Nuclear fusion, the "holy grail" that would finally end all the world's energy problems, has been receding into the future at the rate of about one year per year all my adult life -- it was always "about 30 years away" -- but suddenly we're catching up. Unfortunately, the change of pace comes too late to save us from an acute global climate emergency.
The good news came on Tuesday from the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. They have finally achieved "ignition": that is, they have managed to get more energy OUT of fusing hydrogen molecules together to make helium than they had to put IN to make the fusion happen.
Theoretically, that reaction should release a huge amount of energy from a relatively tiny amount of hydrogen. That's the whole reason for working on the problem, and the physics works just fine. But it's the engineering problem from Hell, and in more than 50 years of experiments they've always had to put more energy IN than they got OUT.
