Fusion ignition news: Big deal, yet net energy gain doesn’t mean net power gain

The biggest news of the day — we got fusion ignition in the lab. OMG. It’s a major breakthrough, although it doesn’t nearly mean we are guaranteed to have fusion power plants in 10 years.

They’ve got more energy from the reaction (3.15 megajoules) than the energy of the light to ignite the reaction (2.05 megajoules). However, the lasers used to convert electricity into photons work with about 1% efficiency, and the actual power used for the experiment was in hundreds of megajoules.

Anyhow, I am excited, and I can only imagine how excited my grandpa, Viktor Ivanovych Soroka, who was a professor in Kyiv Institute for Nuclear Research would’ve been! :)

If you’re interested in this space — check out a company called Helion — it’s a YC-backed team who uses a completely different approach to fusion, and it seems they have a good shot at making commercially available reactors within 5–10 years.