Anddd? That amount of energy scales up by 10% with mass as.only 10% of the material is required to turn into plasma to start the reaction, as I've stated. Increasing the density lowers the amount of energy required, as I've also stated (and cited).

And you do?

Her next statement is that commercialization is decades away, which both her and the announcement agreed with. Nothing contradicts my statement.

Also, I have cited nearly every claim I've made and you have not. We're not equally discussing this in good faith. Pretending fission is harmless is a joke. It's worth the risk IMO, but stop downplaying actual nuclear meltdowns

Her next statement is that commercialization is decades away, which both her and the announcement agreed with.

And thanks for literally ignoring the entire comment you replied to

I fully support continual use and future investment increases into new fission reactors. But having an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude is laughable when you have Chernobyl, Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island staring you in the face. And don't pretend it's just digging a hole for disposal. Simply transporting spent fuel is an immense cost

That 300 MJ was to start the reaction, you don't need to continually pump in 300 MJ. Scaling this up by like 1000x and you surpass that one time input. And the scale would likely need to be far higher for commercialization.

Nobody is saying we're there yet, but to deny how remarkable this breakthrough is, is pretty short sighted. It doesn't mean we decommission any existing fission reactors or even stop planning their construction. It does mean that if $38 billion can produce a net positive (and yes this proved net positive by all practical definitions) reaction, any government subsidies or research into hydrocarbon derived fuel needs to be phased out. That's $20 billion annually for oil alone in the US. God knows how much towards corn for ethanol. This announcement justifies a substantial amount of that phased out and put towards fusion.

There are literally actively used methods for material confinement. Most common are magnetic confinements like tokamak and Stellarator reactors. New methods using beryllium blankets by ITER are shown to be effective. Their two problems are they currently need to be actively cooled which eats away at the energy input/output ratio and they contain natural amounts of Uranium, some of which is U-234 and radioactive requiring hazardous disposal at their end of life. Not as serious as.apent nuclear material disposal from fission reactors, but still a major drawback.

There are also companies with successful experiments fusing deuterium and H-3 in lieu of tritium as tritium is costly to produce. Allegedly, this method doesn't require confinement. Since the products are ionized, it actually uses the reactive expansion to power magnetic generators in lieu of heating steam turbines.

But the NIF that just released their announcement doesn't even use magnetic confinements, rather an inertial confinement (ICF) reactor. This means the confinement times can be improved linearly with density of the fuel and it only requires about 10% of the mass of the fuel to reach temperature sufficient for plasma, which also allows for longer reactions. ICF research is way more immature than MCF so it has always been assumed that MCF would be the breakthrough. That's what makes this such an event is that ICF beat MCF to the finish line creating more energy output than input.

Lastly, they didn't just have an experiment with miniscule energy that could only be detected with instruments. They created 3.15 mega joules. That's 875 watt hours. That's enough to power a TV for a day and well beyond enough to prove their confinement technology works

Not at the contemporary levels of technology. How difficult fusion is today is honestly a sixth grade science project compared to how difficult fission was in 1940's.

The Manhattan Project cost was estimated to be $3.3 Trillion. That's $55 Trillion today. Trillion, with a T.

The inflation adjusted fusion investment to date according to OP has been $38 Billion, with a B.

Aspen groves in CO are amazing for how intense their color change is, but our forests are relatively thin and predominately coniferous.

I'm from VA and imagine walking through the thickest Aspen forest you've ever seen, but it's thousands of square miles and thicker

Basal area is fine. The r value of the diameter at breast height (DBH) to mean crown radius (MCR) is 0.77 meaning the DBH is a very good indicator of the MCR. I live in CO and am from VA so have spent a lot of time in Shenandoah and WVA.

Aspens have one of the highest ratios of DBH to MCR of any deciduous trees. This means it's the opposite. They have relatively smaller canopies for their trunk thickness.

Source pdf by forestry service