My take: fusion "breakthrough" a total dud

What country of the world could be trusted to run such a powerful program? I can't think of any I would trust and international organizations are even worse. I se wouldn't trust the U.S. Dep't of Energy we have now unless I wanted the planet turned into a black hole.

Sure, not se

They sure named that web page right. The Wright Brothers did not invent an F35. They invented a slow, clunky box kite with a motor and proved the idea could work. Others followed and improved, and just over a hundred years later we fly regularly at mach speeds and even go into space. Does that mean the Wrights were a big fat nothingburger? This guy would have said so.

This is apsyop distraction to continue $5-6/gal gas and diesel prices. No such thing as free energy.

Well, if our Secretary of Energy - an accomplished nuclear physicist and former governor of Michigan - considers this to be "one of the most impressive scientific feats" then who are we to question what we're witnessing?

Two things can be false at the same time. Was this a massive breakthrough, a demonstration of a fusion reaction generating more power than it consumed, and proof that fusion power is right around the corner? No on all counts (the "produced more power than input" figure ignored all power costs except the lasers, and it likely doesn't account for loss converting from heat to electricity). Was it a meaningless dud? Also no. Two things can be true at the same time. Was this a stepping stone towards potential fusion power? Yes. Was it wildly overblown by some combination of scientists hoping to milk public sentiment for grant money and "journalists" either two ignorant or too dishonest to accurately report the event? Also yes. In the end, this was a milestone lots of scientists have been hoping to reach for decades, but it's still just one milestone on a course with many miles to go.

I'm waiting a couple years before I believe it's even true or meaningful. I've seen this claim in the past and it's always been disproven in followup studies.

Turn it over to Elon. He will get it done.

What we have here are scientists and engineers at play—on our dime. At least they aren’t worried about pronouns.

While I understand the need to drive funding for fusion, this lie is no help. I too thought that their claim was bogus. But then, we live in a time of redefining success when the outcome does not fulfill the hypothesis. Vaccines are now whatever the government approves to be injected into our bodies. So long as science goal posts are moved to favor failure, then science no longer exists.

The hype in the fusion story is a bit much but this is still a tremendous breakthrough. Fusion is an enourmous problem with even more enourmous potential. The process of solving this type of scientific problem is unbelievably complicated. It requires huge resources and great amounts of time, and 99% of all that time and effort will go into dead ends and false hopes. The general public really doesn't understand this, because projects such as this only pop into the public aye when something really significant (or really fraudulent, and very few of us are really equipped to know which s which) occurs, then they disappear sometimes for years. the real breakthroughs then happen in a stunningly short time giving laymen the impression that the mythical Aha moment drives science. It does but that Aha comes from years of groundwork. One of the most frustrating parts of my carrer as a research chemist was how unbelievably obvious those aha moments were in retrospect. It is amazing how invisible some solutions are, and also incomprehensible how much prep work and failure goes into finding them. This is a big deal, a HUGE deal, just not the big deal the press and politicians are trying to portray it as.

Fusion as a power source is at least many decades, more likely a century or more, in the future. At the rate that the WEF is moving us to live in the dystopia of the Hunger Games movies, there will never be the interest or intellectual effort to complete the development of practical fusion power. IMO, the odds that we are about to enter another period much like that at the end of the Roman empire, when we went from the glorious capabilities of Rome....under-floor heat in magnificent villas, travel to far corners of the earth, goods from everywhere shipped to Rome, and huge buildings like the Pantheon, still magnificent after 2000 years, could be made. And by 200 years later.....Europe lived mostly in freezing hovels, and kings lived in damp, dank, drafty stone castles and "mansions" with a few fireplaces, while the general populace lived in thatched shacks, rarely bathed and were on the edge of starvation for the next 1000 years. The New Dark Ages seems to be the most likely future, given that a large portion of Americans under 25 are nearly illiterate, unbelievably lazy and looking for a steady supply of drugs and free money.