"While the latest experiment still required more energy in than it got out, it is the first suspected to reach the crucial stage of ‘ignition’, which allowed considerably more energy to be produced than ever before, and paves the way for ‘break even’, where the energy in is matched by the energy out."
Here [1] is an excellent video by Sabine Hossenfelder about why you should not get too excited about this result.
However, Sabine misconstrues things in the opposite direction and lies through omission to the audience. For example including startup energy and not ammortizing it over runtime, or not assuming that the energy consumption of the experiments is part of the required energy consumption of the fusion reactor, or trying to construe that once you have a fusion power reaction that is burning it is still especially difficult to further create a functioning power reactor out of it.
The true hard part of fusion is the burning plasma aspect. Once you have a burning plasma, it's a heat source like any other (with a few side-effects like neutron output) and everything we know from fission power reactors (but with a much lower radiation) and fossil fuel generators applies.
Where are you getting this impression? Her video pretty clearly focuses on the confusion between the Qs. Where does she get the napkin math wrong? She uses a published figure for total energy required during the operation of ITER when it’s up and running not a one time startup cost figure. Id she misrepresented that number, what would be a more honest total power consumption figure? As far as construing the output, she uses existing loss ratio for heat to electrical energy conversion which really does not seem to work to construe the problem as “especially difficult”, it’s “normally difficult” is how I interpreted. Are there impending advancements in energy conversion that makes 50% too liberal?
Her video multiple times tries to make fake total Q values by looking at the energy consumption of JET and ITER and then trying to say that is Q_total, which is wrong.
She doesn't even show her calculations on how she calculates some of her Q_total examples.
"While the latest experiment still required more energy in than it got out, it is the first suspected to reach the crucial stage of ‘ignition’, which allowed considerably more energy to be produced than ever before, and paves the way for ‘break even’, where the energy in is matched by the energy out."
Here [1] is an excellent video by Sabine Hossenfelder about why you should not get too excited about this result.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY