Garantee you they weren’t generating a whole lot of power though… And if you can’t do that part then what’s the point?

The first planes only flew for a few seconds.

Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.

So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…

I’ll let you fill in the blank.

A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.

Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.

Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.

In 1932, Walton produced the first man-made fission by using protons from the accelerator to split lithium into alpha particles.[5]

We’ve been at this for coming up to 100 years too.

Let me know when they actually generate power. I don’t want another article about a guy jumping off the eifle tower in a bird suit. A successful flight should be measured by the success of the flight.

Power generators should be measured by the power generated.

0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing.

America, the UK, France, Japan, and no doubt other places have been toying with fusion “power” for 90 years… We’ve created heat and not much else as far as I can tell.