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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

What about this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333346-ignition-confir...

Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?

Because now it’s reproducible, controllable and consistently net positive in terms of energy output.

It’s not a fluke anymore and I assume the engineering behind this is now understood well enough to develop it further and scale it up.

Fusion for the most part isn’t a physics problem it’s an engineering problem the difficulty was always in how to implement it in the real world rather than in math at ideal white paper conditions.

What information available to the public suggests this is reproducible and consistent? They do hundreds of shots every year. Why do we think that this energetic shot wasn't just a result of getting luckier this time than they did a few years ago?

Because they’ve been able to do it multiple times, which is better than the zero or one times before.

Curious where you found this? I skimmed the press release for a minute and didn't immediately see discussion of the repeatability.

This was the second time. The energy out/in ratio was higher this time, hence the claim of better scaling.

Because the press release stated that they’ve ramped up the reaction and got higher energy output and the scaling wasn’t linear in a good way.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7

> In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition, but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the following months fell short.

Fluke or measurement error, it seems.

A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it?

If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?

The hype machine is fully engaged, and may lead to an influx of budget, something of deadly seriousness to DoE. They have had trouble getting funding increases for this kind of weapons work when it was represented as weapons work. Pretend it's not, and people fall all over themselves to praise it.

But it is weapons work, first, last, and always.

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