> 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.
100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth.
$1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization
That's quite high. Here in Germany they assume 530-800€ per kW_peak for a utility-scale ground-mounted system (2021) [0]. You can add additional CAPEX for inflation and expansion of the grid, but <$1500 per kW_peak (aka $1.5m per MW) should be quite possible. Especially if you include scaling effects.
If you add batteries for night-time balancing, LCOE roughly doubles for now.
Economically, no other energy source will beat non-winter day-time PV in the foreseeable future. Imo, as long as other plants are running during those times, investing in PV is a no-brainer.
I suggest we do not lay all of our eggs in one basket. Climate change can be best countered if we use the sweet spot of all current available and anticipated technologies, including photovoltaic, long & short term storage solutions, and fusion. There is no need to bet on one technology at this stage.
Solar panels are cheap and the market appears to be fine with unreliable power[0] if it's cheap enough.
[0] Unreliable, but predictable that is. You can estimate with decent confidence what the weather will be like tomorrow and you can definitely tell what it's going to be a few hours from now, so energy auctions a day ahead are feasible.
Do you have week long blackouts currently? In any given year you can count on a week where a panel only produces 10%. It just has to be cloudy or rainy. However much solar we add, even with storage to get through a night, needs some other source to get through the cloudy week, unless we are ok with blackouts.
A panel. Panels spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres produce power averaged over that area, so they're much more consistent and predictable.
HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:
Glad it will work there. There has been local opposition to new transmission lines in the USA (see Maine recently) so when folks say “just build powerlines” all I can think of is the difficulty of the land assembly and permitting. Technically it is easy, it is all the humans in the way that make it hard.
The batteries do exist, but it’s better to use them in cars. If we start diverting our battery supply for grid storage it will drive up the price of EVs.
Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc.
Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.
People should understand that it is all an energy problem, regardless of how that energy is currently delivered. Transportation can be (and, of course, is being electrified), most industrial processes and agriculture currently use fossil fuels as inputs because its the cheapest source of input.
For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808....
But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".
If there’s a glut of cheap electrical energy, there would be a rapid push to electrify things like iron and steel production (8% of emissions), heating (10% of emissions) and transportation (10%)… and so on.
I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air
In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2.
Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed.
Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc).
Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
Those are figures for current electrical production schemes.
After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process.
It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
You hope. It’s not “more expensive now”. It’s infinitely more expensive because we can’t even build one. It’s unclear how much a fusion reactor will end up costing but I wouldn’t use hope to blind myself into thinking it’ll be 10x cheaper than fission. There’s certainly reason to be hopeful because solar and wind are cheaper, but construction for those is also relatively simple and easy to mass manufacture most of it. Fusion reactors will probably look more like fission than not (ie complex to mass manufacture, still require complex structures, need regular complicated maintenance due to radioactive decay in the containment materials etc). Additionally, solar and wind don’t pose real threats to established fossil fuel interests. Fusion would and it’s unclear how they might respond from a regulatory hurdle perspective.
Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
The first commercial reactor designs are probably 50 years away and another 50 years before costs come down to be reasonable / we can build enough to start replacing existing fission and coal. This is from the CEO of General Fusion a leader in the space. I think if even the fusion people are saying “build fission today to solve global warming” then that tells you something about the time scale this is happening on.
I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
There are a lot of bigger picture items around energy. Part of Europe's challenge with the war in Ukraine is that a lot of countries buy Russian gas & oil.
>Russia accounted for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 35% of Germany’s oil imports last year, causing Germany to resist a blanket European Union ban on Russian energy.
If every country could assure their energy independence, geopolitics would look very different. Yes, there are still many problems, like natural resources. But if you can assure all your residents can keep the lights on, their houses warm and the economy moving (EV's for transit, technology)... its very reassuring.
Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.
Basically the only energy that is cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels is wind and solar, which have only gotten to that point in the last 1-2 decades, so it seems difficult to make claims about what has happened in "history".
You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.
LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.
With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?
We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere".
Increased C02 (and the close following methane and water vapor increases) serve to trap more of the heat radiated outwards that would otherwise escape.
The vast bulk of that heat comes from the visible light of the sun which passes easily through the atmosphere coming in, gets converted to IR energy as it warms the earth and oceans, and then escapes outwards.
Our changes to the atmosphere have disturbed that balance.
Your comment has some small merit, but you would need to work through the heat output of human generated power and then compare that to the daily heat energy originally from the sun that radiates outward.
Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.
I have no idea. Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own. That does not make your blanket assertion true.
