been 20 years in the future for the last 60 years. It's possible that it is now only 19 years in the future for the next 60 years. Progress is made.
This is impressive. But a small caveat that a lot of news sources are forgetting. Even though they got 3MJ out from 1.5MJ in, it took a lot of energy to power (500MJ) the LASERs.
I’m my humble engineering experience.. the hardest and longest part is usually figuring out how to achieve the initial goal. Once the initial goal is accomplish, then it’s just reiterating the process that got us there. That continuous reiteration is the easier part. I bet you’ll see commercial fusion in this life time. Or sooner than expected.
@@Machiavelli2pc This is gonna be in less than 5 years, the investment is larger than what we have in U.S. debt. We might literally reach world peace in after all these centuries of war, labor, and poverty
The power will come from itself. First you only have to jump start it. To put it another way, they have achieved perpetual motion or free energy. The Snow Piercers Eternal Engine that they prayed to and worshipped was perpetual motion. Work out can be => then work in. That means space travel is closer. I tried myself to discover free energy using self-oscillating circuits. I didn't even come close. They used 2 atoms ⚛️ I am amazed by this fascinating this breakthrough.
Problem being: This methodology simply isn't scalable in terms of the sheer number of iterations of the process required per hour required in order to begin creating a commercial supply!
There are a lot of powerful people who do not want people to have cheep clean energy, not going to get my hopes up till I actually see it used in the real world.
I think many of us will see a day when fossil hydrocarbons are considered far too valuable to just burn -- sort of like how we don't use old-growth tropical hardwood trees to heat our homes; we make fine furniture and musical instruments with it. We will continue to need fossil hydrocarbons for various materials, but not nearly as much of it. The fossil fuel companies will adjust, or die.
@@cacogenicist, fossil fuel companies already quit pumping when the price of oil gets below a certain amount, and that is when the primary use is fuel. The alternative uses are not enough to warrant production. We might need to come up with many alternatives to replace fossil fuels. If fusion is the next big thing, oil producers will get there first and set a price.
Sadly they mention Q_plasma = 1.5 but the generation of the 3MJ from the 2MJ delivered from the lasers, but the total energy used to power the lasers was 300MJ. So in actuality Q_total = 0.01, and then theres converting the heat into electricity, and thats another 0.5 to be multiplied on top of that, so using 300MJ to generate 3MJ of heat, and then getting around 1.5MJ of electricity, thus losing 298.5 MJ for every 300MJ put into the system.
This is misleading. NOT mentioned is the 200 kW of electricity it took to produce 2 kW of laser that then produced 3 kW of fusion power which when converted to electricity might give 1 kW back. Losing 199 kW but was over 1000 kW before so this IS progress but hardly the free energy many think it might be. Not to say that it won’t work, but equally it might cost so much that we’d think solar was free by comparison. Lasers need to maintain the temperatures and pressures found on the Sun to continue otherwise it snuffs out quickly which has been the problem to date.
I'm dumbfounded that after all those years they finally cracked the code. I first read about Tokamak reactors in the early '60s in a copy of Business Week. I suffered the joy and depression that these scientists endured as they tried to do the near impossible. Congratulations!
Don’t worry, huge conglomerates will band together to protect their interest in legacy energy production and use their propaganda machines to scare us away from this new source of power. Then they’ll buy this technology up and keep it in a closet until they can figure out how to monopolize it’s deployment. Murika
@@todd-617 Yep. The Corporations will not reduce their profit projections. We would have to fundamentally change the entire wealth system and that is never going to happen, not while rich people exist. Yes we have the tech, but humanity will never be responsible enough to use it.
@@fractalwalrus5409 Changing political will can (and has) changed laws that affect the Oligarchs. They can exist, they don’t have to CONTROL the gov’t and energy production. Anymore than they have to control Healthcare in the U.S. They bought that control, but the people can take it back with a simple vote.
@@todd-617 You're right, it's going to be a fight. Science-denial has already spread well past AGW and into even more life-threatening territory like Covidiocy. Hopefully, the results will speak for themselves.
WOW! This is probably the most amazing science news I've ever been witness to. There's virtually no downside to fusion besides the expensive tech needed to acheive it. From what I read, this test only used 4% of the 'fuel' in the pellet so there's huge gains to be realized.
I really hope we get a future President that will nationalize this energy resource and not just hand it over to private industry to profit and price gauge like our other utilities.
@@lexyswope As they did with the internet, gps, computers and others, which then are used for enourmous, very little taxed profit by some monoploizing corporations.
F**k no! Private industry shunned this and refused to fund research privately. They thought is was a pipe dream. So let them try to spend a trillion dollars in research on it themselves.
This is great and all, and I hope that this doesn't sound too critical, but we've been "doing" fusion for a while now. Hearing "We haven't done this before" rubs me the wrong way a little bit. Can say a 10 year goal is never going to happen. Can't even build an airport (a technology which is over 100 years old ) is less than 9 years or so. Again, I'm happy for this, it's another step in our search for fusion energy, I'm just a little skeptical of the media hype that this is creating absent the context that exists.
Based on what I know about this the experiment occurred on a massive scale.The lasers where distributed over the length of s football field and were many in number and scale all focused directlyon the elements used in the experiment to produce fusion. While this is extremely important and amazing I cant help but wonder how do yoy scale it down for practical applications
Don't hate on me for saying this: I'm totally skeptical about this. This same thing was in the news some 15- ish years ago. Yes, the same lasers (powered by a nuclear reactor) shot on a pallet of hydrogen. This is not news but false hope. I have lots of popular science mags laying around going way back to my college days some 25 years ago and fusion energy has always been more enthusiastically than this news heralded as being just around the corner. And yet, here we are with basically 15 years old news. Really it IS the same stale news. Fusion for a few micro seconds with a net energy gain of 0.00001 percent. It can't be done (and I'm an unabashed optimist). You need to make the plasma hotter than the sun to make fusion possible on earth. But the plasma is so hot that it can evaporate anything instantly. So they house it in a so called magnetic bottle. The thing is, they have to cool the magnets to almost absolute zero (with takes up a lot of power too). So it becomes impossible to access that heat without heating up the magnetic bottle. If the magnets are not strong enough, you'll get meltdown because plasma will touch the bottle. Any heath exchang apparatus most have an otherworldly capacity to conduct that heat quickly enough away. It can't be done. It's an engineering problem with no solution. Better spend all that money for things that really matter.
@@donaldhysa4836 No, they didn't come close to generating more energy then they used. The lasers themselves consumed 332 MJ, but the laser beams delivered 2 MJ to the target. The resulting fusion reaction produced 3 MJ. Because the fusion reaction produced more energy than it took to cause the fusion reaction, it's a breakthrough. But actually delivering that energy to the target cost a lot more than the energy that was actually delivered. The lasers themselves cost 332 MJ to run, and the experiment likely has lots of other power usage such as cooling, monitoring equipment, pellet manufacture and delivery, and so on. As to whether they "generated" energy, well the energy produced by the fusion reaction was not captured, so they didn't *generate* any energy.
@@donaldhysa4836 For context: The energy gain concerns only the step "light energy laser" - "heat energy nuclear fusion". The balance becomes already negative, if one considers only the current for the laser.
0:52 "For the very first time this fusion process produced more energy than was used by the lasers to drive it." - Fact Check: They were only measuring the energy that the lasers itself inputted into the unit and did not include all the energy that it took to power up the lasers and all the rest of the energy guzzling equipment needed for this experiment. Also don't over look that the laser energy surplus was produced for a whopping "100 trillionths of a second."
Thank you! This is a big achievement, it is. But this facility was and never will be meant for cost effective electrical grid production. This facility, and its method of achieving fusion, is for improving national and allied defense only by greatly enhancing our knowledge and ability to produce powerful and CONSISTENT nukes to use as deterrents. And we just made a huge breakthrough on that front with this. This achievement advances the goal of clean cheap grid electricity in one way only. It shows that fusion can be net positive and all this research and work was never chasing a fairytale, which will strongly attract new private and public investors in fusion. Now if something like Helion's gen 7 or 8 or maybe even 9 reactor or somebody else produces activation AND 24/7-365 continuous net positive grid electrical production at a fairly similar, or even somewhat more expensive financial cost compared to other current power sources within the next ten years. Ya, that will change humanity and the future will be here just like every news source is reporting.
