YES! It’s a click-bait title. Read the article to understand the breakthrough.
Every minute that passes in Africa, scientists are 60 seconds closer to discovering infinite energy!
Almost certainly, the pop press is missing every possible “but”. Just from what I do understand, how impressive this is depends on the temperature and density of that plasma and annoyingly, they actually do mention that, but then don’t give the corresponding numbers.
I found a bunch of headlines saying the record for a tokamak is 22 minutes, which was impressive for beating the previous record by 25%. Progress in this tends to be incremental. Here’s a nice little graph of energy*confinement time from The Future of Fusion Energy:
Thank you for the informative and thoughtful comment. I appreciate it.
Hey, no problem!
This isn’t to say that the research isn’t great, either. I don’t think they’d bother if it was useless. And per the diagram they’ve had to do more and more with less funding since 2000.
Limitless free energy that billionaires will gladly charge you $250 a month for
Sounds like fusion power is only 20 years away.
I’m already getting limitless energy from fusion. I just use PV as a mediator.
Cool to see that progress is being made, though we’re still several decades and many unsolved problems away from fusion as a viable power source. It does seem silly to focus so much on performing fusion here on Earth when we could just be collecting the energy from the Sun.
The sun is great and all, but it keeps insisting on dropping behind the earth or the clouds at awkward moments.
I’m still hopeful for the triton stuff. The idea of harnessing the em from pulses of fusion is very clever… The engineering problems are extreme, but if they can make it work it’d be something special
