The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used its bank of high-powered lasers on Dec. 5 to ignite a fusion reaction that produced more energy from a small pellet than the lasers put into the pellet, the lab said.
The long-hoped for achievement marked “a new chapter in NNSA’s [National Nuclear Security Administration’s] Stockpile Stewardship Program,” Jill Hruby, administrator of the NNSA, said in a press release Tuesday.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore’s California campus aids with nuclear weapon design and maintenance in an age when the U.S. adheres to a voluntary moratorium on nuclear-explosive testing.
In a widely covered press conference in Washington yesterday, headlined by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, White House officials, Hruby and Livermore Director Kimberly Budil, among others, last week’s fusion milestone got more billing as a path to a clean energy source.
The recent NIF experiment yielded 3.15 megajoules of energy from a laser-bank shot of 2.05 megajoules. The lasers require much more energy than that to charge up.
Editors note, 12/14/2022, 10:24 a.m. Eastern time U.S. The story was changed to include the correct input and output figures at NIF.
