US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

&gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)<p>Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we&#x27;re working with 3.15:2.05.<p>With modern lasers, that&#x27;d be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% efficiency through direct-energy-capture.<p>The jumps to get here included<p>- 40% with the new targets<p>- 60% with magnetic confinement<p>- 35% with crycooling of the target<p>The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.<p>&gt; I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”<p>It&#x27;s nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small.

Here&#x27;s your most exciting paragraph<p>&gt; LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.<p>It&#x27;s fusion Manhattan project time.

Another good time to remind everyone that the inventor of the maser (which led to the laser), Charles Townes, was discouraged by his department chair (allegedly): &quot;Look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn&#x27;t going to work. You know it&#x27;s not going to work, we know it&#x27;s not going to work. You&#x27;re wasting money, Just stop!&quot; A few months later, it worked. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;charles_townes_nobel_prizewinning_inventor_of_the_laser_dies_at_99&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;charles_townes_nobel_...</a>

I don&#x27;t know about everyone else, but I&#x27;m taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I&#x27;m remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it&#x27;s incredible how far we&#x27;ve come.<p>Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.

After the Wright brother&#x27;s first demonstration of powered flight, I like to imagine all the pessimists in this thread would have said that commercial air transport would never be viable because wood and fabric don&#x27;t have the material properties to carry a ton of steel.

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn&#x27;t find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually).<p>Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$15k a kg. But tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram (!) [3].<p>This leads to a calculation of ~$700M for the coal plant and ~$3.75B for the fusion plant (of which only ~$1.5M is deuterium)<p>I have a few questions and I wonder if any can help:<p>1. Is the above fusion fuel correct?<p>2. What measures are expected to bring these prices down to price efficiency?<p>Of course, I am not calculating the cost it would take for the reactor, storage, delivery etc.<p>Nevertheless, this is an absolutely incredible development and the people working for this progress should be definitely proud of their work. My generation and the ones following will hail this as a breakthrough moment. Thanks!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iter.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;FusionFuels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iter.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;FusionFuels</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prices_of_chemical_elements" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prices_of_chemical_elements</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;fusion-power-may-run...</a>

The design of the National Ignition Facility was never intended to study commercially viable fusion power. It&#x27;s exclusively a physics testing facility with origins for testing the physics of thermonuclear fusion weapons for better bomb design.<p>Nothing that happens at the NIF is very useful in heading towards commercially viable fusion. The design of the testing apparatus is also similarly incompatible with making a sustained fusion device as there is no way to continuously feed in fuel into the device, nor methods of extracting the energy.

The most surprising thing I&#x27;ve learned from this is we&#x27;re only allocating $624 million &#x2F; year to this program. We really need better mechanisms for deciding how to allocate taxes.

Calling this &quot;ignition&quot; is a misnomer. The correct term, as given in the article (as opposed to the headline) is exceeding breakeven: more fusion energy output than energy input to the target.<p>&quot;Ignition&quot; means the reaction becomes self-sustaining and does not require any further input of energy to continue.

I&#x27;m still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they&#x27;re pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In comparison fusion seems very expensive and unproven and even when we get everything to work it might not be much better than a solar farm with a big battery pack. But maybe I&#x27;m missing something important about the economics?

What’s the difference between &quot;ignition&quot; and every other “fusion achieved“ news story I’ve seen in the last 40 years?<p>This has the feel of those “water discovered on Mars for the first time ever” headlines.

HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it&#x27;s about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument.<p>It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus.<p>Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve Civilization Survival, much less Singularity Ignition.<p>My suggestion: highly educated Homo Sapiens may not be the right course. There is a proven way of saving the planet which, by virtue of its remarkably sustainable intellect, we should be investing more on: koalas.

Maybe I missed it but it&#x27;s not a net positive output. From the article, the implication it is:<p>&quot;LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output&quot;<p>From newscientist, the same info followed by a rider:<p>&quot;generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place&quot;

&quot;NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic laser system...-located at LLNL in Livermore, Calif.—is the size of a sports stadium&quot;<p>That&#x27;s an important piece of information - the thing is gigantic!

