In my reporting about the United States government announcement of a nuclear fusion research result at the National Ignition Facility, I was wrong about something.
I first heard about the developing story on Sunday night when I began receiving text messages about it from friends. Tom Wilson of the London Financial Times had broken the story. I went online and realized that the news contained a major omission.
“Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels,” Wilson wrote. His article explained that, from a 2.1 megajoule energy input, the experiment produced a 2.5 megajoule energy output.
I knew, as a specialist in nuclear energy research, that those values apply to only the energy going into and coming out of the fuel, and not the large amount of energy required to operate the NIF device.
The promoters of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a magnetic fusion experiment, had been creating the same type of misunderstanding about the prospects of ITER, which I described in news stories five years ago.