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Scientists Are Now 43 Seconds Closer to Producing Limitless Energy
(www.popularmechanics.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Almost certainly, the pop press is missing every possible "but". Just from what I do understand, how impressive this is depends on the temperature and density of that plasma and annoyingly, they actually do mention that, but then don't give the corresponding numbers.
I found a bunch of headlines saying the record for a tokamak is 22 minutes, which was impressive for beating the previous record by 25%. Progress in this tends to be incremental. Here's a nice little graph of energy*confinement time from The Future of Fusion Energy:
Thank you for the informative and thoughtful comment. I appreciate it.
Hey, no problem!
This isn't to say that the research isn't great, either. I don't think they'd bother if it was useless. And per the diagram they've had to do more and more with less funding since 2000.