The scientists used lasers to fuse two light atoms into a single one, releasing 3.15MJ (megajoules) of energy from 2.05MJ of input – roughly enough to boil a kettle.
Why do we even study this? Renewables are the only way. This is a waste of money which is a finite resource.
Fission requires insanely costly wastes management. It is very dangerous and security is a huge costs-contributing factor. This is not the case with fusion, so costs might be lower despite complexity.
Fusion also produces most of the nuclear waste that a fission plant does thanks to undergoing the same nutron activation process, and while it lacks spent fuel rods, thouse are already infinitely recyclable, so the only real waste saveings would be in low grade waste like dust covered clean suits and such.
This also doesn’t help the case for Fusion very much given that even with these disposal costs ITER has costs four to six times any average fission plant for a donor reactor that has no generating capacity and which is mearly to prove that the physics work, something we did for fission with the Chicago pile in 1942 at an estimated inflation adjusted cost of 53 million dollars.
If it’s this expensive for a proof of concept, it is very unlikely that any full plant would be much cheaper. Compare it to things we can actually deploy at scale today like onshore wind or battery backed solar, and it is pretty clear that Fusion is an expensive but important science project, not a serious proposal to power the electrical grid.