Last week, the press reported that for the first time, a #fusion reactor had briefly generated more energy than was supplied to it. Here´s our view: 
While the successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California is an interesting milestone, it does not take commercial energy production by fusion any closer, as some media suggest.
The reactor as a whole is far from producing a net energy gain. Indeed, the measurement took into account only the laser energy supplied and the plasma energy exiting - not the considerable energy required to generate the powerful laser beams in the first place.
The reaction also took place in a tiny fuel pellet inside the world's largest laser, lasted only a few billionths of a second and can only be repeated every six hours. This makes it useless for practical purposes. The essential and unsolved problem of fusion is its inefficiency:
The tools that make fusion possible in the first place (lasers or field-generating magnets) consume a lot of energy. Although we are in favor of fusion research, we consider it unlikely that fusion will be able to generate electricity at marketable prices in the next decades.
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