# Breakthrough in Fusion



## Bwv 1080 (Dec 31, 2018)

And it remains 30 years away. Important advance but what gets lost in the headlines is the real energy conversion ratio was about 0.5% - so a long way from a viable power source



> Although positive news, this result is still a long way from the actual energy gain required for the production of electricity. That’s because they had to use 500 MJ of energy into the lasers to deliver 1.8 MJ to the target – so even though they got 2.5 MJ out, it’s still far less than the energy they needed for the lasers in the first place. In other words, the energy output (largely heat energy) was still only 0.5% of the input. An engineering target for fusion would be to recover much of the energy used in the process and get an energy gain of double the energy that went into the lasers – it needs to be double because the heat must be converted to electricity and you lose energy that way.
> 
> “Therefore we can say that this result from NIF is a success of the science – but still a long way from providing useful, abundant, clean energy.”







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expert reaction to reports of advance in nuclear fusion from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | Science Media Centre






www.sciencemediacentre.org


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

Workable fusion is ALWAYS "just forty years away"... has been since the 1960s. But tomorrow's announcement is still a big deal because it's FUSION rather than fission. Even though good safe workable fission reactors exist and could be online in a matter of a couple of years:

Triga
tokamak
Dynomak


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