@@aw3299 I'm sorry, don't mean to be mean, but talk is cheap. I'm plenty familiar with your above storyline, works great within that bubble, but take a look at current events, environmental, climatic, cut throat political scene, business dominated by maximizing profits, minimizing externalities and contempt for regular people. But there's no point in getting into all that. We had a saying back in the '60s-'70s, being fixated on the rearview mirror is a lousy way to race into the future. You're betting on future stability and economic grow a kin to the past century - that simply isn't in the cards anymore.
@@petermiesler9452 Agreed, pretty much on all fronts. I only left that comment for others to hopefully see if they saw yours. Wanted to let them know that this breakthrough, and very possibly even the dream scenario I described isn't enough to elevate us to the future we dream of. I believe the modern society breaking point, something akin to the social/societal upheaval of the great depression or much worse, will come before the fusion scenario I described will happen, let alone be ubiquitously implemented. It's not enough to produce clean energy, we need to completely reverse all the greenhouse gas, pollution in all forms, and ecological plant and animal biosphere damage we've done. How the hell we'll completely do any of that, let alone all of that, let alone all of that in every country and part of the world by every human, BEFORE the consequental effects become to great to be able to do that work, I have no have idea, and honestly no hope that all those NEEDED goals will be reached before modern society is destroyed. And we have to many problems blocking the needed urgency implementation to give us a chance to accomplish those goals. Between looming war all around the world, if not world war, including nuclear war, or just the drastically increasing threat of local nuclear war by smaller but dictatorial players like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea. The growing fascism, nationalism, conservatism pushback, and rising dictatorship potential in western democratic liberal countries, with growing economic, political, military, and most importantly media image and social persuasion power of governments like China, the middle east, and east asia. And always reducing worker benefits and wages to the eventual point of slavery to both keep and grow the wealth of those economically on top, in addition to advancing technology to allow them to enforce their opinions, power, and eliminate their criticism. I get it, even if we somehow stop the world from ending environmentally, do you really want to live in a dystopia afterwards. I'm a trans person, and if I think the future will just be fixed with full equality for me and fusion power, I'm going to be so mistaken I'll look back to today as if it was a golden age, which is fucking saying something.
This is the best and brightest news I have heard in all the long years of my life. Hope returns. We need a Global New Deal to get this developed and installed across the globe. 🤩
This break through must not be allowed to fall into the hands of private capital. If it was discovered using public funds and at facilities that are in the public sector then this breakthrough ought to be used for the benefit of the public broadly ... and not be handed over to a private firm to exploit for profit.
It is only been made possible BECAUSE OF private interests, unfortunately. I don’t expect it to belong to ‘the people of the world’ for our benefit. Not one thing before this has ever escaped the hands of private benefactors, and fusion isn’t going to be any different
Aneutronic fusion generators would certainly be preferable -- like proton-boron or deuterium-helium 3. But that's harder to accomplish. Initially -- and there's a lot of very tricky engineering that still needs doing -- I suspect fusion reactors might be used locally to power very energy-intensive industrial facilities (like perhaps desalination plants), before fusion is powering the grid.
Converting 300MJ of Electricity into 2MJ of Lazer energy to produce 3.15MJ of Heat and calling it a "net energy gain" without explaing it like this is basically fraud, in business "net" means including your expenditure.
This is 100% a message to try and get investors. There are some very important things not mentioned here. One, it's not hydrogen. If you listen closely, she talks about isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium and tritium are rare. Deuterium at least can be harvested from the ocean, but is difficult to do and expensive. Tritium is classified as extremely rare and very difficult to make. Typically, the most abundant way of making it is by destroying larger atoms like Lithium, so it breaks down into smaller atoms, some of which are tritium. Obviously, you can see a problem there. What about the other atoms like Lithium? They will he gone forever. Unlike other processes that consume things, which are typically chemical reaction, the fundamental atomic elements are perfectly preserved, just their molecular bonds are changed. In this Fusion process, what ever base element is consumed will be gone forever. Add to that, her announcement is that the process made more energy than was put into it. That likely isn't true either. Did it make more power than the high powered lasers, or did it make more power than lasers, the magnetic containment field, the cooling systems, the building facility, etc, etc, combined? Probably the first one. Also, what form was that energy? Electricity, which most of the public and uninformed investors may believe? Ot heat? Yup, heat. So, a lot of that energy is going to be lost converting that heat energy to electric. So, they really just announce that they barely exceeded the power of the lasers (and likely just the lasers) in heat energy, which when converted to electrical energy wouldn't even be close to enough power to run the lasers, to just power itself. All that, and the process, if made commercial, would likely involve the permanent destruction of elemental atoms to generate the fuel supply it needs to run. Keep that in mind when thinking of investing or believing that this type of energy will have any effect on climate change.
@Mark Victor ya, I know saying elemental atoms is a little like saying old fort cheese, which inadvertantly was something I liked to do around an ex of mine that spoke french. Drove her nuts when I was effectively said old old cheddar. Still, I intentionally said elemental atoms because many people forget atoms are elements. Many people don't understand the difference between molecules and atoms. One can destroy a molecule and all you've done is broken the bonds between the atoms. In this process, they breaks the actual atoms to make Tritium. One of the methods is to make a blanket that contains Lithium. Lithium is already rare on Earth, involves terrible mining practices, and is also the thing we need really badly for batteries until they can finally actually figure out how to replace it with a mass scalable new battery tech that can supply a similar if not better power to weight ratio. You can make fun of the word choices as much as you want, but the Tritium hurdle will likely be the hardest thing to overcome and to me, destroying elements as a basic part of the process doesn't make the energy source a viable long term solution. Even fission has that problem in that once they've used all the radioactive materials, that's it. They can't really synthesize more.
What no one is saying is they generated 3 megajoules using 2 megajoules to power the laser but that’s not all the power they drew to complete the experiment. They drew a total of 300 megajoules from the grid. So they still drew 300x more from the grid than they generated. I’m in my 40s and don’t expect to see this commercially in my lifetime.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Not a big deal, that is true of EVERY technology which turns heat into mechanical work and then (optionally) electricity. The other 2/3 is available to use for heating, driving chemical plants, etc. Locate the fusion power plants in cold climates, or near other big users of heat. Getting use out of the other 2/3 is routine cogeneration.
@@EfficientRVer What do you mean it's not a big deal? It means you need to generate 3 times as much energy as you would otherwise need to generate just to break even. That's absolutely a big deal. For a technology that is just barely producing a small amount of energy, the efficiency of actually generating the electricity is of critical importance. You're not wrong that every other power generation technology has similar inefficiency losses. But those technologies can generate energy far more readily than fusion, so overcoming those inefficiencies is much easier to the point where it really isn't a big deal for those technologies (though it's hardly ideal either). As far as attempting to use the lost 2/3rds of the fusion energy for heating or other purposes that's cool and all but it still doesn't erase the inefficiency inherent in generating electricity. Look, my only point is that there is still a long road before fusion is a practical commercial technology.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Every engineer (I'm a mechanical engineer, who specialized in thermal power systems and turbomachinery) understands that heat output, mechanical power output, and electrical power output are three different things. All 3 of them are useful products worth money. Nobody was claiming that the excess energy of the controlled fusion was electricity, it very clearly was heat. There is zero confusion, except among people who incorrectly think a megawatt of heat output gets you a megawatt of electricity output. This is true of fusion, fission, oil, natural gas, diesel, gasoline, geothermal, all heat-driven generation. Anyone who thinks the fusion energy claim is off by a factor of 3, doesn't understand power generation.
Minimum 3 decades. There are two potential fusions chains at present. One of them results in heavy neutron bombardment, which leaves containment material issues unsolved. The other one involves lots of something that we just don't happen to have lots of right now, helium 3. The end result leaves us with large monopolistic utility providers, at least in the US, with big, expensive and centralized power generation... Same as it always was. We have a perfectly good fusion reactor located conveniently in the center of our solar system. We need to utilize that more effectively and work towards more distributed power generation.
Well stated. I have been around for quite a long time, and I remember (might be 20 years ago) some nuclear physicist being asked in an interview "How far away is commercial nuclear fusion?", the answer was "40 years. It has always been 40 years, and still is."
The NIF aka National Ignition Facility wasn’t just for fusion (clean energy) research. It was also for modeling and researching hydrogen bombs! Just as Apollo landed the USA on the moon it also developed rockets, guidance, communications, tracking and more for war. So is the same with NIF fusion technology research
Let’s hope its scalable for creating a decentralized grid, where small generators can be used. Energy needs to be in home or in your neighborhood to be safe from power blackmailing.
