Breakeven

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Breakeven is not one line but several, and which one is meant changes the meaning of any claim built on it. Scientific breakeven with respect to energy delivered to the fuel or target is what NIF crossed on 5 December 2022, when 2.05 MJ of ultraviolet laser light on target produced roughly 3.1 to 3.15 MJ of fusion yield. Wall-plug or engineering breakeven asks whether the facility produced more energy than it drew from the grid; NIF did not come close, having stored on the order of 330 MJ of electrical energy in capacitor banks to fire that shot, an overall efficiency of well under one percent. Commercial breakeven adds capital cost, availability and the parasitic load of a real plant, and no device has approached it. The 2022 result was a genuine scientific first and was correctly described as such by the researchers; the popular framing of it as a power-generating milestone was not their framing.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.