The recent experiments in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco reported the success of creating extremely high pressures and temperatures to get the hydrogen atoms to fuse. This apparatus is still far short of producing more energy than it requires to operate; but this was key finding of the “bootstrapping” process, the energy created by the fusion reaction was going back into the remaining fuel. As reported by Redding in the article, “Nuclear Fusion Project Takes Key Step in Lab Test:”

“Seeing that kick in is quite exciting, and it does show that there is promise” for increasing the energy output, said Omar Hurricane, lead author on the Nature paper. It’s not clear when researchers will be able to get more energy out of the reaction than the lasers pour into it, he said, but “we are working like mad … in that direction.”

The sign of bootstrapping is “really a wonderful result,” said fusion expert Robert McCrory of the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the research. “There’s a lot more that needs to be done” to reach the point where the reaction produces more energy than the lasers deliver, but “this was absolutely necessary.”

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