Of all your graphics, not sure what the point of this one is. 😂 The others have a more of a narrative component to them (crime reduction, for instance). Is there something noteworthy about producing cherries? Chile is the top copper producer in the world.

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They have not even remotely achieved that.

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1602907470133100547

Its only a net positive if u dont include 99% of the energy.

Turkey's rise to producing more than double the next highest producer seems more impressive.

They'll never catch Kazakhstan on potassium!!!

/s? We hit 150% return for fairly instantaneous reactions now. We generally are expecting to do fusion sort of like a combustion engine with many short burst of on and off. If we can get a few seconds of sustainable reactions we looking at many orders of magnitude returns.

We broke even last year, it was pretty big news and all this fusion post is in response from latest break through.

Imagine having this much money to spend and buying Twitter instead

We did it barely at the end of last year and earlier this week we hit 150% return 2MJ in 3MJ out.

Yeah but with unlimited energy we can just turn air into biofuels directly skipping the plant part if we just brute force it

I fully support continual use and future investment increases into new fission reactors. But having an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude is laughable when you have Chernobyl, Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island staring you in the face. And don't pretend it's just digging a hole for disposal. Simply transporting spent fuel is an immense cost

This chart is incredibly flawed. As someone mentioned, security arrangements vary in scope or scale - the Rio Treaty is defunct, and countries can be allies irrespective of formal security arrangements. For example, it strains belief to imagine that the US would treat an invasion of Austria or Ireland the same way it would treat one in the DRC or Sudan. Pakistan may b a 'Major Non-NATO Ally', but it's closer to China these days than the US.

I sort of expect it to be a tech governments will openly steal and sell back on the cheap to competition if anyone tried to truly do that but is unable to roll it out.

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Venezuela? Really? As an ally of the US?

That 300 MJ was to start the reaction, you don't need to continually pump in 300 MJ. Scaling this up by like 1000x and you surpass that one time input. And the scale would likely need to be far higher for commercialization.

Nobody is saying we're there yet, but to deny how remarkable this breakthrough is, is pretty short sighted. It doesn't mean we decommission any existing fission reactors or even stop planning their construction. It does mean that if $38 billion can produce a net positive (and yes this proved net positive by all practical definitions) reaction, any government subsidies or research into hydrocarbon derived fuel needs to be phased out. That's $20 billion annually for oil alone in the US. God knows how much towards corn for ethanol. This announcement justifies a substantial amount of that phased out and put towards fusion.

Better said than I said it. I just went for the snarky comment

Ya OP didn't word that well. IIRC the laser put around 2MJ on target and the resulting fusion yield about 3MJ, so if NIFs laser was more efficient than what OP said would be accurate. But in actuality it took the NIF laser something like 200-300MJ for that shot. But when you consider that NIF is getting relatively old and that it's a research center so efficency wasn't at the forefront of design it's not unreasonable to see where this could hopefully lead.

If it ever works then it will be the greatest investment ever but if not then just another government waste of my money

The Manhattan project did not cost anywhere near 3 trillion dollars, which would've been far, far larger than the entire world economy at the time, let alone the United States. The figure is closer to 2 billion with a B, or over 20 billion in today's dollars, which is actually backed up in the link.

This is a terrible visualization. It’s not at all clear what either chart is supposed to be. The y axes are out of scale. The title is misleading.

Yeah, but they used 300MJ to produce those 3MJ. This whole calculation is just a joke. And the containment method worked.. for a trillionth of a second. IRL the expectation is to contain for 60 years with less than 1 in a million chance of failure.

No one has ever achieved a fusion reaction (in a reactor not a bomb) that produced net positive energy. I dont understand why we are investing in this when we can do fission right now. Most nuclear waste can be used by different reactor types to recycle it. The very small amount left over that can be stored by digging a fucking hole.

Think of the human and economic impact of those highways over that period.

Spending even 1% of that on a speculative research project is pretty good.

So that's how they got a fusion reactor in the basement.

"Hey can I have $35 billion, it's like no money?"

j/k I get what you mean, if we can solve clean, cheap, on demand energy this will seem like a pittance.