It's not like the "wormhole" thing where what was produced isn't really what can plausibly be described as a wormhole. In this case, fusion really did happen, and the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction was about half again what the energy put into the fusion reaction was.
That said, there are two pretty important caveats about how big a deal it is macroscopically:
1. In order to have useful fusion power, we'd need at least another order-of-magnitude or so energy out compared to energy in. Maybe, depending on how optimistic you are about the ability to capture that energy and efficiently feed energy in, closer to two orders of magnitude.
2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion. Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.
> 2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion. Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.
Thank you, that is the kind of caveat I was expecting.
That said, there are two pretty important caveats about how big a deal it is macroscopically:
1. In order to have useful fusion power, we'd need at least another order-of-magnitude or so energy out compared to energy in. Maybe, depending on how optimistic you are about the ability to capture that energy and efficiently feed energy in, closer to two orders of magnitude.
2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion. Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.