That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternative approaches to fusion) or this weird "we were able to beam particles through a wormhole" story some months ago, make me very skeptic about the current startup economy.
It all reminds me so much of the movie "Don't look up".
NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1% efficient. Equivalent lasers today are over 20% efficient, so their results were not as bad as many articles made out. They're still off by a factor of five, but also they got a 230% jump in output by increasing the laser power only 8%.
How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?
> Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space.
You're doing the opposite, taking credit away from people who've actually succeeded at scale. I don't like Twitter guy at all, but even I can give credit to Tesla and SpaceX for becoming commercially successful with fundamentally new ideas (electric cars, reusable rockets). That's a massive achievement.
Even Helion, the company this thread is about - they'd be nothing if they didn't actually operate a commercial power plant outputting 50MW at some point. If they fail despite trying everything and someone else does it years later are you going to be on that thread saying "yeah, commercialising fusion is no big deal, Helion had a prototype going years ago"? No you wouldn't, because it's actually a massive deal if someone could do that.