I'm sorry but you sound much more arrogant here with your strange assumptions. AFAIK all of those things he said are based on the data from the experiment. And I've read the same (i.e. that it's very far from being energy efficient).

> will believe Wouldn't be better if you were able in to verify stuff to some degree yourself instead blindly trusting every expert (not at all implying that the people who did this experiment are untrustworthy but your bound to run into some bad apples with this attitude eventually)

The paper was very clear what was involved and that information was poorly communicated. The experiment used X energy from a laser pulse to get Y thermal energy. The issue w0mbat referred to is to be self sustaining you need to use the output energy to drive the process. Aka the important number is after all relevant losses including electricity > lasers > fusion > heat > electricity, with each of those stages have losses. The reason they don’t communicate end to end efficiency is from a scientific standpoint it’s meaningless as they aren’t converting any thermal energy into electricity.

For example p + p Fusion releases neutrinos which then escape any practical device without depositing their energy as heat. This isn’t a concern with DT fusion but again the point is we don’t really care about the actual mass to energy conversion but rather the amount of useful energy obtained.

none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction.

this is about more power leaving the reaction chamber than what entered it. that's all the announcement is about.

this is NOT about how much energy it takes to ready the lasers. this is NOT about the electricity consumed by lighting, computers, cooling, or measurement or anything else-- none of that counts when you are measuring the efficiency of the reaction itself.

this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in.

understanding that is key to understanding the significance of the announcement, and this is significant.

and I maintain that the poster I originally called arrogant is arrogant, because they indicated in their comment that they knew how to calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work. I called it arrogant because it is --objectively-- an arrogant position to take.

if that makes me arrogant, then so be it. my arrogance is independent of theirs and has no bearing on comments made before my own, and my comment did not influence theirs. (they were being arrogant before I pointed it out.)

> none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction.

Actual power plants are self sustaining as in they use the electricity they produce to operate, it’s mandatory though not sufficient for any commercial fusion power plant.

So, this isn’t about a different way to “calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work” he was directly quoting their numbers from the paper. It’s only a question of communicating the meaning of efficiency.

> this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in.

The exact same energy was there before and after fusion only it’s form changed. It might seem pedantic to point that out, but if you don’t make it clear people will misunderstand.

Also, the applied laser energy also leaves the reaction chamber so any fusion would be net positive thermal energy by that yardstick.

> Actual power plants are self sustaining Actual power plants are not necessarily self-sustaining and practically none of them can start if the grid power is not available. See: black start power plants and https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w

If it on average produces less electricity than it consumes then it isn’t a power plant.

Black start is obviously a different question than being self sustaining.