Can someone ELI5 why this is significant over previous fusion experiments?

Is that a different approach than the Tokamak, some piece to make it works, or some other relationship? What does it mean for existing projects such as ITER?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tokamak" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tokamak</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ITER" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ITER</a>

Calling this fusion ignition is stupid. Laser fusion is unlike other fusion devices in that the efficiency of laser is extremely low. It is true that the reaction created 3MJ when the laser energy input INTO THE REACTION CHAMBER is 2MJ. But the whole laser system took 300MJ to run for this one shot. Thus the real Q value is extremely low compared to other fusion methods.

This makes me feel America is back. This is a big achievement and should not be underplayed whatsoever. Whichever country achieves practical fusion is going to be dominant in the next century.

Are there any thoughts on how this will become a power plant yet? It&#x27;s awesome to see it filled up, reacted and then reset as a proof of concept, but can it ever be a continuous flow through the chamber without losing that ignition temp? Or will it be more like a 4 cylinder engine where each reactor is at a different stage of being filled, heated, reacting and emptying, with the net result being continuous?<p>Edit: Taking the internal combustion metaphor further, I&#x27;m imagining these connected in a circle. The grid is the starter motor to power the first laser, then each active chamber powers the laser on the next one (probably by capacitor not directly). Thus the energy production moves around the circle with each chamber being flushed and refilled before the laser powers back on. How far off is that image in my head? I&#x27;ve never actually seen it described

Related ongoing thread:<p><i>Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33971953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33971953</a> - Dec 2022 (82 comments)<p>Two threads from before the announcement:<p><i>Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863</a> - Dec 2022 (755 comments)<p><i>Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33968357" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33968357</a> - Dec 2022 (160 comments)

2022, not ordered by importance: Dall.E 2, Chat-GPT, Fusion Ignition. Can&#x27;t wait for 2023.

Let&#x27;s say this all works out and over the next few decades fusion replaces all other electricity generation, and we&#x27;re past the point where all the initial infrastructure costs have been paid for.<p>How much will my electric bill be reduced?

&gt; “We have had a theoretical understanding of fusion for over a century, but the journey from knowing to doing can be long and arduous. Today’s milestone shows what we can do with perseverance,” said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.<p>This part gives me so much hope as we have understandings of what is theoretically possible, and in due time humanity reaches them. This gives me a lot of hope especially in the fields of curing major diseases and in longevity!

I still don&#x27;t understand why we waste time and money with fusion. Fision so much easier. Should focus on it. Fusion is ok, but 100 years into the future when we are bored.

Scientists spend their whole lives researching a particular topic, but as soon as there’s a breakthrough the politicians take credit. Unbelievable!!<p>Excellent milestone for humanity nonetheless

On a scale of 1 to invention of fire&#x2F;wheel&#x2F;smelting&#x2F;electricity&#x2F;computers, how relevant is this? I have trouble comprehending the historical impact.

Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of energy over input?

Early in my career I had the pleasure of interning at LLNL (ironically, working on a completely open source compiler project) but I was able to go on a number of tours of NIF. It was extremely cool. They have a whole team of software engineers writing software just to keep all the mirrors calibrated and things like that. In person it is much bigger than it seems in pictures.

I&#x27;m sure this has been considered, but I haven&#x27;t ready anything about the &quot;geo-political&quot; effects of virtually unlimited energy from fusion.<p>I imagine that power dynamics would change drastically, but I have no clue, really.<p>I understand that&#x27;s still far away, but are there any articles&#x2F;discussions on how large scale fusion-generated energy would change the world?

This is some of the most incredible and inspiring scientific news in my lifetime. I am overcome with excitement right now.

