#99 News Media Report Year-Old Fusion Breakthrough, Milestone, Step Forward, Etc., Etc.

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By Steven B. Krivit
Jan. 26, 2022

Some of the 192 lasers in the U.S. National Ignition Facility (Photo: S. Krivit)

Today, media organizations like Reuters reported “Researchers Achieve Milestone on Path Toward Nuclear Fusion Energy.”

That’s because the journal Nature published year-old results from laser fusion experiments performed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California.

In the experiments reported in the paper, researchers reported a fusion energy yield of 0.17 megajoules.

Omar A. Hurricane, the chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at the lab, explained to New Energy Times that these experiments took place between November 2020 and February 2021.

The fusion energy yield from those experiments was eight times lower than the yield achieved later, in August 2021. That’s when the lab announced, in a press release, that it had performed an experiment on Aug. 8, 2021, that achieved a yield of 1.3 megajoules.

As we reported last August, the NIF device consumed 400 megajoules of energy and produced 1.3 megajoules.

Overlooking the input energy consumed, Reuters implied that the experiments produced a useful but small amount of energy: “The energy produced was modest — about the equivalent of nine nine-volt batteries of the kind that power smoke detectors and other small devices.”

These experiments lost 99.7 percent of the energy that the overall system consumed. They lasted for only a billionth of second. Nevertheless, that didn’t keep most of the news media from reporting that this older, less-powerful result was a “record-breaking” “milestone,” a “breakthrough” and a “step toward practical nuclear fusion.”