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Do they do the same with all the tokamak type reactors too though, ignoring how much energy is needed to maintain the plasma?
No, the claim is that a net gain of energy occurred. That’s what they’re all trying to achieve.
The news from LLNL is misleading to some extent, as the experiment’s not really aimed at power generation. LLNL is one of the two nuclear weapons labs in the US (the other is Los Alamos) and the purpose of the fusion experiments they do is to examine the physical processes inside a nuclear weapon - hence their interest in x-rays compressing a pellet of solid deuterium-tritium. They’re (presumably) excited because a net gain of energy is what they would be looking for in a potential ‘4th generation’ weapon, which wouldn’t need a fission primary to set it off. So perhaps not the great news for the world that the FT report suggested.
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rodan
jupiz
Do they do the same with all the tokamak type reactors too though, ignoring how much energy is needed to maintain the plasma?
It’s fascinating, but I think it was on here someone posted an article which said the main issue was going to be a lack of tritium as all the Canadian reactors that produce most of the worlds tritium are reaching the end of their service life