They just made it work slightly better enough to keep Zap on the seed-round investor gravy train.
Z-pinch/Zap is so far away from break even it's not even funny, and they're nowhere near close to capturing enough energy from high-energy neutrons to even power itself. Basically right now it's a 99.99% useful energy loss in their whole system.
And it will stay that way. Just need to keep making pretty photos to keep the investors ignorant.
Notice how they polished the fuck out of all their equipment? Make it shiny.
They are working on a liquid metal container to help with keeping things clean, but frankly in my opinion its just something to keep investors away from asking why there's no possible roadmap to net-energy production.
Q: When are you going to be able to make energy? A: Good question! Have you seen our new animation... liquid metal!!!!1! it's awesome!
“These are meticulous, unequivocal measurements, yet made on a device of incredibly modest scale by traditional fusion standards,” describes Ben Levitt, VP of R&D at Zap. “We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us, but our performance to date has advanced to a point that we can now stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s pre-eminent fusion devices, but with great efficiency, and at a fraction of the complexity and cost.”
“Over many decades of controlled-fusion research, only a handful of fusion concepts have reached 1-keV electron temperature,” notes Scott Hsu, Lead Fusion Coordinator at the DOE and former ARPA-E Program Director. “What this team has achieved here is remarkable and reinforces ARPA-E’s efforts to accelerate the development of commercial fusion energy.”
PRL: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...
You only brag about 30 million degrees if it's a thermal temperature distribution plasma (and moreso if it's steady state and not pulsed like this).
