The Fusion Breakthrough!

From the beginning of the announcement article in Science, we have this lyrical praise:

More energy out than in. For 7 decades, fusion scientists have chased this elusive goal, known as energy gain. At 1 a.m. on 5 December, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California finally did it, focusing 2.05 megajoules of laser light onto a tiny capsule of fusion fuel and sparking an explosion that produced 3.15 MJ of energy—the equivalent of about three sticks of dynamite.

“This is extremely exciting, it’s a major breakthrough,” says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. (This Physics Today article offers less excitement and more sober details.)

OK, I'm a cynic

I just did a lot of writing and used actual numbers so that the word "megajoule" would have a more visceral meaning than "Wow, an extra million." But, in the real world, a megajoule is a bit more energy than eating a pound of chocolate chips. Yes, it's a "breakthrough" in the sense of reaching what they call "scientific breakeven." But in the world of power generation, it's the equivalent of a couple of UPS batteries. As most of the articles truthfully mentioned, you would have to increase the energy from the "breakthrough" fusion reaction by at least a factor of 100 and then repeat it thousands of times per minute to make it worthwhile.

OK, I'm not a complete cynic!

There is plenty of room for improvement in the lasers and the hohlraum. There's a saying "nuclear fusion power generation is 30 years away and always will be." But there also used to be a saying "Flat-Screen Televisions are 30 years away and always will be." Guess what?