Phat writes:
An eventual breakthrough leading to cheap and abundant energy could be a game-changer.
As the old saying goes, fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be.
The experiment in question had ~2 megajoules of laser light in and ~3 megajoules of fusion energy out. That's a yield of about 300 watts, or enough to run your computer for an hour or 2.
Of course, there is a huge BUT . . .
While they got more fusion energy out than laser light in, what they didn't say as loudly is that it took 300 megajoules of electricity to make the 2 megajoules of laser light. So their actual total yield was just 1%. Not as exciting.
The other less major BUTS are that they used tritium, which is really expensive and hard to come by, and the fuel pellet takes a lot of work to get to the right shape (almost perfectly spherical). As it sits right now, this is not a process that can be repeated 10's or even 100's times a second, more like twice a day.
Even if they arrived at a high enough energy output, it is highly doubtful that it will be affordable for decades after that. Of course, if they don't try then we will never have affordable fusion power, so I commend them for slogging away at it.
In the short to medium-long term, fission is the fuel source we should be pursuing, IMHO.