It’s sparking fire in a very specific synthetic scenario which maybe could be useful in making a specific type of fusion reactor.
It’s a critical step, yes, in development of that type of reactor, if we wanted to do so. Currently there is no reason to believe we’d find it worthwhile to do.
But there are literally hundreds more steps just as critical with no known solution, that are likely just as hard before we could actually have net positive energy even in a lab for such a reactor. Even if we found the economics would pan out.
That’s why I’m saying it’s a small step and we’ve got miles to go - because we do.
You’re pointing out some of the next small steps.
But those won’t get us to even having the energy balance positive on paper.
making lasers 100x more efficient for one being a notably hard problem, from a physics perspective. Probably even harder than IC fusion. The planned upgrades to lasers will help, but not enough to be close to a positive energy balance.
If the ‘first 90% takes 90% of the time’, we’re now at 2% of that first 90%. But everyone is hyping it up as we just completed it. Which is not true at all.
Honestly, it sounds like a Hail Mary funding push to try to get a new project funded or stop the lab from being shut down.
You want to use lasers to initiate some fusion, you can do that using a tabletop laser lab (although magnetic confinement and big voltages is much simpler).
So this is the first machine where we're sure: it wasn't fusion caused by lasers, it was fusion caused by neutron pressure! Where did that neutron pressure come from? From other atoms fusing!
Note also that the sun does NOT do this. Fusion inside the sun is powered by falling atoms converting their falling energy first into heat then into singular fusion events, which essentially explode and throw a lot of atoms back up. Then the cycle begins again. Fusion inside the sun is a self-limiting reaction, which is why stars don't just blow up once, but "burn" over a long time. All the fusion inside the sun really does is slow down gravity for a little bit, then immediately stop. Gravity is producing the heat from the sun.
The reaction is initiated by the lasers.
You can’t actually use a hammer to initiate it at any useful scale because hammers can’t create the appropriate pressures and temperatures to initiate the process at the scale needed to produce a useful energy output. Which is why the lasers.
So no, the lasers are not immaterial at all.
No one needs to talk about delaying solar deployment, obviously that would be stupid. No one should be arguing for that, I certainly am not, and trying to do this whole thing where we attack genuine advances just because they aren’t the thing we prefer is super counterproductive to progress. Shameful to do that, no matter how common it is on social media.
This was built as a machine to test fusion, not to generate electricity. It did that, and doing so is a significant advance.