A couple points:<p>- Yes the efficiency of the laser is poor and modern tech is more efficient, but not enough to make it an energy producing process. The best lasers are ~50% energy efficient.<p>- This can only be maintained for short periods of time and the time to restart the process in long. Not only that, tritium is a rare isotope. These are probably the largest challenges to overcome.<p>- The energy is released in the form of high-speed particles, and there is no efficient energy capture process.<p>The significance of their achievements is overblown. Yes, they achieved ignition, but no it is just an incremental process towards commercial fusion power.

3.15 MJ is equivalent to 1.5 lb TNT, so it was quite a bang in their target chamber. Just for comparison, it&#x27;s also just short of one kWh, so it would run an electric car for about three-four miles.

This is a really hard question to answer, but do you think in peacetime 1930s if you’d asked someone how long it would take to build the bomb, they’d say “we’re only a few decades away with proper funding”?<p>The pay off achieved by accelerating fusion development seems to justify almost any amount of spending. Is it worth going for it?<p>The most important subquestion for me: is there a sufficiently brilliant living scientist who has the technical ability, managerial skills, and integrity to be trusted to deliver? I wonder if this is the reason we haven’t already done it.

Huge!<p>So much left to do. Capture that output energy. Streamline the machinery that produced the result. Do it at scale and efficiently.<p>But that&#x27;s just engineering, as they say. Which is one thing we are pretty good at!!

What an amazing achievement. I was curious, so I looked up the open software roles at LLNL[0]. I&#x27;m very curious how the salary compares to your average bay area tech salary.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers&#x2F;find-your-job&#x2F;0d659855-5fe3-49dd-a1c7-e75f07f64bb9_mid-senior-level_full-time_livermore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;join-our-team&#x2F;careers&#x2F;find-your-job&#x2F;0d6...</a>

I’m glad we might see fission power plants in my lifetime (next 30-50 years). My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch.<p>Yet I’m concerned that shortly thereafter, the giant robotic laser death spiders will destroy entire cities. This might also be be before we’ve built the arcologies to launch into outer space to escape the giant robot laser death spiders.

One more step towards getting away from dirty fossil fuels.<p>I just hope we have enough time to see it implemented at scale (ie, powering entire states&#x2F;cities&#x2F;towns&#x2F;municipalities, swapping infra in place).<p>I also hope the O&amp;G industry doesn’t attempt to block this with fake science (ie, decades of climate denial, greenwashing via “recycling” campaigns).

Exciting! Is this work published somewhere? I&#x27;m curious to hear more about the setup and other experimental conditions.

Given the resulting output was &quot;2x higher than expected&quot;, I&#x27;ll wait patiently for any peer reviewed work on the subject and a replication (or improvement) of the results.<p>In the presentation they mentioned they couldn&#x27;t reproduce the results immediately due to the containment imperfections -- at least that was my understanding.

Inertial Fusion in a Magnetic field is something I&#x27;ve been pushing for a long time. There are a lot of interesting variations on this design, and I hope I can get more interest in my design at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.DDproFusion.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.DDproFusion.com</a>

I recommend reading [0] for (only slightly outdated) context on the field and its progresses.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astralcodexten.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astralcodexten.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;your-book-review-the-f...</a>

I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?

everyone should watch <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY</a> to put this into perspective.<p>for some reason, all the news articles are extremely misleading.<p>previous output ratio for this fusion method was something like 70%, now it is 150%. it&#x27;s a useful improvement, but not a major breakthrough. the whole system still consumes 100x more energy than it produces. 100MJ of energy is needed to power the laser. the laser generates only 2MJ of energy that powers fusion. fusion generates 3MJ of output energy. so all the articles are saying &quot;they put 2MJ energy and got 3MJ energy back&quot;. no, they put 102MJ and got 3MJ.

Since I absolutely decided to take this in the worst possible way (get the downvotes ready)<p>What is the timeframe for those lasers to light a bulb somewhere, vs the timeframe of those lasers killing someone on a battlefield ? (As in, how much of is applicable for the military?)

So for my entire lifetime Fusion has been 30-50 years away. Now it&#x27;s 29-49 years away?