Temperature to fuse hydrogen is minimum 100,000,000K or 6 times the temperature of the core of the sun. Then you would need a boiler and a turbine/generator. Not very adaptable to a single home power plant. I don't see this happening anywhere near the 10 year prediction as stated at 3:10. Think F-35 overruns and that is just a complicated plane.
@@gfisher7765 , 2 million degrees F. or 10 thousand degrees F. Is a long way from what you are spouting. Kelvin is a color temperature of visible light emitted by a incandescent source. You are talking about temperature that only happened during the Big Bang event.
Ghostbusters had it first:-)) Joke aside. Humans have been stupid with our use of our Earth. But when we have people who have the ideas, the will and skills to save us from ourself. We might survive a few more generations. Thanks for the hopeful update that can save our Earth. Good work and Merry Christmas to you all.
Kudos to the scientists. That said the CNN reporter was wrong, fusion was not harnessed, to consider it harnessed, we would have needed to be able to generate some electricity. Still a very long way to go.
Not to put a damper on things, but there is a long way to go from scientific breakeven to engineering breakeven to commercial breakeven. They've achieved Q=1. They'll eventually need to achieve at least Q=5, and probably much more. Edit: They actually achieved Q=1.54, which is a big leap above previous efforts that were all below Q=1. But, there is still a long way to go.
Awesome reply, unfortunatly to achieve iGNITION, needs a Q = 10 or greater, once ignition is achieved all is needed just to send constant fuel, DT for it to continue on its own.
Most of that free energy is already spoken for driving the ecosystem. You want transportation, heat, distant communication, manufacturing, recreation? Go get your own energy!
The DOE Secretary is stupid. First, we have always been able to do fusion since 1945. One, that is what the particle colliders do and two, that is what Fat Man used to destroy Nagasaki. What is the breathrough in science should be is Cold Fusion, not Fusion itself. The difference is cold fusion doesn't take millions of degrees of heat to do. It is done at a "cold" temperature. So, when they do cold fusion, then I will be impressed.
Hopefully the government doesn’t hand it over to private corporations like they love to do. Spend our tax payer dollars to innovate then just hand over the tech to private industry to monopolize. Hope the fossil fuel industry doesn’t use their power to burry this innovation.
Reality check about the fusion! The recent fusion experiment generated 3.15 Megajoules of energy from 2.05 Megajoules of input from the laser. Yet the laser draws about 300 Megajoules from the grid just to operate the laser. When you do an energy balance, you must include ALL the input energy. Total inputs: 2.05 MJ input from the laser + 300 MJ input to operate the laser Total output: 3.15 MJ Total output - Total inputs = 3.15 MJ - (2.05 + 300)MJ = - 298.9 MJ This big fusion news is a lead bubble.
That's why it isn't ready yet, the breakthrough is still huge. It shows that it can be done it just isn't efficient yet. This announcement will bring more funding and more people into the field to help improve cost. Maybe in 5 years the Lazer consumption will go down to 200 then 100 and eventually less than the output. Engineers will probably focus on making better lasers that are more efficient.
I did research in Energy Security- this is the most important breakthrough currently in terms of producing social, racial, and structural equity. Scarcity, political division, and class differentiation are manipulation tactics used to perpetuate the means of production toward unsustainable ends where profit is valued over humanity and Earth. This is a creation of sociocracy- not a step in any controversial economic system.
U got ur head in the clouds buddy - what on earth could make a net gain in fusion input/output suddenly ensure people are nice to each other? Naive, careless thinking at best
@@garyc1384 Whether or not people will be kind and responsible enough to share wealth remains to be seen, but there will cease to be any particular reason for wealth to not reach everybody in some capacity, as the general cost of living will go down to basically nothing.
If it's only one experiment, why are they telling us about this. I thought you had to repeat an experiment before it could be credible. I'm tired of these half truths.
Good news!!!!! However, I am disappointed that CNN didn’t mention that it will keep a sharp lookout for “privatizing profits while socializing costs” as it concerns this marvelous breakthrough. Or, do they simply not care about average Am’s? H’mmm…
"I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." ---Thomas Edison. The secret to success - as true in Edison’s time as it is today - is perseverance. As Edison himself said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
@angel luis ll it is true edison invented light globes ,and he was a good inventor ,however he was sadistic and power hungry ,he told nikola tesla if he could make one of his inventions work he would give tesla 50k when tesla did so ,edison said you obviously don't understand american humour,then when teslas alternating current become obviously more popular than edisons direct current edison proceeded to discredit teslas work ,even to the point of electrocuting animals including an elephant just to prove it was too dangerous to use ,tesla wanted everyone to enjoy electricity permanently for free,to that end things we enjoy today such as wifi,microwave, xray,and even bluetooth are all examples of teslas genius yet all of his inventions were discredited by edison because edison had connection to jp morgan and the Rockefellers all of which made money from electricity companies ,tesla even proved his wireless remote boat was indeed operational but once again with edison ,edison wanted to discredit tesla by saying tesla was in love with his pidgeon and while nikola may have indeed loved his bird, he was eccentric, but he was still a genius ,because ,otherwise if tesla was indeed mad why did the fbi confiscate 50 crates or more of teslas work answer ,they knew tesla was working on something called the death ray,and long answered short version the above mentioned inventions are now being used today but not credited to teslas work if the fbi thought he was indeed a madman shouldn't they have considered his work the ramblings of an eccentric person and just left his personal files to his family ,= no they wanted to see if they could weaponise his inventions and did not want to reveal this to the public ,,,,so angel luis ll, while i think edison was a good inventor, i personally wonder why he was such an arsehole
@@geoffhaylock6848 Remember my friend, as Albert Einstein also once said "The secret to making a star on Earth without the help of gravity is to remove spacetime from the equation. No spacetime, no gravity. Easy."
@@geoffhaylock6848 Also remember my friend, a 7th century Egyption monk once said in his past life, "By continuously making a piece of wire get hot, you will eventually harness the power of the Sun."
Wow! An important breakthrough through during my generation. Who says our educational system is broken and we have lost our creativity. The old-fashioned system is still great.
@@ATLIEN333 Yet this country still tries to educate everyone, but in other countries, only a few are educated. We still create and make all kinds of break throughs. So many people from other countries want to come to American schools.
Great news, after decades of failed promises and billions in cost they needed a positive breakthrough, at minimum to keep funding going if nothing else. There's so many more breakthroughs need that will only come through more research.
0:53 This reporter's statement is incredibly incorrect. The scientists said something very different than what she just claimed here. They said the fusion energy released was greater than "the energy deposited by" the lasers, NOT the energy consumed by the lasers. Lasers are NOT 100% efficient. We do not know how much energy was consumed, because they did not say anything about it in their press release yesterday. It's still quite possible, or even likely, that there was a net energy deficit, rather than a gain, over the ENTIRE system. In which case, you can't generate electricity with it. It can still be a milestone, but let's not over-sell it.
It’s almost guaranteed that fusion power will not be coming from a laser based system like the one used in this experiment. In this experiment the energy yield barely exceeded the energy input which is way less yield than necessary to produce a practical power generation system. We’ve been thought to be 30 years away from practical fusion power generation for the last 30-40 years and guess what, we still are.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
As a European, I am finally really impressed with your great country. First, with how you support Ukraine, and now with this wonderful achievement. Much improvement on the era of the stable genius.
The US hasn't been impressed with Europe for one hundred years and continues to be so.
and the transistor, and the light bulb, and the Air Conditioner, and the NIH, and putting humans on the Moon, and putting an end to two world wars, and rock 'n roll. The list is endless. Thank you.
@@alejohernandez75 Troll. Ignore.
@@markbeames7852 Very true. But recently I've only been hearing of abortion bans, Christian nationalists and what a shame that Jan 6 wasn't a success. This news is a reminder of what your country has done for the world. Undeniably great things.
2months ago we successfully tested the 1st satellite to avert an earth destroying meteor. Your welcome for that! 😅
I remember, as a kid in the 70's, reading a Spiderman Comic where Doc Oct was talking about this very process of focusing lasers onto a piece of Tridium. Pretty freaking awesome to be alive when this breakthrough occurred
Doc Oct would be proud lol
My first thought was of Spider-Man 2 (the movie).
I think I may have read that same issue! I was just remembering other Sci-Fi authors that spoke of the same method, going back decades.
and Parents say comics arn't educational
Freaking hecking reddit moment! Marvel!
