The potential for utilizing more potent lasers in initiatives aiming to generate electricity through controlled thermonuclear fusion is one impetus for their development. The plan is to use laser light to implosively compress, ionize, and evaporate a solid fuel pellet in order to start nuclear fusions. A new laser has just been revealed at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, and it seems to be a big step in the right direction.
The development of laser fusion is picking up steam. In an effort to start fusion, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California blast a target with millions of joules of energy using 192 laser beams. In the previous year, the lab succeeded in igniting a reaction, which releases more energy than initially reaches the target (SN: 1/14/23, p. 6). The lab then duplicated the feat in July and attained the highest energy yield to date. According to a lab release, an explosion of around 2 million joules produced nearly 4 million joules of fusion energy. But laser fusion is still not a net power source because it takes a lot more energy to run the laser facility.
