>>1284485
Oh cool a science story. But you forgot to paste the rest of the article.
>Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which stars burn — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, so-called main-sequence stars convert matter into light and heat, generating enormous amounts of energy without producing greenhouse gases or long-lasting radioactive waste.

>But replicating the conditions found inside the hearts of stars is no simple task. The most common design for fusion reactors — the tokamak — works by superheating plasma (one of the four states of matter, consisting of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons) and trapping it inside a donut-shaped reactor chamber with powerful magnetic fields.

>Keeping the turbulent and superheated coils of plasma in place long enough for nuclear fusion to happen, however, has been a painstaking process. Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has ever managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in.

>One of the main stumbling blocks has been how to handle a plasma that's hot enough to fuse. Fusion reactors require very high temperatures — many times hotter than the sun — because they have to operate at much lower pressures than where fusion naturally takes place inside the cores of stars. The core of the actual sun, for example, reaches temperatures of around 27 million F (15 million C) but has pressures roughly equal to 340 billion times the air pressure at sea level on Earth.

>Cooking plasma to these temperatures is the relatively easy part, but finding a way to corral it so that it doesn't burn through the reactor without also ruining the fusion process is technically tricky. This is usually done either with lasers or magnetic fields.

>To extend their plasma's burning time from the previous record-breaking run, the scientists tweaked aspects of their reactor's design, including replacing carbon with tungsten to improve the efficiency of the tokamak’s "divertors," which extract heat and ash from the reactor.

>"Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation enabled us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR records in a short period," Si-Woo Yoon, the director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.

>KSTAR scientists are aiming to push the reactor to sustain temperatures of 180 million F for 300 seconds by 2026.

>The record joins others made by competing fusion reactors around the world, including one by the U.S. government-funded National Ignition Facility (NIF), which sparked headlines after the reactor core briefly put out more energy than was put into it.

Not that I don't think this is cool, but I wonder how large of a net energy loss it produced

>>1284495
the specific event? none. huge energy surplus by definition of the physics.

but if youre talking about all the infrastructure to get to this point, then, yeah, sure, a lot. R&D what do you want?

>>1284516
>huge energy surplus by definition of the physics.
>By definition of the physics
Brainlet, you sound like a retard
Are you just guessing? It doesn't say that In the article, and I'm sure they would have mentioned it had that been the case.

You realize fusion isn't guaranteed energy gain, right? It's like any other physical process and efficiencies are a real thing

The last I heard was the only process that generates energy gain is using lasers and the superheated plasma/magnetic process like this could sustain fusion for longer but was extremely in inefficient use of energy and often resulted in large net energy loss

Oh wait, you are a retard, you retard, read this from the article:
>Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has ever managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in.
That's technically wrong, a laser style one generated a net gain a couple years ago, but these tokamaks are very inefficient

>>1284536
Ignition at the NIF has been defined in a few different ways over the last couple of years. The first claimed ignition shot was dubbed "scientific ignition", and defined as more energy released in the form of fusion neutrons than laser energy coupled to the DT (deuterium-tritium)fuel capsule. They have since repeated this and improved it such that they have claimed another type of ignition, that in which the energy released in the form of fusion neutrons is greater than the total laser energy.
Neither of these metrics of energy input are the total electrical energy input to produce the laser pulse.
Currently, they are using ~400 MJ of energy to put ~2 MJ of energy into the target, and yielding ~4 MJ from the fusion.
Of course, since we're talking about the NIF here, there are energy losses from the laser interacting with the hohlraum to produce the x-ray bath that compresses the DT target, and there are people who think that using the lasers to directly compress the target is a more feasible strategy for an ICF power plant. Direct drive has some upsides and some downsides, like any decision you make.
Either way, it's exciting to see both ICF and MCF making significant strides in terms of research into their basic challenges. Controlling plasma instabilities is an absolute bitch. Hopefully people crack the egg on room temperature superconductors (real ones, not those shilled by the fraud Ranga Dias or those retarded South Koreans with their LK99). That would be a real game changer.