The original question is a good one. We will use more energy as it gets cheaper (see monster trucks, Las Vegas, Dubai). We should be thinking of what we will do with the waste heat when everyone has a fusion reactor.
Your repeated assertion that I made a "blanket assertion" suggests you're either someone with english as a second language or else someone who stubbornly digs in (unless there's another explanation here?).
To be clear I made a qualified assertion; the phrase "Relative scales of various factors matter here" does the work.
> Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own.
Yes - but, again, How much more?
If it's barely twice as much (which seems unlikely) then heat from our activity is a major factor in all this.
If it's 100,000x times more then I stand firm, heat from our activity has effectively zero impact on the AGW issue (although other by-products from our daily routines are the crux of the problem).
If it's some other factor then what relative signifigance does our human heat generation have?
> I have no idea.
It's a shame you didn't grab an envelope and make use of the back, it's a classic Fermi problem [1] of the kind I and my class mates were posed in high school and the kind of thing many other HN commeters would delight in taking a run at.
If you're feeling game you might like to start with the daily heating of the earths surface from the sun, and then look at the petajoules of energy generated and consumed per day and take a stab at guesstimating the waste (unused, released into the lower earths surface layer) heat as a percentage (or google efficiencies, etc).
But some people would start driving 6 ton vehicles because fuel is free. Limiting factor for crytpo mining would be only number of hardware you can get (provided crypto survives for so long). Some people would probably do the math and decide that thermal insulation is too expensive, and run heating/cooling on max. I could probably come up with more examples.
EDIT: from quick google query it looks like per day earth receives equivalent of yearly power consumption (not only electricity but also fuel). So we would need to x356 our energy consumption which is not that much unreasonable if you could have for example heated outdoor pool for free anywhere in the world.
Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium.
It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them.
Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.
A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima because they were fairly sure it was going to work and wouldn't have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on the timelines involved.
Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.
I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.
This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.
I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.
It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
This general idea that a previous generation was better because they lead a less pampered life goes back to some of the earliest writing. Yet here we are.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
I mean, sure. But at the same time they were constrained by the tools of their time, had no internet for instant information access and spread, and scientific collaboration has never been at a higher level than it is now. There's no reason to believe that people who grow up with instant lookup and massive computational power will somehow be less capable than people whose only tools were pen and pencil. What is possible now couldn't even be dreamed of back then.
> they're working on getting you to click on an ad
They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.
No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.
They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.
They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.
They're working on fusion.
And so on and so forth.
Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
At this point, it's not even about "money" in the traditional sense (wealth, prestige, etc.); rather, it's about stability, the alleged "American dream". I live in Chicago, so I'll consider the local national laboratory, Argonne. They pay their software engineers $101,888 per year, according to Glassdoor ($71,640 after state and federal tax). Using the 28% rule most lenders use nowadays, with today's rates, that's a maximum mortgage payment of $1,671 at 7%. However, the median house price in DuPage County is $335,000 [1], and a 30-year mortgage (with 10% down) has a monthly payment of just over $2,000. No dice - even for a highly skilled professional living in one of the most affordable parts of the country. Keep in mind that you still need to pay 2.3% per annum property tax, besides owning a car and saving for retirement. It's just not nearly as feasible a path towards financial stability as taking a $"TECH" job with west coast pay.
Yeah, I think we have a lot of sleeper geniuses out there
I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler
I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
He's actually the complete opposite based on reports of what it is like to work with him at SpaceX and Tesla in recent years. Employees describe having to avoid him so he doesn't meddle in the projects and screw them up.
Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.
This is not quite correct. LLNL is a Federally Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) which is owned, as a facility, by the government, but managed and staffed by a non-profit contracting organization called Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) under a contract funded by DOE/NNSA. The board of LLNS is made up of representatives from universities (California + TAMU), other scientific non-profits (Battelle Memorial Institute), and private nuclear ventures (e.g. Bechtel.) LLNS pays, with very few exceptions, staff salaries at LLNL, and they are not beholden to the government civilian pay schedule.
Be that as it may, a number of positions at LLNL, including many of those affiliated with NIF, require that candidate is a US person and is eligible for a DOE security clearance. A security clearance is not necessarily binary on being a US person, but a number of national-security related positions may require not only the clearance, but also that the candidate is a US person (or outright forbid foreign nationals.)
There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway. No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all, but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible.
Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google.
> All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This sort of work is not easy to do well.
The NIF is not for more powerful nuclear weapons, as that's entirely unnecessary. If anything, most interest these days is in less powerful weapons for potential battlefield use.
