Nuclear Fusion breakthrough

I think difficulties with scale, in every sense of the word, is the foremost technical problem with renewables. It's all theoretical right now of course but I'm sure the hope is that a fusion reactor could be more or less equivalent to a traditional power station in the form it takes and the amount of power it produces. At the moment you need to dedicate vast amounts of space to renewables for a less reliable result

Who stands to benefit from this monetarily? Will all the football clubs be owned by nerds in the future instead of guys from Oil states?

It would cause a seismic change in Geopolitics. The Oil and Gas states would progressively be fucked and destabilised.

I got bitten by a hamster from California. My super power is how many nuts I can get in my mouth.

They’re so stable and unfucked currently.

Unfortunately, this is as far from a practical application as possible. They are shooting with 192 gigantic lasers (warehouse sized) at a tiny pellet of fusionable material encased in a gold shell. This pellet then explodes, but a tiny amount of time, at the start of the explosion, there is actual fusion happening, and it's producing more energy than the laserlight that heats it up.

Unfortunately, a few nanoseconds later, the explosion moved the material so far apart, that the fusion is already stopping again. Also, the lasers are very inefficient and the laserlight that is coming out of them has only like 1% of the energy that was put into the lasers. Their claim of ignition only covers the part from the laserlight on, which means that the fusion produces only a few % (single digit) of the total energy that was put into it.

Oh, and the pellet has to be replaced afterwards, and the lasers readjusted, because they apparently move out of focus due to the heat.

This whole branch of fusion (inertia based) is probably never gonna produce a power plant. But it could probably be weaponized. Yay.

It's not a practical power source but it does show that we can also produce more energy from from fusion than went in right? Isn't that the big deal? Not that we now have a fusion power plant.

I mean, yeah, they have proven in an experiment, that ignition can indeed be done. Which is already a fantastic scientific achievement.

My point is just that this is "only" a scientific breakthrough. It doesn't bring us any closer to functional fusion power plants. The only practical applications it has is for weapons.

Dude. 

Discovering how to start a fire was cool and all, but it didn’t bring us any closer to building an oven.

Yeah, quite. If we can terraform an alien world, we can fucking well fix ours. Ludicrous.

Well, I’m going to come back to this thread in thirty years and go “fuck you! told you so” except we’ll all be dead by Iranian drones by then.

This is the first scientific breakthrough I can remember where there's almost been an equal amount of pessimistic news articles as much as there is optimism.

I think it's where we are as a society that nothing can be taken as good news. There is always a downside.

Which is good but also shit.

It's also probably because it's fusion and it's history with only another 50 years for nearly a century.

Relative to all the stuff we spend money on, the money allocated to solving what may be one of the most complex but rewarding challenges in physics is peanuts. It we had thrown the requisite billions at it like we should have done, we'd probably be a lot closer than we are now.