[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Plans for a “gain” experiment (more energy out than in) are advancing at pace.

So the headline is very precise: they achieved fusion, but not power production using fusion. And as far as I can tell, achieving fusion is not the hard part.

[SimplyUnknown]

As far as I can tell, the newsworthy part is that they achieve fusion using their "two-phase" which is supposedly different than conventional tokamaks such as ITER uses. I'm not sure how either of those technologies exactly work, but the article seems to suggest this is a cheaper way to build a fusion reactor. Then again, this is a press piece, so not exactly unbiased.

[mannykannot]

Devices like tokamaks use powerful electromagnets to compress a plasma. An alternative uses very powerful lasers to explosively vaporize and compress a pellet of fuel. In comparison, this uses the steampunk-esque method of firing a pellet of fuel into a target with a "hypervelocity gas gun".

This is just a press release, but an unusually informative one. For more information on what they have and have not done, see here: https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122

(Link from apendleton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923527)

They have good evidence of deuterium-deuterium fusion. IIRC this is harder to achieve than deuterium-tritium fusion, but as tritium is radioactive with a half-life of ~12 years, it is much harder to acquire and work with. In their concept of a power reactor, they would apparently use the deuterium-tritium reaction, which with the latter being created by bombarding a lithium blanket with the neutrons produced by the reaction, something that is envisaged in most other fusion power concepts.

[SimplyUnknown]

Thanks for the short explanation. That clears things up, and you make the First Light approach sound very cool.

[ILMostro7]

You had me at steampunk