It is necessary since they banned the testing of nuclear weapons. Before they would do this kind of research by imploding a cylinder of uranium encasing a hydrogen core with X-rays produced by a "Fat Man" style bomb. Now they implode a cylindrical casing full of hydrogen by x-rays caused by a laser vaporizing an outer layer.
“It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
That isn’t what this would be used for. In fact, yields for the largest deployed H-bombs today I think are smaller than they once were (due to better targeting capabilities).
This is true. The issue is that already a relatively small nuclear weapon is perfectly sufficient to wipe out most to all civilian structures. However, it does so in a roughly circular area, and you need to increase the initial explosion a royal lot to increase the devastated area by a bit. And as you increase the overall spherical blast of the weapon in order to increase the circle of doom on the ground, more and more explosive power just vaporizes air.
That's why MIRV was introduced. One ICBM delivering 10 - 20 small warheads result in much greater devastation than an equally heavy warhead in one package, because less power is wasted on air and space.
The purpose of NIF, and it’s not hidden, is to maintain the existing US nuclear stockpile since we can no longer rely on using underground nuclear weapon testing to ensure they still work. There’s a very big supercomputing capability funded under the same effort. Instead of testing the weapons by exploding them underground, we use computer modeling with the modeling validated (ie backed up) by experiment (at NIF) to make sure the stockpile works and can maintain its strategic deterrent. The euphemistic name for this is “stockpile stewardship.”
The B53 bomb was built in 1961 and it released 38 PJ or 10 BILLION times more energy than this experiment. Data gathered about plasma and fusion at NIF temperatures and pressures is not helpful for the insanely different environment of a nuclear bomb.
> What do you think the US nuclear weapons research lab will use their research for?
Why do you think that fusion is not enough? Complete strategic energy independence for the US, and dominance in the electricity sector? That's so, SO much more valuable than better nuclear weapons.
You should be very excited because we live on a planet with independent competing countries and well... you don't want to live in the US or Europe with China or other not so friendly countries building a bigger more powerful nuke. If a weapon can be built, it will be built. How, when and if it can be used are things you can control not whether someone somewhere will develop it. Especially in war time, all bets are off.
Although, it would be interesting to see fusion reactors on planes and ships powering other types of weapons like lasers and more powerful railguns or faster icbms.
Good things often have dubious or downright evil origins (which would never be justifiable a priori).
A relatively recent example: development of cancer chemotherapy began with the incidental finding that the chemical warfare agent nitrogen mustard reduced the white cell count of affected soldiers.
We make progress building on the shoulders of giants, but those giants are often standing in dung.
Given it's Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla's stock compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth); but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting Starship to Mars. He's not going to be as rich in the future as he was in that moment, and he'll be relentlessly mocked for the context as his ship takes on water (eg when he's worth $60-$80 billion and spent $44 billion buying Twitter and SpaceX needs $10+ billion infused into it to keep pursuing Mars).
It appears to be working/progressing properly so far (and quite rapidly compared to norms in the industry), including the Raptor engines. I doubt that's it.
Musk has very obviously poor impulse control. Someone more contained, patient, less impulsive, would have waited and taken a more strategic approach to acquiring Twitter (which would have left an opening to let the stock implode with the rest of the tech market, after which one could have pounced and grabbed it for far cheaper). On the flip side, that less impulsive person probably wouldn't have started SpaceX in the first place (given the suicidal fiscal task involved and context at the time in the industry), or wouldn't have gone to the financial extremes required to make it succeed (betting essentially all of his wealth on Tesla and SpaceX).
I know it is popular/easy to hate on the man right now, but this is a really strange take.
Given that Musk has been talking about mars since at least 2001, many years before he had the resources he has now, and almost went bankrupt funding spacex's first orbital rocket, it's hard to believe he's pretending.
People seem happy to believe all negative things they hear about him, but discount anything that doesn't gel with this negative image. It's like how the same people who put all missteps of Tesla/SpaceX at Elons feet, will also discount any of the successes and say he has nothing to do with them.
I dunno, if you look at the Boring Company through the lens of "this man really wants to go to Mars", it kinda makes sense. Probably a lot of Mars colony infrastructure should be tunneled underground, given the lack of atmosphere / magnetosphere.
Things like Hyperloop also make more sense in that context.
> We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.
You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
okay but oil is a fundamental input into everything hence a much bigger threat than say TSMC's nextgen fab. everybody understands that with some effort those outputs of a strong economy can be recreated but not inputs. Arguably lithium or water may become that but we are currently far from it. Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
> Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again.
> but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined
Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well.
The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you.
> plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks.
Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.
> 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.
It's fusion Manhattan project time.