Have a good one yourselves. You should celebrate rightfully on the scientists. It is a great accomplishment. Nevertheless no energy was being created. A tremendous amount of energy was wasted to make this experiment work. Keeping that in mind if we just look at the last step some energy was created compared to the energy used (a really small amount that can by no means be scaled up). This is a milestone but is by no means the breakthrough the article does make it look like. It is a great achievement for science but it has no further meaning to the use of nuclear fusion to generate power. Since all the other processes around do and will necessarily always waste so much more energy than can be gained by the last step. This approach to nuclear fusion is a dead end that can and will never produce any net energy. If we accept that, it will nevertheless produce valuable new knowledge. A lot know how of plasma physics can be gained from it.

And don't confuse the unit, they where talking about MJ not MW.

1MJ = 0.27 kWh

Edit: In more common units this reads like 0.14kWh of light energy produced 0.42kWh of fusion energy.

Edit2: To produce the amount of 0.14kWh of light energy the amount of 14kWh of electric energy where used. And an infinite amount of energy (in comparison) to produce the "fuel"

And the energy positivity is just the energy of the light hitting the target. Not the energy of the particle accelerator to separate the different hydrogen isotopes nor the electric energy to generate that light via lasers with a efficiency of about 1%.

No we didn't. We managed to get fusion stable for a tiny fraction of a millisecond. This uses the inertia of the "fuel" and ignites a miniscule fusion bomb. This is not stable and can not be done more often then once or twice a day by the nature of this experiment.

Because it didn't produce net energy and it is literally impossible it ever will. It is the least possible way of fusion power there is.

It is obvious that this approach will never be usable to generate energy. There are better approaches even when talking about fusion. This consumed already that much energy in generating the "fuel" heating the lasers and everything. It only produced a tiny amount of the energy it consumed in total. Moreover it's pulse is one, maybe two shots per day. There is no way in enhancing this since the lasers need to cool (cooling with energy seems counterproductive for obvious reasons). Every shot generated not even enough energy to heat a cup of coffee. There is no path on how to improve that in a foreseeable future. There is literally no way to scale this up or make this produce net energy. Yet everyone keeps telling that this is a "breakthrough" of any kind. Telling that that this will help to solve the energy crisis in any possible future is not optimistic, it is simply wrong. Yet there are obvious things we definitely can do with greater impact. We simply do not approach the obvious things because we keep telling ourselves that this is will somehow help. Some realism is important here.

It means exactly nothing for the usage of fusion power. This method has exactly zero chance of being ever used in a commercial fusion reactor. However more and more people think that the inevitable and hard change to renewable energy sources could be avoided. This article, like a lot of the other, unreflected articles makes me really sad.