The difference, a little more than a megajoule, is roughly the amount of energy released by a hand grenade. The beams delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy, triggering a reaction that fused the hydrogen into helium and released 3.15 megajoules. In December 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California focused the world’s most powerful laser on a peppercorn-size diamond capsule filled with hydrogen. In late 2022, researchers celebrated a long-sought scientific milestone, a sign of progress in a field full of vexing technological challenges and skepticism about near-term prospects. Long seen as the ultimate prize in the quest for clean and abundant energy, fusion is the process that fuels the sun, where a crushing gravitational force smashes atoms together and unleashes their energy. Some of the world’s richest investors have piled into startups targeting one of the biggest and toughest challenges in science: nuclear fusion.
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