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US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Still used orders of magnitude more energy to perform the experiment than the experiment output - plus they have no way to harvest that energy, and they're mainly a nuclear weapon research facility. I guess the publicity for fusion power is good.
*Edit: OK, so this article is missing a bunch of vital context. Here's a better one: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/physicists-achieve-fusion-net-energy-gain-for-second-time/
The key words are "delivered to the target". They use WAY, way more power than they deliver to the target, so if you take the energy generated divided by the total energy used, the number is WAY, way below 1. Probably a fair bit below 0.1 too.
The laser energy. All the energy to make the situation happen is significantly higher. It's sneaky.
That's pure laser energy, not whole system energy. Yeah, they got a slight gain from the fusion output, but nowhere near what the whole experiment used.