Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times::Scientists in California make a significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.
@Uranium_Green those are literally fusion bombs.
But there is a test ban treaty in place, and has been for some time.
NIF provides plausible deniability to study fusion ignition without setting off actual nuclear weapons. This is what it’s always been about. It isn’t power plant research, and never has been.
Thermonuclear bombs are a mixture of fission AND fusion, the amount of energy required to achieve fusion requires fission to provide said energy.
Lasers igniting fusion is a bit of a more of a stretch to create a weapon from (the lasers require 300 mega joules of energy which in turn is 2mj of energy into the reaction and 3mj energy out); it may provide context and more information for fusion as a whole but that information is relevant to both weapons and energy research, not one or the other.
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@Funkytom467 no, JET was doing power plant research.
NIF is studying detonation of fusion explosions. The only other way to do this is to set off a thermonuclear bomb, which the US has signed international treaties promising not to do, and which is trivially easily detected from the other side of the world.
Yes i immediately deleted my answer after i saw i confused the two. My bad, i wasn’t aware of NIF before.
(Gonna go ahead and start looking it up some more…)