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Very misleading headline. They had to put 1.9 gigajules via the lasers into it (and that is just the laser output, not counting inefficiencies and cooling needs of the lasers themselves), to get 1.3 gigajules out.
There is apparently a way to calculate how much energy was absorbed by the tiny fuel pellet, which was apparently much lower then the 1.9 gigajules, but this is likely still orders of magnitude away from producing net energy output.
Your comment is itself misleading ironically since the whole point is to have a self sustaining fusion reaction. The lasers are only needed to start the reaction. Meanwhile, you're making it sound as if sustained laser output is needed.
In this specific case of reactor type it probably is. As far as I understand the plan is to make a lot of these small fuel-pellets and shoot them with lasers, each being used up in the process.
Other fusion reactor types do indeed try to sustain a pulsed (tokamak) or continuous (wendelstein) plasma, but then you end up having huge additional energy costs in the form of magnetic confinement and currently also cooling these magnets to super-conducting temperatures. See the video that @[email protected] posted below.
The energy cost for sustained plasma is reduced dramatically now that room temperature superconductors are now possible. This was basically the main limiting factor for positive energy output.
Hence my "currently" in the above comment. I am carefully optimistic that Wendelstein-X based fusion reactor designs might at some point generate net energy output, but we are still far from achieving this, and sensationalist missleading headlines are not part of getting there.
It doesnt matter if you really believe in science!
What does/could this mean? Does it mean that the tech approach to climate change will work out? aka keep polluting as normal, but just invent some new tech to fix the problems we're creating?
If fusion can be made to work that would open path towards effectively unlimited clean energy in the future. I don't know how much that will help with climate change in the near term though since we have a fairly short window of around a decade, and it's highly unlikely fusion could be made to work at scale in that time frame. So, we definitely can't keep polluting as normal.
I think the plan is gonna be to keep on polluting:
"Climate change is suppose to affect poor countries first. I hate poor countries and I want to see them suffer. So I'll just grab some popcorn and watch climate change. Then when it starts affecting my rich country, i'll either fly to mars or use all the fusion reactors to suck co2 out of the air"
That's how most people in the west expected things to play out. Turns out that it's not just poor countries that are getting hit by climate disasters though. However, the fact that we do need to deal with climate change does not detract from the value of having limitless clean energy that fusion can offer.
Your argument that developing this technology is somehow a negative because people will keep polluting is utter nonsense It's pretty clear that we're going to keep polluting regardless unless drastic societal changes happen. The reason we can't stop polluting is because our society is based around consumerism and our economy is based on growth. Until capitalism is abolished this problem cannot be solved. Technology has absolutely nothing to do with this.