The National Ignition Facility in California has become the first fusion power facility to create a fusion reaction that generates more power than it requires to get the reaction started. This is perhaps the most important step ever towards the always-just-out-of-reach realization of clean, self-sustaining, limitless fusion power.
The NIF, operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), creates a fusion reaction by focusing the world’s most powerful laser (some 500 terawatts), split into 192 separate beams, onto a small capsule (called a hohlraum) containing a mix of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen), situated in a fusion chamber (pictured above). The lasers strike the hohlraum (pictured bottom) with precision timing, causing a perfectly uniform explosion, which creates a massive reaction force that causes the deuterium/tritium fuel to perfectly and uniformly implode — hopefully starting a fusion reaction. This process is called inertial confinement fusion, as opposed to
magnetic confinement fusion, which before today was generally considered to be a more mature technology
