Get Me Rewrite!

Gizmodo often reports on neat science news I don't always see, but I think with this story, they messed up a little on their headline.

The story is about a report from the BBC that some researchers have managed to make a nuclear fusion reaction that "broke even," or in other words, didn't take more energy to make than it created. Nuclear fusion would provide energy on a much greater scale than anything now currently in use, and would do so with much less waste that nuclear fission or even many of the non-nuclear methods of power generation we now use.

Nuclear fusion's problem is that it usually requires things to be very hot and at a very high pressure. The hydrogen bomb, for example, is an uncontrolled nuclear fusion reaction. But in order to start it, bomb-makers have to include a small nuclear fission reaction to make things hot and heavy enough for fusion to begin (Fusion "fuses" atoms, fission splits them. This is why fission creates nuclear waste, because the leftover material is radioactive).

So even though scientists have known how to produce nuclear fusion, they have always had to use more energy to create the conditions for fusion than they got out of the fusion reaction. Such conditions would not be helpful in supplying energy needs. The fuss over supposed cold fusion back in 1989 happened because if fusion could be produced at normal temperatures, fusion reactors could be built.

In the 2013 experiment, scientists used lasers to produce the conditions for the fusion reaction, and preliminary reports suggest it produced at least as much energy as was used to make it -- it "broke even." Some of the commenters at Gizmodo, though, seem to doubt that result, and they sound like they know more about it than me -- even though their comments would indicate that I know more words than they do, or at least when not to use certain ones.

So the headline says, "Nuclear Fusion has Broken Even for the First Time Ever." But of course, that's not the case. Nuclear fusion breaks even all the time, all over the universe. It's even doing so in our own solar system.

About 93 million miles away, in fact.