National Ignition Facility

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The National Ignition Facility is a 192-beam laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, completed in 2009. Its primary mission is stockpile stewardship — studying thermonuclear conditions without nuclear testing — with inertial fusion energy science as a second purpose, a distinction often lost in coverage of its results. NIF fires a few shots per day at most, far from any duty cycle relevant to a power station, and its lasers are extremely inefficient: roughly 300 to 400 MJ is drawn from the grid, with about 330 MJ stored in capacitor banks, to deliver roughly 2 MJ of ultraviolet light to a target. On 5 December 2022 it became the first laboratory to produce more fusion energy from a target than the laser energy delivered to that target. It has since repeated and exceeded that result several times.