Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have managed to get more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than they put in to trigger it, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday, a major breakthrough experts told Forbes is a huge step towards developing a near-limitless source of clean energy that is probably still decades away and will arrive too late to tackle the most pressing problems in the fight against climate change.
Scientists have eyed nuclear fusion—the star-powering process that combines lighter elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier ones and releases energy—for decades but have struggled to achieve a net energy gain due to the energy intensive conditions needed to trigger fusion reactions.
Achieving net energy gain is a “huge milestone” for fusion research and “paves the way for practical fusion energy,” Troy Carter, a plasma physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Forbes
