no, it specifically didn't. If it had ignited, it would be enourmous news because the age of fusion and clean energy has begun. It didn't ignite, it's "close to self-heating", which is progress, but not ignition, and they want funds to double their laser power to actually make it happen.
Do you know what the challenge in these sorts of thing are? For example, do we already know how to double the laser power if we just had the resources or would there need to be research on how to build the laser itself?
One of the biggest challenges with fusion is to be able to contain plasma as far as I understand. Magnets seem to be the way they want to do it but I am a layman so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Magnetic confinement is needed for the continuous-reaction donuts like French scientists are building.
The NIF strategy is more like an internal combustion engine: load fuel, start reaction, capture energy, remove byproducts, start over. The lasers are acting like spark plugs, triggering the fuel to release all its energy at the top of each cycle.
In other words, the French strategy is "build a miniature sun", the American strategy is "build a miniature hydrogen bomb". In theory, it should be easier, hydrogen bombs already exist after all, but to trigger the reaction, you need to find a way to squeeze a lot of energy into a really small space to make the hygrogen atoms kiss, and you can't use the traditional method of "put a plutonium bomb next to it" for obvious reasons.
Four decades, ICF has been predicted to reach break even at one kilojoule (kJ) of energy in 1972, then 5 kJ, 10kJ, 100kJ, 200kJ, and finally 1.8 MJ by 1979 and the construction of three generation of lasers that all proved the predictions wrong.
The NIF is the fourth shot at this, and has a target performance about an order of magnitude less power that what experimental tests (using nuclear weapons) indicate is needed to be directly supplied to the fuel.
Apparently most people think stuff just happens on the first run. I write code for a living and in most cases it doesn’t run as intended on the first run, I can’t imagine making a fucking fusion reactor “just work” by assembling it and pressing “start”.
And then your results are published online (either because you need funding or someone reports on them) and people criticize you for not accomplishing your goals. Humans... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> The facility is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is a key element of NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the reliability and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without full-scale testing.
Most of the Department of Energy budget goes towards nuclear weapons, although they also do some work on civilian nuclear power and pure science. The name was always a bit of a euphemism.
Stockpile stewardship is explicitly one of DOEs purposes, and has been since the Manhattan project really.
Weapons research is one of the top level missions of LLNL [0], where the NIF is located. I guess it’s controversial to some, but it’s not like it’s supposed to be a secret or anything.
