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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Yes, net-positive fusion was achieved in August of last year:
Scientists achieve net energy gain breakthrough with nuclear fusion
Obviously, this will take a decade or two to develop into a viable commercial energy source, but the barrier has been overcome with regards to net-positive fusion.
That's what I was talking about regarding the lasers. As far I understand that result, it's net energy in a physics sense, as in the reaction itself produced more energy than put in, but because the energy put in isn't electricity itself, and the conversion process between electricity and energy in the laser is inefficient, the entire machine as a whole isn't energy positive, just the reaction. It can't yet be used as an electric generator, unless the reporting I saw on this at the time was inaccurate
I get what you’re saying, and you’re right on many ways (especially wrt the energy conversion), but the barrier to producing net-positive fusion has been overcome. And it’s just a matter of scaling it up at this point— which includes overcoming many new hurdles such as (more) efficient energy conversion.
But none will be so insurmountable as the initial creating of net-positive reactions. That was the big one, and we did it.
I guess my objection then is that I tend to take "just scale it up" to imply "all the tech development hurdles are done, we have a working prototype of the machine we want to build, we just need to construct a physically larger one", and so was taking the process of improving the efficiency of the reaction to useful levels and figuring out how to make a significantly more efficient laser as "we don't have this technology done yet, because we still have these milestones left". In other words, we're just arguing from confusion over different definitions of a word rather than the reality of what those words are referring to
I never claimed that all of the development hurdles were done. Far from it. But if you wish to object to my phrase, “just scale it up“, then you can certainly criticize me for oversimplifying the matter.
Its been a decade away since 80's. We should have been working on MSR and make them sustainable before getting to the next stage
It’s not a binary, not really.
We have achieved net-positive fusion as of last year. That’s the achievement we needed to move to the next stage, and it’s the one which was always a hopeful “maybe”. But we finally did it. It’s imperfect and needs to be refined and scaled up (another Herculean effort, to be sure), but we’ve crossed from the “is it even possible?” to the “we proved it can be done, now let’s make this into a practical technology.”
So, when scientists claim 10-20 years from now, it’s no longer hopeful speculation but a well-educated projection based on current development.