Apparently Lawrence Livermore Labs have made a nuclear fusion reaction in a can that produced more power than it took to light it off. Hurray the future is nigh with no carbon emissions!
There are several things that are great about nuclear fusion of this type. The fuel is basically water. Specifically a type of water that has heavy hydrogen. They call it heavy water. The hydrogen has extra bits in it that make it more likely to fuse into Helium in the right conditions. They call it deuterium and tritium. And it is that fusion that makes the power as well as makes hydrogen bombs blow up.
They are trying to make tiny controllable hydrogen bombs.
Heavy water occurs naturally though rarely in large bodies of water like big lakes and the ocean. The heavy water can be separated out using a lot of energy to refine it. As the oceans are big there is plenty to use and therefore the promise is effectively unlimited fusion power for us to run our Teslas and mine bitcoin.
The first big hurdle is getting the reaction to produce more energy than it takes to make it go. This is the thing they say has happened.
There are two main methods being looked at. One is a thing called a TOKAMAK. It is a big doughnut shaped tank that uses magnetic fields to confine a super hot plasma in a ring and squeeze it hard enough to make the weird hydrogen fuse. They take enormous power to create the magnetic fields and to heat the plasma hotter than the core of the sun.
The second is called inertial confinement where they shoot huge laser beams at a small container of weird hydrogen to blast it to super hot temperatures and the surface explosions on the container squeeze the contents to achieve the same idea. They need very high pressure and temperature to make the thing work.
Both methods take huge power.
It is sort of like trying to set a thing on fire that does not want to burn unless you use a very powerful torch to light it. If that torch takes more energy than you get from burning the thing it kinda makes no sense. The hope is that the thing will will eventually make lots more power and we just aint there yet.
I said that was the first hurdle. Also the hieght of the hurdle is debated. The lower hurdle is making a reaction that puts out more energy than the system put in. That is the kilowatts of the lasers and the magnetic fields. (Actually megaWatts in some cases). It takes power to make all the things just turn on to make the shot. Lots of that. If you include that the hurdle is much higher. But lets not get negative here.
But honestly they are talking about the lower hurdle.
There are further problems. The next one is how to harvest the energy from the reaction? Plasma is millions of degrees. No material can survive those temperatures. They have to get the heat out and make steam or something. That is not trivial at all. The one after that is how to make the reaction repeat or even be continuous. Right now it takes hours or days or weeks to prepare a shot that lasts milliseconds. To fuel the future you need it to happen constantly.
They have been working on this for over 60 years. I do not expect any fusion power plants to come on line in the next 40 years. It is possible, but there is so much more to do if it is even practical at all. Possible and practical are different things.
Well before that date we are supposed to all get electric cars which all by themselves will need the electrical grid to be 384% bigger with non-fossil fuel sources. Those are not going to be fusion plants apparently.
So really the news is not that good.
Better to figure out how to suck CO2 out of the air and keep it out. Probably less expensive. One thing that works is growing stuff. Small sea creatures are good for that. The Rocky mountains in Canada are limestone. Those are the fused bodies of tiny sea creatures that are from calcium carbonate which came from CO2 in the air. Mountains out of air. Think about that.