I hope commercial fusion power generation becomes a reality but I&#x27;m far from convinced that&#x27;s the case. What we see here is just solving one problem with many more to go.<p>Energy output exceeding energy input produces a surplus of energy. That&#x27;s a must and that&#x27;s the breakthrough LLNL is announcing but le tme list the some of the known barriers to producing electricity:<p>1. How stable is the reaction? What failure modes does it have? While fusion doesn&#x27;t have the same failure modes as fission does (eg Chernobyl) it could still result in significant damage to the container or even the facility;<p>2. What&#x27;s the relationship between capex (&quot;capital expendiutre&quot;), lifetime, maintenance and power generation. An extreme example is if your power plant costs $50B with annual mainteance of $2B and a life of 30 years but only produces 100MW of power then even though the fuel is free it&#x27;s not economical because those capex and operational costs have to be amortized over the life of the plant;<p>3. How available are the fuels? Of course hydrogen is abundant but most of it is protium (H1), which is not useful for current fusion research. Most of it is DT fusion, meaning deuterium (H2) - tritium (H3). Deuterium is naturally occuring (IIRC ~1ppm). Tritium is not. It needs to be bred.<p>4. What about neutrons? Neutrons create two problems. The first is energy loss. High speed neutrons are energy loss from your system. Inertial confinement (ie this result) tries to capture neutrons with a &quot;shell&quot;. Older designs (eg ITER) use a tokamak, which is magnetic containment of a superheated plasma. Magnetic fields are great for containing electrons and hydrogen nucei because they&#x27;re positively charged. Neutrons obviously have no electric charge so just escape. The second problem is the damage these neutrons cause (ie &quot;neutron embrittlement&quot;).<p>5. How do you convert that energy into power? Nuclear fission, for example, heats water into steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. This isn&#x27;t particularly efficient and greatly adds to the costs. It&#x27;s another system that needs to be maintained. &quot;Direct energy conversion&quot; would be the holy grail here but that&#x27;s all very theoretical at this point.<p>Once you start adding up efficiencies in the different stages of electricity generation you have to do significanlty better than simply exceeding power input.<p>It&#x27;s a notable achievement but as the release says, viable power generation is still a long way away (ie decades).

It&#x27;s a weird scientific annoncement, punctuated with quotes from politicians...

I’d love to hear the pros and cons of fusion vs micro molten salt fission reactors.

This is a huge deal, but not as big as it is being made out to be. This is only a fractional output, there is still significant work required to make this feasible for use outside the lab.

Recently discussed <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33945863</a> [740 comments]

I thought we had passed this mark a long time ago, but only during short stints.<p>However, the way they&#x27;re realizing it by shooting a fuel pellet with lasers is unsustainable and impractical IMHO.

&gt; maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing<p>What is meant by this?

Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the need to generate selfish profit is at reach!

Old news: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nature13008" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nature13008</a>

ELI5 level question.<p>Please correct me if I&#x27;m saying something stupid.<p>If you toss a solar mass of water into the sun it just becomes fuel.<p>So, could a fusion reactor, when efficiency is improved, use water as fuel?

Cool technical achievement, but it has essentially no implications for economically or politically significant energy generation anytime soon.

If ignition was achieved, why would they have to keep on shooting more fuel pellets? Shouldn&#x27;t they just ignite one fuel pellet and feed in more fuel?

So for how many milliseconds did it run? Those things are incredibly unstable, I see only one private US company making the stability breakthrough

It&#x27;s interesting that they beat ITER to ignition. I wonder if this changes the direction of fusion research and funding in any way.

US DOE: Excessive uncritical media hype achieved.

I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is wormhole &quot;real&quot;?

Ok, so how long do I have to wait to get a coffee-can sized device to power my house?

My pessimistic self feels like the short-term effect is that it sets a deadline by which oil companies know they have to extract and sell all the existing oil on the planet, and a doubling down on increased emissions now because fusion will solve it eventually.

