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US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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It may only be two atoms, but it's yet another tiny step in the right direction. It may still be generations before fusion is a scalable and reliable power source, but at this point I think we've proved it isn't impossible.
The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.
Maybe I'm just over-hopeful, but I think "generations" is far too much of an over~~under~~statement. With the way that technology moves, I don't think we'll be waiting that long.
I think we will keep accelerating, but Fusion has taken so, so long to get to where we are now, every advancement has been met with a setback, and we still only have a few parts of it working on small scales.
The ones to watch for the next few years are ITER and CFETR for large scale tokamak style reactors, as well as SPARC for a much more compact solution that looks very promising as it can be built faster and cheaper. I don't really see inertial confinement or pinch reactors being the way forward for power generation, but you never know.
Generations are generally ~20 years. It's been 3-4 generations since the first nuclear power plant, and less since the first commercial one. It'll certainly be at least one more before commercial fusion even being optimistic
The problem is that fusion research does not tend to receive a lot of funding, especially relative to the huge challenges it presents. Even the National Ignition Facility, where this milestone was reached, was only built because it was needed for nuclear weapons research, with advances into using fusion for energy generation being essentially a side benefit (at least, from the perspective of its government funders).