Researchers were able to produce 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules used to power the experiment.
Now we must wait to see if this is an aberration and can be done at scale. I'm ready for the world to change :party-parrot-science:
Government workers got the goods, fuck you capitalism, great 'innovation' you have :fidel-salute:
The US energy sector is a for-profit enterprise and they'll do whatever gets them the most money. They don't build fision power plants because the capital costs are so huge that, by the time it pays itself off, they could've used the profits of an oil-based plant to build another oil based plant, and the CEO in charge when the project started has retired.
The capital startup costs of a tokomak-style fusion reactor are almost certain to be even higher than those for a fission power plant, so even though it's a great technology, it's still dead in the water under the capitalist system.
But this is apparently inertial confinement fusion, which everybody said has no chance of getting there first, so I have no fucking clue what the economics of that are.