This is not a major breakthrough, it's a benchmark.
A major breakthrough would be materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment longer, the ultimate limiting factor for fusion energy plants after we achieve positive net energy.
I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)
You have to understand that fusion has been funded at "fusion never" levels for 5 decades now.
The amount of money that we poured at the mining engineering that later became "fracking" was larger.
Had we funded fusion at the amount we have funded petroleum extraction, we'd have free energy by now. :(
Nuclear fusion? There's this urban myth that fusion could have been achieved if only we'd have poured more money into it, but where's the evidence? Plasma modeling requires a lot of computational power. What you have now in your iPhone in your pocket you could not have had for 10 billion dollars back in 1970. How much money were we supposed to put into fusion research? Do you think with lots of money and just a slide rule, you can solve the fusion problem?
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/us-government-role...
The Government gets involved in a lot of things, but it doesn't mean its contribution is essential. For a recent example, the NIH is claiming the Moderna vaccine is due to their contribution, and sure, you'll be able to find one or a few grants here or there of a few hundred thousand dollars, but the massive investments of tens of millions of dollars were done by Moderna itself.
As for fracking, the father of fracking is considered to be George P. Mitchell [1].
George Mitchell’s team studied those results while developing the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, the first modern fracking play. The company relied on research from the Sandia National Laboratory to use micro-seismic technology to map the shale fractures in wells, and Mitchell also benefited from federal tax credits for unconventional drilling, which helped underwrite the cost of developing hydraulic fracturing. " https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/10/31/how-much...
“The government’s role in fracking’s development was important, but not so important that it eclipses the effort and investment of private industry”
But at that stage it's semantics really.
Maybe we could ask the question: "would private industry have funded all the basic research to get to the same starting point?" I doubt it since it would not have been shown returns for many decades and had a high risk of showing no returns. But maybe they would have, who knows?
A parallel question: "would private industry have developed semiconductor transistors without WW2 research into radar systems?
But of course, it also means that we should not rely on nuclear fusion being available in the short term...
Fusion hasn't really produced much utility at all so far, aside from some interesting discussions.
https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/fusion-research-igni...
It seems to me that fusion is unfairly criticized because there is an obvious end-goal.
I'm reminded of the Crazy Horse Memorial... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
For a Cathedral, you have a general idea of how long it's going to take (at least finite) and know that every piece of material added onto the structure is going to move it closer to the end goal.
For things like fusion, anything beyond say 20 years is basically a bullsh_t speculative guess that sounds better than "we don't really know whether this will even work out in the end". It doesn't really matter whether it's 30 or 60. The real question is whether the number is finite or infinite.
- Nuclear Fusion - AGI - Driverless cars - Quantum Gravity - Carbon Nanotubes
There appears to either be a problem where these are either convenient money sinks, problems that are missing key break-throughs or missing critical technologies. Nuclear Fusion would be easy if we had 400T magnetic fields and the structures to support them.
We seem to be missing a critical cultural element required to drive these types of innovations - or we are missing the slow tooling, process, and incremental innovations required to support these technologies.
But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.
IIRC, there is some sort of Silicon Carbon based material that need to be economically feasible to manufacture (that can withstand a fair amount of neutron bombardment without crumbling like other materials) before a plant will ever make sense. There may be alternative materials but none of them are cheap enough to build a long-term TOKAMAK even if we could achieve the incremental net power necessary for a power plant.
You won't be able to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of fusion power because any serious conversation will always be trampling on people's dreams.
Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.
Do you remember ten years ago when nobody had heard of mRNA or CRISPR? Or fifteen years ago when neural networks were a dead end and SVM were all the rage?
I'm not saying fusion is the "best thing" or have any insight as to where it might be in the curve of adoption, but it feels weird to be making a race out of fusion with these other technologies.