Ha, this is not a 'breakthrough'. They've been slogging away for a long time, and finally get a little surplus heat. Of course, they are putting in very high-grade energy, and getting out a luke-warm bathtub, but that's for another day.
I wrote my series on fusion, knowing that this was coming soon. They are using the 'bomb' method, while China and Europe are using the mini-sun method. Russia is just killing people.
The point of my articles was that there are real 'breakthroughs' needed, and this can't happen in an 'incremental' world. Nobody will cast a risky hypothesis, and it is best to not even think about it. Obviously, they have got the hydrogen atoms to 'pop'. However, they are not counting neutrons, so we don't know how many.
I proposed the hypothesis that both the bomb and sun methods cannot scale. In the bomb method, just a few atoms need to pop to get positive heat, but those first few blow it for all the other guys. If you scale the output by throwing in more hydrogen, and more explosions, then it is still the same. You are always going to get the tail of the probability curve - some atoms just wanna dance.
I just can't think of how the bomb method can make it to a commercial reactor. Do you have bigger bombs? Do you do more a lot faster? All I'm thinking about are the vibrations tearing the whole thing apart. We have to wait for them to scale, but I think they will have constant output no matter what. The same goes for the sun method.
ps. turns out there are questions about their energy accounting. It might be rather hopeful, but it looks like they are out by a factor of 100. I would hope for more direct neutron counting. Don't put any money into it!
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