floofloofUS scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
Faceman🇦🇺It may only be two atoms, but it’s yet another tiny step in the right direction.
It may still be generations before fusion is a scalable and reliable power source, but at this point I think we’ve proved it isn’t impossible.
chemical_cutthroatMaybe I'm just over-hopeful, but I think "generations" is far too much of an understatement. With the way that technology moves, I don't think we'll be waiting that long.
I think we will keep accelerating, but Fusion has taken so, so long to get to where we are now, every advancement has been met with a setback, and we still only have a few parts of it working on small scales.
The ones to watch for the next few years are ITER and CFETR for large scale tokamak style reactors, as well as SPARC for a much more compact solution that looks very promising as it can be built faster and cheaper. I don’t really see inertial confinement or pinch reactors being the way forward for power generation, but you never know.