Cool science nerd alert...
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (part of the Dept. of Energy) have, for the first time, conducted a thermonuclear hydrogen fusion experiment in which the energy generated from a fusion reaction exceeded the energy put into the reaction, as per the two links below. This is a huge advance in hydrogen fusion science, something I've been following closely since doing a term paper on it as a senior in HS way back in 1980, lol, but we're still likely decades away from any practical use of fusion for producing clean (non-radioactive with no greenhouse gases produced, starting from simple seawater as the H2 source) energy at commercial scale for power plants for several reasons. Still, it's really impressive work and a huge milestone towards truly clean, unlimited energy someday.
https://www.nytimes.com/.../nuclear-fusion-energy...
https://www.sciencenews.org/.../nuclear-fusion...
So, let's get to the caveats. First, the large amount of energy required to create the large amount of energy put into the reaction is not "counted" in the comparison, so even more energy needs to be created by the fusion reaction at any commercial scale. Second, this reaction requires football field sized laser array to bombard the pellets of hydrogen "fuel" to heat them to millions of degrees F to initiate the fusion reaction, which is highly impractical for any commercial facility. And third, this fusion reaction lasted far less than one second, so obviously, scientists and engineers will need to find a way to sustain such fusion reactions in a controlled, safe manner to extract the energy liberated from the reactions in order to convert that energy (heat) for use in power plants, which could provide limitless clean power for all.
As an aside, for those curious, thermonuclear fusion mimicks the sun, where hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium atoms, liberating incredible heat/light/energy, given that the mass of the helium products are slightly less than the mass of the hydrogen reactants, such that, as per Einstein's E=mc2, mass is being converted into energy - the one big difference is that the sun uses its immense gravity to drive fusion (which cannot be duplicated on Earth), while fusion experiments use immense amounts of energy to drive the fusion reaction (lasers in this case vs. other facilities, which use heat combined with magnetic capture of charged particles in tokamak reactors).
www.latimes.com