People say this technology (when viable) needs to be nationalized, but that's not far enough. It needs to be *globalized* . Humanity could do so much better if we stopped hoarding.
It will be. This is world changing and no one will tolerate it being hoarded. There's really no excuse for it.
No Renato, it means America will become the dominate Super Power in the 21th Century. They will not give out such technology to other countries. Unlimited clean energy from water. Wow.
don't worry , they're trying, whether we like it or not. Beijing's top Honey-Trap beauties are already on their way to Livermore to seduce these smart-but-lonely physicist guys (& let's not forget, Livermore is in Rep. Swallwel's district :-O )
What do you mean, fusion reactors are only known to and build in the USA?
This is Murika. We need to make sure that only a few oligarchs have control of this and can make ludicrous amounts of money off of it. They can also make it so that poor people don’t have access to it. Now that’s FREEDUM!!!
This is a bigger deal than sending a man to the moon. Once this is scalable, it will completely change the world. That's not an exaggeration. It's not just powering our electric grid. This could revolutionize space travel and get people to Mars in 2 weeks at 1G of thrust. In the next several decades we will see things that we never could have imagined.
When this becomes scalable, sending man to the moon will be a common, everyday practice
We have no reason to go to the moon - if Elon Musk is such a whoopy inventor - why isn't he working on energy production instead of selling his Mars Mission (which are suicide missions) - the fact is, this tech has been around for nearly 80 yrs, already - but has been crushed by the Oil/Energy cartels on anything that would harm their profits ... Mars is a dead planet, has no magnetosphere - that's a pipe dream, the moon has Helium 3 - which is a mining resource, but its energy use would be weaponized to making the worst kind of weapons that would destroy off of humanity ~ making nuclear bombs look like firecrackers. Governments have been lying for years, this is not "NEW"
The boost to construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and material industry will be almost unthinkable. We'll be able to grow food in buildings with constant artificial lights because it will cost basically nothing to power the lights. We'll have more energy to use for mining, so material costs will go down, and we'll have basically unlimited energy to throw at material manufacturing, so we'll be able to produce strong, exotic materials that are expensive now for almost nothing. Buildings will get bigger and cheaper, there will be more space for housing, transportation costs will go down dramatically, almost everything you could think of will be revolutionized.
@@mikelastname9444 If the breakthrough is real and not exagerated that is
Mars really. I don't want fly to the Mars.
The U.S.A. breaks new ground once again. 🦸🇺🇸
Dominushydra
This is about our common humanity. The scientists involved come from all over the world. This is a human achievement, not an American achievement.
@Tycondaroga100 It’s been a global quest for decades. A lot of the work has been done in the Cern large hadron collider in Switzerland. There are labs around the world working together on this.
If it was just a US effort we would have shot the atom with AR’s
A gigantic reactor is being built in the south of France, an endeavour that includes most countries in the world including the US, which will arguably provide a better way to achieve fusion technology at a large scale. It's not about a country, it's about humanity coming together and solve a global issue that is limiting our growth and making the freeworld hostage from autocrats.
@Cosmic Wakes But still … it happened here! 😊
The hardest thing to do with net-positive energy fusion was to prove that it could be done in a controlled fashion in a man-made facility at all. The fact that we now know it's possible means that all that's left is to keep doing it better over time. Welcome to the future, people. 2022 has been redeemed.
You're a fool. This is all just Cold Fusion 2: Electric Boogaloo using the Flux Capacitor all over again. Hey Doc Oc, where's Einstein?
China has already achieved the goal. But it is a futuristic affairs to take shape. Fake news to fool the international audience.
Liberal colonists democracy boast for rule of law and freedom. What's about Julian Assange?
A BIG step forward towards sustainable, clean energy. The Holy Grail is within sight. Can't wait to dump antiquated, dirty, expensive, fossil fuels.
@@rodneyboehner3007 Airplanes are fake, the earth is flat, all food is soylent green.
@@burmy1552 Look brah, it takes a temperature of 100 million degrees to sustain a fusion reaction--and it's not a self-sustaining chain reaction that goes on and on by itself like nuclear fission. So, what's the chances this can be sustained for an everyday, 24-7 energy plant? (Answer: 0.000001%.)
You have to put so much energy powering a laser to heat a pinpoint of the "nuclear fuel" that you're not going to get much back. That's why a hydrogen bomb is really powered by full power of 3 nuclear fission bombs in 2-stages (the Core, the Spark Plug, and the Tamper) and why it's really called a "thermonuclear" bomb) and why the Sun has to be so massive to sustain the pressures and temperatures in its core to sustain nuclear fusion reactions.
This sounds like the "Cold Fusion" scam all over again from a woke administration that is so desperate to tout an SBF/FTX-style solution to a very difficult--if not impossible--problem with getting free, non-carbon-based energy.
I always hoped the world would change in my lifetime. And granted, we have seen some amazing things but if this bears fruit... world changing. Mind changing. Everything will change so much and so quick. Congrats and thank you to all the people who have come and gone and those still here who have helped to make this discovery!
World changing like how solar panels make free energy from the sun at zero operational cost? The entire middle east could be powered by solar but isn't. Texas could power the entire country with solar but doesn't. That's reality.
@@UnsaltedCashew38 No. It couldn't. Go find out why.
Too much? Nuclear sex
The world changes everyday.....
Pretty cool. Now for the engineering problem.
I won’t be around when this becomes universally usable but I’m insanely happy to be alive to hear the announcement. This is amazing.
You might be, don't underestimate the need of many.
Also, don't underestimate the greed of oil companies that buy up discoveries to keep us hooked on their products.
Yep, it will take many decades. BTW. Fusion reaction in the lab has been done before. This was just another small step.
Remember, the Wright's brother flyer lasted 12 seconds. We were told it would be a million years for a transatlantic flight. It happened 16 years later. 60 years after that 12 seconds flight, we were on the moon. Never say never.
@@coolperson962 Who said it would take a million years for a transatlantic flight after the brothers’ first flight?
The “more out than you put in” is the critical piece. If the process continues to pan out, it can be an unbelievable change, like the difference between horse-and buggy vs. motor vehicles.
Blessing to all the scientists that achieved this milestone, their is hope for our children. I now imagine faster flying vessels to explore the galaxies and even possibly visit other earth like planets ,cleaner cars , airplanes and transportation overall . I think of the possibilities which are endless with this achievement.
To put it mildly, the news of this great accomplishment by our scientists shook the scientific community!!
Oh damn, I thought this would never be possible. We can use literally just salt water for energy now.
We'll have the means to harvest hydrogen from other planets in the solar system within a century or so as well.
Getting more energy from the fusion than you put in is a _major_ milestone, but an economically viable fusion energy generator will require quite a bit more scaling and engineering refinement.
id better monopolized sea water now before it becomes property of another.
Helps solve rising sea levels too if we use it for fuel lol
@@DatDirtyDog, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Combustion using hydrogen and oxygen will again produce water, numb nut.
This could be the most important discovery in history.
OPEC can no longer be tolerated and suddenly the western governments have stopped stalling the development of nuclear fusion .. It was always a matter of scaling instead of running around the problem for decades.
The ability to make fire rates highly.
Nah man, I been farting into a small turbine for years to produce my own energy.
@@needinput9805 me too. Worked fine for me so far
Probably less significant than taming fire or inventing writing, but most likely more important than the wheel, electricity or the internet - although it obviously would not have happend in a world without any of those inventions.
Correction. The process did not generate more energy than the lasers used. The lasers used 500MJ of energy, because they're inefficient. But they produced 1.5 MJ of heat energy and the fusion produced 1.8 MJ of heat energy.
My research suggests it was more like 300 MJ rather than 500 but your point still entirely correct. The fact that the energy secretary doesn’t even allude to the is fact is tragic.
@@lonnyhandwork422 it seems that barely anybody understands that, including the CNNs correspondent.
Oh d*** they lied to us again. So glad we have You to correct them. I can't understand why you're not on the panel of engineers from the lab. Maybe you should put in a resume. I'm being very sarcastic to you morons if you don't understand that period
@@aleonyohan6745 yeah, but you're wrong though. The claim that more power was created than invested is incorrect.
More energy was created than what lasers put into the process, but the lasers are so extremely inefficient, that the actual overall invested power was some 100x higher than the output (300MJ vs. 3MJ)
@@alex.pozgaj let me ask you a question do you think we landed on the moon in 1969?
