As a fellow scientist, I will go and read the details from the research paper that the group published [1]. Anything else is nonsense for me. it gives a clear view on the goals, physics and what was done. Including all the details you would get that. I will quote the first paragraph from the paper summary

> In summary, the December 5, 2022 experiment on the National Ignition Facility, N221204, was the first time that fusion target gain was unambiguously achieved in the laboratory in any fusion scheme. The demonstrated level of target gain on N221204 of 1.5 times is a proof of principle that controlled laboratory fusion energy is possible

And they specifically mention that it is not overall facility-wise net gain in the next paragraph

> Notethat G_{target} > 1 does not imply net energy gain from a practical fusion energy perspective, because the energy consumed by the NIF laser facility is typically 100× larger than E_{laser}. The NIF laser architecture and target configuration was chosen to give the highest probability for fusion ignition for research purposes and was not optimized to produce net energy for fusion energy applications.

So you don't have to go and claim a deception. You want to claim it wasn't significant which is your opinion but that is not what the actual scientific community in the field (who know more than you) would agree.

[1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...

> So you don't have to go and claim a deception.

I didn't claim a deception in the research paper. I've clearly stated what I'm claiming, and you've said nothing that changes any of that.

In fact, you originally didn't even mention the research paper, you said "the announcement". The deception was in every official announcement, none of which included any details of the caveat that you quoted. That deception continued, mostly unwittingly I'm sure, in all the press on the matter.

You're shifting the goalposts to try to support a point which is irrelevant to what I've been saying.

> You want to claim it wasn't significant which is your opinion but that is not what the actual scientific community in the field (who know more than you) would agree.

It's not significant with respect to commercial nuclear fusion power, which was the entire basis for all the reporting about it.

The idea that "the actual scientific community" would support your position is an unsupported claim that's easily refuted.

For example, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist who previously a commissioner for the US NRC, wrote in "What’s fueling the commercial fusion hype?"[1]:

> "Recent White House and Energy Department pronouncements on speeding up the 'commercialization' of fusion energy are so over the top as to make you wonder about the scientific competence in the upper reaches of the government."

That article discusses the NIF experiment among others, highlighting out the discrepancies between the official announcements and what the experiment actual does. It also points out that the experiment "is, in effect, a miniature (secondary) thermonuclear bomb, with the lasers playing the role of the triggering fission reactions (primary)," which helps explain "its lack of promise for civilian use."

There have been plenty of similar criticism from other scientists, including Daniel Jassby previously of Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and M.V. Ramana at U. British Columbia.

In "Clean Energy or Weapons? What the ‘Breakthrough’ in Nuclear Fusion Really Means"[2], Ramana wrote, "without the excitement created by these hyped-up statements, it would be impossible to get funded for the decades it takes to plan and build these facilities."

Again, in a "sane, rational, advanced" society, this would not be necessary. And you, and the commenter I originally replied to, would not have had clear misapprehensions about the experiment as a result. In your case, at the very least, you appeared to believe that "ignition" was some fundamental physical phenomenon in this case, which it is not, in the context of the NIF experiment.

> As a fellow scientist

As a scientist, you should be interested in what's true.

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[1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/whats-fueling-the-commercial...

[2] https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/clean-energy-weapons...