The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily increasing the amount of power it produces. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) raised the experiment’s yield to 8.6 megajoules, a significant improvement over the historic 2022 experiment. The NIF uses inertial confinement to produce fusion reactions, with fusion fuel coated in diamond and encased in a gold cylinder dropped into a spherical vacuum chamber where powerful laser beams converge on the target.
Another main approach to fusion, magnetic confinement, uses powerful superconducting magnets to compress and contain plasma for fusion. While no magnetic confinement experiments have achieved net-positive results, several startups, including Xcimer Energy and Focused Energy, are pursuing inertial confinement.
