Really? I never heard of that. Got any pointers to information?
The National Ignition Facility is part of LLNL – they managed to get a fusion explosion out of a fuel pellet, using a huge laser array, and they say the energy output from the event was twice the net energy input.
All thermonuclear energy projects will use non-fission initiation. The only fission-initiated fusion devices are weapons. (And, by a neat trick of symmetry, all thermonuclear weapons are fission-initiated.)
Oh, that. Sure. What they carefully avoid mentioning is the total amount of energy the whole apparatus consumed.
We are still many orders of magnitude away from an actual fusion power plant.
Even if they truly got a net gain of energy there’s the scaling up factor. What works in the lab does not necessarily work when large enough to make a difference.
True, though in the case of fusion, I think it’s more likely to be the reverse: That you can’t get net positive at a small laboratory scale, only when it’s huge.