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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

if this is true, HOW is this not being played on every news network right now?

Perhaps because it generated less energy (1.3 MJ) than was directed at it (1.9 MJ). The team calculated that the fuel capsule generated more energy than it absorbed, but the overall reactor did not generate net energy.

Maybe because that leaves it still three or more orders of magnitude away from usefulness, about like a car that maxes out at 300 ft/hr or a rooftop solar panel that generates 0.3 watts at noon.

Fusion that releases its energy by emitting hot neutrons will never, ever produce commercially viable power, no matter how big its Q gets.

Using currently proposed models, this might be true. The facilities and reaction apparatus don't scale well, so power generation plants would have to be massive, and using tempermental, super high precision, enormously complex equipment means huge infrastructure, operation, and maintenance costs.

As materials, theory, and science in general improve, designs will get better, and someone will crack the puzzle of scaling, but that's 10 to 30 years out, as always.

We might see a viable fusion engine for spacecraft before practical fusion power on earth.

I guarantee that, when that finally happens, it will not be hot-neutron fusion.

"The goal is to achieve ignition – a point at which the energy generated by the fusion process exceeds the total energy input.

The experiment, conducted on 8 August, fell just short of that mark"

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