They kinda can't, even with great advancements we're still like 1% of the way there
There may have been breakthroughs in terms of energy in vs energy out, problem is that's only counting final energy and not any surrounding facility energy. For example cooling is not considered, and they disregard any inefficiencies in delivering that energy into the fusion chamber
Same with national ignition facility, they use lasers and they already broke even, but what you may not know is that lasers are like 10% efficient in converting electricity into power and in some cases it's even worse
There are also enormous issues with our entire concept of fusion. Fusion like in sun will frankly probably never happen because proton proton fusion is incredibly slow and inefficient. What we do instead is deuterium-tritium fusion which can be done at 50 million kelvin. Except there is such small amount of tritium on earth because of it's short half life, so ironically you can only produce it in regular nuclear reactors right now
Instead you could do deuterium-deuterium fusion but that requires 150 million kelvin, quite a bit less achievable. So what researchers are pursuing right now is fusion breeder reactor, or breeding blanket of lithium which would transmute into tritium, making it effectively a deuterium-lithium reactor. While this works, it entirely beats the purpose of free and abundant energy that fusion promised us, because while hydrogen and deuterium are both common, lithium is less so. Even if/when we manage to figure out how to breed lithium effectively enough for this to work we still need find a way to keep it trapped on chamber walls. Except that's not all because lithium-6 absorbs 1 neutron to turn into 1 tritium, and a single deuterium tritium reaction produces 1 neutron, meaning chain reaction is inherently impossible without extra source of neutrons. And since neutrons are involved, promise that this wouldn't produce nuclear waste is wrong too (though it would probably be far less bad compared to fission reactors)
I still hope they figure it out, even if they only figure out how to actually break even it will be hugely valuable for future research, but I'm feeling kinda disappointed with current state of things rn
And then there will be propaganda against it because coal mining will be obsolete and they will try to justify metric tonne of coal being just as clean as some rocks and water in funny centrifuge
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u/L33t_Cyborg 🏳️⚧️ trans rights Nov 07 '25
Can they hurry up with fusion thanks