This is equivalent to a spectator of the Wright Brothers first flight asking “so when will be be able to fly commercially”. A long time. Solar and other renewables will outcompete economically and gain substantial market share before fusion is viable.
Fusion will never be economically viable.
CONGRATULATIONS! Utterly awesome. I'm guessing every value and all the sensor data from that prior 'lucky shot' was intensely scrutinized to make the lucky shot every shot now? I read an article somwhere regarding using a hybridized approach to inertial confinement fusion, applying a magnetic field to the hohlraum somehow... Seems VERY interesting. How about applying a nanoparticle lattice system that levitates into position right before the shot to the hohlraum as well? At least all of this doesn't seem 'always 30 years away' now! Thank you all for your decades of hard work and perseverance. You are one of the most important bastions of humanity's future!
IF this ever becomes a commercially viable method to produce energy for the grid, it will take decades. By then we have covered the grid's needs with renewables and various energy storage solutions.
Right. It will be used for the military for a long time
You are probably thinking about giant Tokamaks using magnetic containment to achieve fusion costing many billions while taking years to build and improve. This method involves laser compression, which may prove to be way easier to develop and it might cut our timeframe of achieving sustainable energy from decades to just years, so the 10 year plan to bring a commercial solution is very achievable using lasers to sustain fusion.
Only if you personally stop everyone from reproducing. Get to it!
Wow, is this for real? If this real this will send "Shock Waves" through out the world especially in the Middle East and Russia!!!!!
Why are you thinking so small? It's not just about the grid that's barely even the starting point if this works.
She really shouldn't do that or make predictions about it. Particularly since most people don't understand the science.
We still love our Governor...Sun Kissed.
💙From Michigan
Still banging. Kinda looks like Charlize Theron here.
Imagine that other administrations wanted to keep coal... these are very good news and I'm very happy to be alive to hear it
Trump was very much in favor of keeping coal , because of the jobs.
How old are you Jose? Because your going to need fossil fuels for a long time. Not to put a damper on your parade.
@@jantzfitzgerald6115 It’s not a parade. It’s about saving humanity. If they don’t lower carbon emissions it will soon be too late.
@@KB-sv7fm the lowest Carbon emissions in America for the last 22 years occurred in 2019 and 2020. Under Trump. This fusion news is wonderful, but it will do nothing for anyone for many more years. Shipping crap from overseas is a braindead idea. It causes freakishly high amounts of Carbon fuel emissions. It is not a partisan issue. It is a common sense issue.
@@jantzfitzgerald6115 Trump is no environmentalist. Stop trying to make it seem things happen BECAUSE of Trump rather than IN SPITE of Trump. What is the Republican version of the Green New Deal ?
Well, this is a great achievement, no doubt about it. Electricity from fusion has been 20 years in the future for the last 60 years. It's possible that it is now only 19 years in the future for the next 60 years. Progress is made.
This looks really good. If things go well, this could be wonderful.
This is impressive. But a small caveat that a lot of news sources are forgetting. Even though they got 3MJ out from 1.5MJ in, it took a lot of energy to power (500MJ) the LASERs.
Where did the energy to start the laser come from??
@@h-e-acc mostly fossil fuel produced the electricity.
I am crying. It is finally happening. It may not be in my generation but hopefully my children and grandchildren will benefit from this.
I’m my humble engineering experience.. the hardest and longest part is usually figuring out how to achieve the initial goal. Once the initial goal is accomplish, then it’s just reiterating the process that got us there. That continuous reiteration is the easier part. I bet you’ll see commercial fusion in this life time. Or sooner than expected.
Yeah Maybe if they dont support abortion and didnt get the covid shot making it hard to reproduce
We are going to scifi future!!
Watch it happen within the next 5 years! Mass markedly available!
@@Machiavelli2pc This is gonna be in less than 5 years, the investment is larger than what we have in U.S. debt. We might literally reach world peace in after all these centuries of war, labor, and poverty
Thanks it's the future exploring
We can stop drilling.
We still need hydrocarbons 24 7 plastics etc. etc.
The push for more EVs are probably going to have a higher impact on drilling
@@BETTERWORLDSGT They will try to buy it. Then suppress the competition
@@doords All that electrical power needs to come from somewhere..
The power will come from itself. First you only have to jump start it. To put it another way, they have achieved perpetual motion or free energy. The Snow Piercers Eternal Engine that they prayed to and worshipped was perpetual motion. Work out can be => then work in. That means space travel is closer. I tried myself to discover free energy using self-oscillating circuits. I didn't even come close. They used 2 atoms ⚛️ I am amazed by this fascinating this breakthrough.
Problem being: This methodology simply isn't scalable in terms of the sheer number of iterations of the process required per hour required in order to begin creating a commercial supply!
There are a lot of powerful people who do not want people to have cheep clean energy, not going to get my hopes up till I actually see it used in the real world.
Do you understand what this means, Jim? This discovery will send 'Shock Waves" through out the world. Especially in Russia and Middle East!
My thoughts exactly. They are probably already building a scare campaign against this that they can easily deploy on thier propaganda networks.
Just get your hopes up. Go on, you know you want to. 😁
I think many of us will see a day when fossil hydrocarbons are considered far too valuable to just burn -- sort of like how we don't use old-growth tropical hardwood trees to heat our homes; we make fine furniture and musical instruments with it.
We will continue to need fossil hydrocarbons for various materials, but not nearly as much of it. The fossil fuel companies will adjust, or die.
@@cacogenicist, fossil fuel companies already quit pumping when the price of oil gets below a certain amount, and that is when the primary use is fuel. The alternative uses are not enough to warrant production. We might need to come up with many alternatives to replace fossil fuels.
If fusion is the next big thing, oil producers will get there first and set a price.
Sadly they mention Q_plasma = 1.5 but the generation of the 3MJ from the 2MJ delivered from the lasers, but the total energy used to power the lasers was 300MJ. So in actuality Q_total = 0.01, and then theres converting the heat into electricity, and thats another 0.5 to be multiplied on top of that, so using 300MJ to generate 3MJ of heat, and then getting around 1.5MJ of electricity, thus losing 298.5 MJ for every 300MJ put into the system.
standing ovation!
The Saint (1997) brought me here. Thank you Elisabeth Shue!
All of the great scientists at the Department of Energy! LLNL leading the way! 👍👏
This is misleading. NOT mentioned is the 200 kW of electricity it took to produce 2 kW of laser that then produced 3 kW of fusion power which when converted to electricity might give 1 kW back. Losing 199 kW but was over 1000 kW before so this IS progress but hardly the free energy many think it might be.
Not to say that it won’t work, but equally it might cost so much that we’d think solar was free by comparison.
Lasers need to maintain the temperatures and pressures found on the Sun to continue otherwise it snuffs out quickly which has been the problem to date.
I'm dumbfounded that after all those years they finally cracked the code. I first read about Tokamak reactors in the early '60s in a copy of Business Week. I suffered the joy and depression that these scientists endured as they tried to do the near impossible. Congratulations!
I want to know what changed so that it works now vs before? New materials, new laser tech? What got us over the hump?
This is the best report I've seen on this channel.
Did she mention that they are hiring?
This is awesome. Gives me hope that one day we'll be able to stop destroying our planet but still achieve our power needs 🙏🇺🇲
Don’t worry, huge conglomerates will band together to protect their interest in legacy energy production and use their propaganda machines to scare us away from this new source of power. Then they’ll buy this technology up and keep it in a closet until they can figure out how to monopolize it’s deployment. Murika
@@todd-617 Yep. The Corporations will not reduce their profit projections. We would have to fundamentally change the entire wealth system and that is never going to happen, not while rich people exist. Yes we have the tech, but humanity will never be responsible enough to use it.
@@fractalwalrus5409 Changing political will can (and has) changed laws that affect the Oligarchs. They can exist, they don’t have to CONTROL the gov’t and energy production.
Anymore than they have to control Healthcare in the U.S.
They bought that control, but the people can take it back with a simple vote.
@@todd-617 You're right, it's going to be a fight. Science-denial has already spread well past AGW and into even more life-threatening territory like Covidiocy. Hopefully, the results will speak for themselves.
Hope seems an even more precious commodity lately...
I share it with you though. 👍🏻
WOW! This is probably the most amazing science news I've ever been witness to. There's virtually no downside to fusion besides the expensive tech needed to acheive it. From what I read, this test only used 4% of the 'fuel' in the pellet so there's huge gains to be realized.
