Inertial Confinement Fusion Breakthrough (?)
This isn't really a "data hack", nor is it "helpful" to most people in their current daily lives, but we wanted to comment on a December 13th announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy that a breakthrough had been made in one type of controlled fusion: Inertial Confinement Fusion. While this is a theoretical and technological breakthrough, most media coverage was misleading enough that we wanted to clear up some confusion: A commercially available Nuclear Fusion Reactor utilizing Intertial Confinement Fusion is still decades away As Secretary of Energy Granholm says in the Press Conference video link below (emphasis added), "This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant, fusion energy powering our society". This is a very deliberate statement on her part: it is still unclear whether Fusion Reactors will become a reality, but this breakthrough brings hum...