Historic fusion ignition in a lab experiment confirmed

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has published an extensive paper confirming the validity of its 2022 fusion experiment where multiple lasers focused on a sphere of deuterium and tritium to achieve the first fusion ignition in a laboratory.

Creating nuclear fusion is relatively easy to produce. All you need are the conditions that place hydrogen isotope ions under the right conditions of heat and pressure to cause them to fuse into helium. In fact, it's so easy that it was the centerpiece of a General Electric exhibit that ran for 10 hours a day at the 1964 World's Fair.

The tricky bit is to achieve nuclear fusion while getting more energy out than you put in, which is called fusion ignition. Until December 5, 2022, this had only been accomplished on Earth inside a hydrogen bomb.

On that day at the Lawrence Livermore facility, 192 laser beams focused on a deuterium/tritium cryogenic target, delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet light. The target fused and generated 3.15 MJ of energy output.

In other words, fusion ignition.