I really hope we get a future President that will nationalize this energy resource and not just hand it over to private industry to profit and price gauge like our other utilities.
Taxpayers paid for its development.
@@lexyswope As they did with the internet, gps, computers and others, which then are used for enourmous, very little taxed profit by some monoploizing corporations.
@@normieloser6969 no it isn't
F**k no! Private industry shunned this and refused to fund research privately. They thought is was a pipe dream. So let them try to spend a trillion dollars in research on it themselves.
Dream on. Name just one thing in human history that has escaped being privatized
*cue in Iron Man soundtrack*
This is great and all, and I hope that this doesn't sound too critical, but we've been "doing" fusion for a while now. Hearing "We haven't done this before" rubs me the wrong way a little bit. Can say a 10 year goal is never going to happen. Can't even build an airport (a technology which is over 100 years old ) is less than 9 years or so. Again, I'm happy for this, it's another step in our search for fusion energy, I'm just a little skeptical of the media hype that this is creating absent the context that exists.
we've been doing Nuclear fusion. this is different
The germanium transistor wend from discovery to production in 5 years. The microprocessor was even quicker….. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
*went
@@GodzillaGoesGaga Thanks! I
I think the difference is people care more about creating cheap clean energy than they do about another airport.
Warm reminder: You still need oil / petroleum even with fusion. :)
Based on what I know about this the experiment occurred on a massive scale.The lasers where distributed over the length of s football field and were many in number and scale all focused directlyon the elements used in the experiment to produce fusion. While this is extremely important and amazing I cant help but wonder how do yoy scale it down for practical applications
scale is tiny, they are fusing 2 atoms, the energy output for that would be hardly detectible.
@Mark Victor The yield of that bomb was also 1000s of times greater than a suitcase bomb.
Don't hate on me for saying this:
I'm totally skeptical about this. This same thing was in the news some 15- ish years ago. Yes, the same lasers (powered by a nuclear reactor) shot on a pallet of hydrogen. This is not news but false hope. I have lots of popular science mags laying around going way back to my college days some 25 years ago and fusion energy has always been more enthusiastically than this news heralded as being just around the corner. And yet, here we are with basically 15 years old news. Really it IS the same stale news. Fusion for a few micro seconds with a net energy gain of 0.00001 percent. It can't be done (and I'm an unabashed optimist). You need to make the plasma hotter than the sun to make fusion possible on earth. But the plasma is so hot that it can evaporate anything instantly. So they house it in a so called magnetic bottle. The thing is, they have to cool the magnets to almost absolute zero (with takes up a lot of power too). So it becomes impossible to access that heat without heating up the magnetic bottle. If the magnets are not strong enough, you'll get meltdown because plasma will touch the bottle. Any heath exchang apparatus most have an otherworldly capacity to conduct that heat quickly enough away. It can't be done. It's an engineering problem with no solution. Better spend all that money for things that really matter.
They had a 500 MJ laser to generate 3 MJ of fusion energy. Only 2 MJ of the laser energy was used.
So did they generate more energy than they used or nah?
@@donaldhysa4836 yes
@@donaldhysa4836 No, they didn't come close to generating more energy then they used.
The lasers themselves consumed 332 MJ, but the laser beams delivered 2 MJ to the target. The resulting fusion reaction produced 3 MJ.
Because the fusion reaction produced more energy than it took to cause the fusion reaction, it's a breakthrough.
But actually delivering that energy to the target cost a lot more than the energy that was actually delivered. The lasers themselves cost 332 MJ to run, and the experiment likely has lots of other power usage such as cooling, monitoring equipment, pellet manufacture and delivery, and so on.
As to whether they "generated" energy, well the energy produced by the fusion reaction was not captured, so they didn't *generate* any energy.
@@donaldhysa4836 For context: The energy gain concerns only the step "light energy laser" - "heat energy nuclear fusion".
The balance becomes already negative, if one considers only the current for the laser.
@@tosa2522 This was not meant to be an actual nuclear reactor this was an experiment to prove the concept
This is an amazing feat. This is going to change everything. Not all at once but the implications are countless.
So it's a Naked Gun 2 and a half scenario 🤔
Not it our lifetimes.
0:52 "For the very first time this fusion process produced more energy than was used by the lasers to drive it." - Fact Check: They were only measuring the energy that the lasers itself inputted into the unit and did not include all the energy that it took to power up the lasers and all the rest of the energy guzzling equipment needed for this experiment. Also don't over look that the laser energy surplus was produced for a whopping "100 trillionths of a second."
Thank you! This is a big achievement, it is. But this facility was and never will be meant for cost effective electrical grid production. This facility, and its method of achieving fusion, is for improving national and allied defense only by greatly enhancing our knowledge and ability to produce powerful and CONSISTENT nukes to use as deterrents. And we just made a huge breakthrough on that front with this.
This achievement advances the goal of clean cheap grid electricity in one way only. It shows that fusion can be net positive and all this research and work was never chasing a fairytale, which will strongly attract new private and public investors in fusion. Now if something like Helion's gen 7 or 8 or maybe even 9 reactor or somebody else produces activation AND 24/7-365 continuous net positive grid electrical production at a fairly similar, or even somewhat more expensive financial cost compared to other current power sources within the next ten years. Ya, that will change humanity and the future will be here just like every news source is reporting.
@@aw3299 I'm sorry, don't mean to be mean, but talk is cheap. I'm plenty familiar with your above storyline, works great within that bubble, but take a look at current events, environmental, climatic, cut throat political scene, business dominated by maximizing profits, minimizing externalities and contempt for regular people. But there's no point in getting into all that.
We had a saying back in the '60s-'70s, being fixated on the rearview mirror is a lousy way to race into the future.
You're betting on future stability and economic grow a kin to the past century - that simply isn't in the cards anymore.
@@petermiesler9452 Agreed, pretty much on all fronts. I only left that comment for others to hopefully see if they saw yours. Wanted to let them know that this breakthrough, and very possibly even the dream scenario I described isn't enough to elevate us to the future we dream of. I believe the modern society breaking point, something akin to the social/societal upheaval of the great depression or much worse, will come before the fusion scenario I described will happen, let alone be ubiquitously implemented. It's not enough to produce clean energy, we need to completely reverse all the greenhouse gas, pollution in all forms, and ecological plant and animal biosphere damage we've done. How the hell we'll completely do any of that, let alone all of that, let alone all of that in every country and part of the world by every human, BEFORE the consequental effects become to great to be able to do that work, I have no have idea, and honestly no hope that all those NEEDED goals will be reached before modern society is destroyed. And we have to many problems blocking the needed urgency implementation to give us a chance to accomplish those goals. Between looming war all around the world, if not world war, including nuclear war, or just the drastically increasing threat of local nuclear war by smaller but dictatorial players like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea. The growing fascism, nationalism, conservatism pushback, and rising dictatorship potential in western democratic liberal countries, with growing economic, political, military, and most importantly media image and social persuasion power of governments like China, the middle east, and east asia. And always reducing worker benefits and wages to the eventual point of slavery to both keep and grow the wealth of those economically on top, in addition to advancing technology to allow them to enforce their opinions, power, and eliminate their criticism. I get it, even if we somehow stop the world from ending environmentally, do you really want to live in a dystopia afterwards. I'm a trans person, and if I think the future will just be fixed with full equality for me and fusion power, I'm going to be so mistaken I'll look back to today as if it was a golden age, which is fucking saying something.
@@aw3299 Thank you. I appreciate the clarification and agree with you.
The scientists involved deserve a Nobel Prize, they really did it and made such a revolutionary breakthrough in energy!!!!!!!
so they did this before CERN?
WOW this is really great news for the planet!
NO Edward. It kick of a energy race, Spies from every corner on global are going to try to get their hands on this technology.
Hopefully we don’t turn it into a weapon like we do with everything else.
@@todd-617 How the heck would nuclear fusion be weaponized?
@@cascadianseagull Someone will find a way. they always do
This is the best and brightest news I have heard in all the long years of my life. Hope returns. We need a Global New Deal to get this developed and installed across the globe. 🤩
Acordo global, com quem? Com os imbecis da China, da Russia, da Corei do Norte, do Talibã, acorda cara.
You're going to be waiting a long, long, time.
@@SteveRHanson About a generation.