Gratz to the scientists, seems like an impressive achievement!

What does this mean for ITER and magnetic confinement fusion?

TL:DR please, how big of a deal is this and when can we approximately expect cheap or costless energy? And is it sort of like perpetual energy generator? And if yes, doesn&#x27;t that break law of physics? And if not, why not?<p>So many questions. Pardon my ignorance.

remember those &quot;experts&quot; who said fusion won&#x27;t be feasible before second-half of this century?

It&#x27;s a big deal, it will change the way people live. Hopefully it also help to eliminate wars, the war for the natural resources and land.

&quot;...a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s the best outcome you can think of as a result of possible free energy?

Widespread energy generation nuclear fission is politically impossible in most Western countries.<p>Why are people optimistic that fusion won&#x27;t have the same kind of problems, such as new plants being too expensive to build and old obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?

Christopher Nolan couldn&#x27;t have timed the release of Oppenheimer better.

Congrats Doc Ok.

This was for a few seconds using radioactive &quot;fuel&quot; correct?<p>So perpetually 10-25 years away at all times?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.xkcd.com&#x2F;678&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.xkcd.com&#x2F;678&#x2F;</a><p>Beware science packaged as press-releases.

Thank you, Biden!

&gt; achieve President Biden’s goal<p>This seems unnecessarily partisan to mention

The future just got a whole lot brighter for my children. This is going to save our planet, not funky wind farms.

Tangential, but fun: the following is NOT what this post says. The following is the response to a the ChatGPT prompt &quot;write the press release by an imagined body called the Department of Energy announcing the achievement of fusion ignition.&quot; Mind you, ChatGPT training data ends in 2021, so it&#x27;s definitely not aware of this news:<p>&quot;The Department of Energy is pleased to announce the successful achievement of fusion ignition in our latest experiment. This breakthrough marks a major milestone in our pursuit of clean, limitless energy.<p>Fusion, the process by which atomic nuclei combine to release vast amounts of energy, has long been considered the Holy Grail of energy production. It has the potential to provide an virtually limitless supply of clean, safe energy, without the harmful greenhouse gas emissions or dangerous waste products of other forms of energy production.<p>For decades, scientists and engineers have been working to unlock the secrets of fusion and harness its power. This has been a challenging and complex endeavor, but we are now closer than ever to achieving our goal. The successful fusion ignition in our experiment marks the first time that this process has been achieved outside of the core of a star. This is a significant step forward in our efforts to harness the power of fusion and bring it to practical use.<p>We believe that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the way we produce energy, and we are committed to pursuing this technology with all of the resources at our disposal. In the coming years, we will continue to conduct experiments and research, with the goal of developing a fusion reactor that can provide a stable, reliable source of energy.<p>We are extremely proud of this achievement, and we will continue to work tirelessly to develop this technology and bring it to the world. This is an exciting time for energy production, and we are confident that fusion will play a major role in our collective future. We are grateful for the support of our colleagues and partners in this effort, and we look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible.&quot;

Remarkable. It&#x27;s still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation&#x2F;radioactivity.<p>If you don&#x27;t like nuclear for these reasons, you&#x27;ll probably hate fusion.

I like how over 60 years after the nuclear boom, it somehow just happened to happen today. Just when the world is ready to transition to electric vehicles on a global scale, just when oil companies aren&#x27;t able to make as much money from oil as they used to, just when one of the major suppliers of fossil fuels (Russia) is at war with the West, it has somehow magically happened. What a coinky-dink.<p>Throw lots of money at something when you need it to happen and then it will happen. Or have control over the technology and don&#x27;t let it see the light of day until it benefits you financially and makes your enemies lose their main stream of income. I truly applaud this timing and will err on the side of conspiracy rather than coincidence reading more about this &quot;breakthrough&quot;.

I have an idea. Why don&#x27;t we just take all the nuclear weapons we&#x27;ve accumulated around the planet and explode them in the South China Sea?