I wish people would stop referring to a fusion reactor as "the heart of a star". The heart of s star has a pretty low power density, more comparable to what a person generates per cubic meter. What fusion engineers are trying to achieve has a power density that is orders of magnitude higher than what a star has.

Do you think the board will make it as hard for the CEO to leave as it is for customers to leave Adobe products? In the end I just cancelled my card....

Fusion energy is still an unknown number of years away - and the proof that it is economically feasible is even further. However, this type of advancement gets us closer to running a reactor in a domain where we can at least start working on the considerable materials challenges that need resolving.

I never thought that the A38 just south of Bristol would be described thus: "The A38 is a major A-class busy road, connecting South West England with the Midlands and the north." :) It is not a major road but more like a country lane and nobody in their right mind would use the A38 to travel from SW to the Midlands unless opting for the scenic route!

Clearly nobody is giving up. But we will soon have been working on this for 100 years with no real engineering solution in sight. Dreaming up uses for free energy (and by the way fusion is unlikely to be cheap or clean) does not help. A number of very large hurdles are still unresolved in principle and conveniently ignored by this type of reporting.

This article creatively plays with the definition of "net gain". The actual power required to deposit the 2.1MJ to generate the 2.5MJ was more like 200MJ when you take the machinery into account. This inertial fusion project is employing the same misinformation the Tokamak people are. This is not to say that this is not interesting science, but let's keep the numbers fair.

That's right. Just maintaining a plasma for 17 minutes at temperature says nothing about the number of T-D fusion events going on inside the machine which is probably very low or the machine would have been trashed. This is valuable science but doesn't really solve the bigger issues this project is facing and it is certainly too far from a solution for world energy to even be thinking about this or making predicitions. In the 1980's we were 50 years away - we still are today and in fact one could argue we are further behind as tritium availability is becoming a real issue.