This break through must not be allowed to fall into the hands of private capital. If it was discovered using public funds and at facilities that are in the public sector then this breakthrough ought to be used for the benefit of the public broadly ... and not be handed over to a private firm to exploit for profit.
It is only been made possible BECAUSE OF private interests, unfortunately. I don’t expect it to belong to ‘the people of the world’ for our benefit. Not one thing before this has ever escaped the hands of private benefactors, and fusion isn’t going to be any different
About freaking time!!!
Aneutronic fusion generators would certainly be preferable -- like proton-boron or deuterium-helium 3. But that's harder to accomplish.
Initially -- and there's a lot of very tricky engineering that still needs doing -- I suspect fusion reactors might be used locally to power very energy-intensive industrial facilities (like perhaps desalination plants), before fusion is powering the grid.
This is what we need for the world
Blimey!!! Half off of the "My Fusion Guy" with a promo code!!! Cheers
Imaginge the decrease in oil prices that are on the horizon..
I'm looking forward to getting rid of the those OPEC and russian oil/gas cartel leaches.
Converting 300MJ of Electricity into 2MJ of Lazer energy to produce 3.15MJ of Heat and calling it a "net energy gain" without explaing it like this is basically fraud, in business "net" means including your expenditure.
This is 100% a message to try and get investors. There are some very important things not mentioned here. One, it's not hydrogen. If you listen closely, she talks about isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium and tritium are rare. Deuterium at least can be harvested from the ocean, but is difficult to do and expensive. Tritium is classified as extremely rare and very difficult to make. Typically, the most abundant way of making it is by destroying larger atoms like Lithium, so it breaks down into smaller atoms, some of which are tritium. Obviously, you can see a problem there. What about the other atoms like Lithium? They will he gone forever. Unlike other processes that consume things, which are typically chemical reaction, the fundamental atomic elements are perfectly preserved, just their molecular bonds are changed.
In this Fusion process, what ever base element is consumed will be gone forever.
Add to that, her announcement is that the process made more energy than was put into it. That likely isn't true either. Did it make more power than the high powered lasers, or did it make more power than lasers, the magnetic containment field, the cooling systems, the building facility, etc, etc, combined? Probably the first one.
Also, what form was that energy? Electricity, which most of the public and uninformed investors may believe? Ot heat?
Yup, heat. So, a lot of that energy is going to be lost converting that heat energy to electric.
So, they really just announce that they barely exceeded the power of the lasers (and likely just the lasers) in heat energy, which when converted to electrical energy wouldn't even be close to enough power to run the lasers, to just power itself.
All that, and the process, if made commercial, would likely involve the permanent destruction of elemental atoms to generate the fuel supply it needs to run.
Keep that in mind when thinking of investing or believing that this type of energy will have any effect on climate change.
@Mark Victor ya, I know saying elemental atoms is a little like saying old fort cheese, which inadvertantly was something I liked to do around an ex of mine that spoke french. Drove her nuts when I was effectively said old old cheddar.
Still, I intentionally said elemental atoms because many people forget atoms are elements. Many people don't understand the difference between molecules and atoms. One can destroy a molecule and all you've done is broken the bonds between the atoms. In this process, they breaks the actual atoms to make Tritium. One of the methods is to make a blanket that contains Lithium. Lithium is already rare on Earth, involves terrible mining practices, and is also the thing we need really badly for batteries until they can finally actually figure out how to replace it with a mass scalable new battery tech that can supply a similar if not better power to weight ratio.
You can make fun of the word choices as much as you want, but the Tritium hurdle will likely be the hardest thing to overcome and to me, destroying elements as a basic part of the process doesn't make the energy source a viable long term solution. Even fission has that problem in that once they've used all the radioactive materials, that's it. They can't really synthesize more.
@@haddow777 Thank you for this information that the hype machine doesn't report on.
What no one is saying is they generated 3 megajoules using 2 megajoules to power the laser but that’s not all the power they drew to complete the experiment. They drew a total of 300 megajoules from the grid. So they still drew 300x more from the grid than they generated. I’m in my 40s and don’t expect to see this commercially in my lifetime.
Don't forget to account for inefficiencies in actually turning that fusion energy production into electrical energy. Nuclear turbines top out at 33%.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Not a big deal, that is true of EVERY technology which turns heat into mechanical work and then (optionally) electricity. The other 2/3 is available to use for heating, driving chemical plants, etc. Locate the fusion power plants in cold climates, or near other big users of heat. Getting use out of the other 2/3 is routine cogeneration.
@@EfficientRVer What do you mean it's not a big deal? It means you need to generate 3 times as much energy as you would otherwise need to generate just to break even. That's absolutely a big deal.
For a technology that is just barely producing a small amount of energy, the efficiency of actually generating the electricity is of critical importance.
You're not wrong that every other power generation technology has similar inefficiency losses. But those technologies can generate energy far more readily than fusion, so overcoming those inefficiencies is much easier to the point where it really isn't a big deal for those technologies (though it's hardly ideal either).
As far as attempting to use the lost 2/3rds of the fusion energy for heating or other purposes that's cool and all but it still doesn't erase the inefficiency inherent in generating electricity.
Look, my only point is that there is still a long road before fusion is a practical commercial technology.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Every engineer (I'm a mechanical engineer, who specialized in thermal power systems and turbomachinery) understands that heat output, mechanical power output, and electrical power output are three different things. All 3 of them are useful products worth money. Nobody was claiming that the excess energy of the controlled fusion was electricity, it very clearly was heat. There is zero confusion, except among people who incorrectly think a megawatt of heat output gets you a megawatt of electricity output. This is true of fusion, fission, oil, natural gas, diesel, gasoline, geothermal, all heat-driven generation. Anyone who thinks the fusion energy claim is off by a factor of 3, doesn't understand power generation.
Minimum 3 decades. There are two potential fusions chains at present. One of them results in heavy neutron bombardment, which leaves containment material issues unsolved. The other one involves lots of something that we just don't happen to have lots of right now, helium 3.
The end result leaves us with large monopolistic utility providers, at least in the US, with big, expensive and centralized power generation... Same as it always was.
We have a perfectly good fusion reactor located conveniently in the center of our solar system. We need to utilize that more effectively and work towards more distributed power generation.
Well stated. I have been around for quite a long time, and I remember (might be 20 years ago) some nuclear physicist being asked in an interview "How far away is commercial nuclear fusion?", the answer was "40 years. It has always been 40 years, and still is."
Yes central monopoly free to the rich only feed on the poor
The NIF aka National Ignition Facility wasn’t just for fusion (clean energy) research. It was also for modeling and researching hydrogen bombs!
Just as Apollo landed the USA on the moon it also developed rockets, guidance, communications, tracking and more for war. So is the same with NIF fusion technology research
What a time to be alive!!!
Kids in the future holding a commonly used fusion battery:
“The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.”
Thank you to all the people who made this happen.
Is fusion finally actually 20 years away now?
Let’s hope its scalable for creating a decentralized grid, where small generators can be used. Energy needs to be in home or in your neighborhood to be safe from power blackmailing.
Temperature to fuse hydrogen is minimum 100,000,000K or 6 times the temperature of the core of the sun. Then you would need a boiler and a turbine/generator. Not very adaptable to a single home power plant. I don't see this happening anywhere near the 10 year prediction as stated at 3:10. Think F-35 overruns and that is just a complicated plane.
@@gfisher7765 , 2 million degrees F. or 10 thousand degrees F. Is a long way from what you are spouting. Kelvin is a color temperature of visible light emitted by a incandescent source. You are talking about temperature that only happened during the Big Bang event.
Where do you get them? That's what I want to know
60 years to this point and another 60 till fusion is actually viable for energy production.
Yes. And that is being optimistic.
Truthfully no one knows, but I would say that's an extremely pessimistic time-line
@@jrok172 I will begin to believe they are getting somewhere when they manage to sustain a reaction sequence in seconds rather than nanoseconds.
@@chrisose idk if the time matters as much as the energy output ratio but more work needs to be done
@@jrok172 The time absolutely matters because until it is self sustained it is worthless.
We need a little more info, how much more?
Ghostbusters had it first:-)) Joke aside. Humans have been stupid with our use of our Earth. But when we have people who have the ideas, the will and skills to save us from ourself. We might survive a few more generations. Thanks for the hopeful update that can save our Earth. Good work and Merry Christmas to you all.
Kudos to the scientists. That said the CNN reporter was wrong, fusion was not harnessed, to consider it harnessed, we would have needed to be able to generate some electricity. Still a very long way to go.
