“US Researchers Achieve Breakthroughs in Positive Energy Nuclear Fusion” – IT Pro – News

A breakthrough doesn’t mean we’ll have a production reactor tomorrow, it just means a milestone has been reached. With where the technology is now, without going into details, the practical usability is still the same, 0.0.

Why is it considered such an important landmark? Because for the first time more energy comes out than it goes in. In practice, there was still very little to use, but that’s a completely different milestone. What is important about this landmark is that it has been shown that on Earth without the enormous gravity of the Sun (which you have to offset left or right) additional energy can still be extracted. Until now this was expected in theory, and this has now also been proven.

This in turn means that the spigots of money are being opened more and the development process is accelerating.

If you compare it with a process that is being developed by the company where I work
An enormous amount of time and energy is spent discovering a new process and getting people to look into it. The money faucet is tightly closed.
– Once the research starts, you get very limited resources, first you have to prove that the idea is something. The money spout drips a little.
– When you have the first lab results, the academic world advances, and the research phase accelerates. Click the money flow.
– You then create an experimental/proof-of-concept installation (which now contains nuclear fusion) to further improve the process with a view to a production installation. Money faucet gives a drop.
– Then you are building your first production install as you will still run into many issues and unexpected shutdowns. This stage will cost much more than proof of concept, but in fact you are no longer developing technology here, but proving how profitable it is. The money faucet gives a ray.
– If the previous move showed profitable = spewing money out at max pressure.

From a scientific point of view, you might want to see it backwards, that the money spigot is fully open from the start, but that is simply the economic reality.