A first.  We (that’s really the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California) finally produced a fusion reaction (that means hydrogen atoms fuse together and in the process liberate a bunch of energy) that theoretically produced more energy that it took to create it.

But, not really. First of all, no one is including the billions of dollars we spent building this specialized reactor system (that we started using in 2009). And, we clearly omit the energy demand that was required to create this system.  For example, no one is including the 300 megaJoules withdrawn from the electric grid to power the 192 lasers that effected the reaction.

All we did for this success was create more energy than it took to react over a billionth of a second or so.  So the amount of energy to initiate the reaction (2.05 megaJoules) compared to what was produced (3.15 megaJoules) is positive. (Note: If we add in the 300 megaJoules to power the lasers, this reaction clearly did not exceed the energy input at all!)  Moreover, this reaction is not sustainable.   We’d need to do this tens of thousands of times a day. (And, this system requires hours to recover from each experiment- obviously, it’s not going to be sustainable.  Moreover, we need to produce about two pound of tritium (a form of hydrogen), that currently costs some  $ 1 million per ounce to produce.)

But, still- that’s a better result than we’ve achieved over the past 7 decades!

Moreover, this reactor system is different from most of the test reactors out there.  Those are primarily donut-shaped reactors (aka tokamaks).  In these systems, the hydrogen gas gets heated to afford the electrons be released from the nucleus (which creates what is called plasma- clouds of nuclei [with a positive charge] and electrons [with a negative charge]- that operate within magnetic fields that trap the plasma in the tokamak, allowing the nuclei to fuse together- which then releases fusion energy.

In this case, the National Ignition Facility (at Lawrence Livermore) uses lasers- and since these are only 1% efficient, the designers know they won’t work for real fusion power generation.  If we were about to go commercial with this concept (don’t worry- we are at least a decade away), we’d need much faster lasers, capable of firing 10 times a second.  The ones we are using can only handle 10 shots a week!

But, there’s a great deal of interest in fusion right now.  (The Inflation Reduction Act [IRA] has provisions to fund such research.)   And, there are a bunch of entities that have already raised money [outside of the IRA] to build and test all sorts of fusion reactors.  Of course, no one  expects them to produce viable fusion results for at least 5 years (and which timetable I consider HIGHLY optimistic). These firms include General Atomic (although it is in California, it is provisioning facilities in the US and in France),   Commonwealth Fusion (Boston) that has raised $1.8 billion (Bill Gates, George Soros, and Google), General Fusion ($ 130 million, Jeff Bezos), Helion Energy (Seattle, about $ 2 billion raised), among many others.

We are getting a little closer all the time.