Generating electricity from heat is trivially simple. So, you are wrong.
Not to put a damper on things, but there is a long way to go from scientific breakeven to engineering breakeven to commercial breakeven. They've achieved Q=1. They'll eventually need to achieve at least Q=5, and probably much more.
Edit: They actually achieved Q=1.54, which is a big leap above previous efforts that were all below Q=1. But, there is still a long way to go.
... and do this without needing tritium because there is more of me then there is the entire worlds supply of tritium.
It's just Q_plasma of 1.5, that was reached. Q_total would be somewhere around like 0.01, even if the process were continuous.
Awesome reply, unfortunatly to achieve iGNITION, needs a Q = 10 or greater, once ignition is achieved all is needed just to send constant fuel, DT for it to continue on its own.
Hey look SMR's are completing their first build out right now.
I would guess someone figured out how to put a Meter on it.
Hmm. Still less total energy output than was required to run everything. What is that percentage?
or we can just harness all the free energy that the sun gives us every day, not to mention wind and tidal energy
We can do ALL of them
Most of that free energy is already spoken for driving the ecosystem. You want transportation, heat, distant communication, manufacturing, recreation? Go get your own energy!
Right. Well this will be 'in addition to'.
@@aqueousone A few hundred square miles of solar panels would meet 100% of the total electricity currently used/generated across the planet.
Or we can continue using the fossil fuels that the planet has provided for us. None of this is by accident, it's all by design
The DOE Secretary is stupid. First, we have always been able to do fusion since 1945. One, that is what the particle colliders do and two, that is what Fat Man used to destroy Nagasaki. What is the breathrough in science should be is Cold Fusion, not Fusion itself. The difference is cold fusion doesn't take millions of degrees of heat to do. It is done at a "cold" temperature. So, when they do cold fusion, then I will be impressed.
Hopefully the government doesn’t hand it over to private corporations like they love to do. Spend our tax payer dollars to innovate then just hand over the tech to private industry to monopolize. Hope the fossil fuel industry doesn’t use their power to burry this innovation.
Like EXXON buying out Algae Diesel from New Mexico State then locking it up and throwing away the key, to keep prices High.
First tiny step. No one is giving the nber of Megawatts used to see a few KW gain in output over input, but at this time it's a huge power hole 🕳️
Reality check about the fusion!
The recent fusion experiment generated 3.15 Megajoules of energy from 2.05 Megajoules of input from the laser. Yet the laser draws about 300 Megajoules from the grid just to operate the laser.
When you do an energy balance, you must include ALL the input energy.
Total inputs: 2.05 MJ input from the laser + 300 MJ input to operate the laser
Total output: 3.15 MJ
Total output - Total inputs = 3.15 MJ - (2.05 + 300)MJ = - 298.9 MJ
This big fusion news is a lead bubble.
That's why it isn't ready yet, the breakthrough is still huge. It shows that it can be done it just isn't efficient yet. This announcement will bring more funding and more people into the field to help improve cost. Maybe in 5 years the Lazer consumption will go down to 200 then 100 and eventually less than the output. Engineers will probably focus on making better lasers that are more efficient.
This is a nightmare for OIC!
Where do I order my Mr. Fusion™️
Folks, this is literally EVERY sci fi prediction, good and bad, about to come through.
There is no greater achievement in human history.
Like the people in that business say, fusion energy, for all, is about twenty years off, and it always will be.
I did research in Energy Security- this is the most important breakthrough currently in terms of producing social, racial, and structural equity. Scarcity, political division, and class differentiation are manipulation tactics used to perpetuate the means of production toward unsustainable ends where profit is valued over humanity and Earth. This is a creation of sociocracy- not a step in any controversial economic system.
The hell does fusion energy have to do with race and equity. You are what is wrong with this country. Jesus Christ I cannot stand you people
U got ur head in the clouds buddy - what on earth could make a net gain in fusion input/output suddenly ensure people are nice to each other? Naive, careless thinking at best
@@garyc1384 Whether or not people will be kind and responsible enough to share wealth remains to be seen, but there will cease to be any particular reason for wealth to not reach everybody in some capacity, as the general cost of living will go down to basically nothing.
You are definitely an Optimist.
If it's only one experiment, why are they telling us about this. I thought you had to repeat an experiment before it could be credible. I'm tired of these half truths.
I would love to know more about this from a reputable organization other than the government. It sounds very promising.
Did the reaction produce more power than was put into the lasers, or more power than what was in the laser beams?
Excellent question - the latter, unfortunately. I can't believe how few are asking this question!
This is the biggest thing to happen in all of our lifetimes.
Good news!!!!! However, I am disappointed that CNN didn’t mention that it will keep a sharp lookout for “privatizing profits while socializing costs” as it concerns this marvelous breakthrough. Or, do they simply not care about average Am’s? H’mmm…
"I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." ---Thomas Edison. The secret to success - as true in Edison’s time as it is today - is perseverance. As Edison himself said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
We are talking about making a Star on earth without the help of gravity. Not make a piece of wire get hot.
@angel luis ll it is true edison invented light globes ,and he was a good inventor ,however he was sadistic and power hungry ,he told nikola tesla if he could make one of his inventions work he would give tesla 50k when tesla did so ,edison said you obviously don't understand american humour,then when teslas alternating current become obviously more popular than edisons direct current edison proceeded to discredit teslas work ,even to the point of electrocuting animals including an elephant just to prove it was too dangerous to use ,tesla wanted everyone to enjoy electricity permanently for free,to that end things we enjoy today such as wifi,microwave, xray,and even bluetooth are all examples of teslas genius yet all of his inventions were discredited by edison because edison had connection to jp morgan and the Rockefellers all of which made money from electricity companies ,tesla even proved his wireless remote boat was indeed operational but once again with edison ,edison wanted to discredit tesla by saying tesla was in love with his pidgeon and while nikola may have indeed loved his bird, he was eccentric, but he was still a genius ,because ,otherwise if tesla was indeed mad why did the fbi confiscate 50 crates or more of teslas work answer ,they knew tesla was working on something called the death ray,and long answered short version the above mentioned inventions are now being used today but not credited to teslas work if the fbi thought he was indeed a madman shouldn't they have considered his work the ramblings of an eccentric person and just left his personal files to his family ,= no they wanted to see if they could weaponise his inventions and did not want to reveal this to the public ,,,,so angel luis ll, while i think edison was a good inventor, i personally wonder why he was such an arsehole
@@geoffhaylock6848 Remember my friend, as Albert Einstein also once said "The secret to making a star on Earth without the help of gravity is to remove spacetime from the equation. No spacetime, no gravity. Easy."
@@geoffhaylock6848 Also remember my friend, a 7th century Egyption monk once said in his past life, "By continuously making a piece of wire get hot, you will eventually harness the power of the Sun."
@@unbounded_intellect pretty sure it is going to take more than a piece of hot wire to get fusion going 🤣
This is giving me that Tony Stark vibe moment. That's just fantastic to hear.
Wow! An important breakthrough through during my generation. Who says our educational system is broken and we have lost our creativity. The old-fashioned system is still great.
The American system is broken and inequitable. So to you it's ok.
@@ATLIEN333 Yet this country still tries to educate everyone, but in other countries, only a few are educated. We still create and make all kinds of break throughs. So many people from other countries want to come to American schools.
Does this mean that the motorheads hafta get ridda their hot rods and monster trucks?! 🤨
Great news, after decades of failed promises and billions in cost they needed a positive breakthrough, at minimum to keep funding going if nothing else. There's so many more breakthroughs need that will only come through more research.
0:53 This reporter's statement is incredibly incorrect. The scientists said something very different than what she just claimed here. They said the fusion energy released was greater than "the energy deposited by" the lasers, NOT the energy consumed by the lasers. Lasers are NOT 100% efficient. We do not know how much energy was consumed, because they did not say anything about it in their press release yesterday. It's still quite possible, or even likely, that there was a net energy deficit, rather than a gain, over the ENTIRE system. In which case, you can't generate electricity with it. It can still be a milestone, but let's not over-sell it.
It’s almost guaranteed that fusion power will not be coming from a laser based system like the one used in this experiment. In this experiment the energy yield barely exceeded the energy input which is way less yield than necessary to produce a practical power generation system. We’ve been thought to be 30 years away from practical fusion power generation for the last 30-40 years and guess what, we still are.