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This is a really great achievement for a fusion reactor, and actually is a breakthrough that makes me think that it might be on its way to serious commercialization.

Unfortunately, a lot of other fusion news is not similarly fundamental, though, so it can get tiring to see "we made a few extra watts but the reactor still went unstable."

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A lot of research into plasma confinement is completely empirical. No theory at all. The scientists try new settings, see how they work, and draw a line on a graph extrapolating from them to higher power settings. That's why you need all these small experiments, which have no hope of generating net energy: because you're trying to solve plasma confinement by tinkering, without much of a map to guide you.

Confined plasmas have complex behaviors that are really, really hard to model computationally. Experimentation definitely beats computation in this field.

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