This is still twelve times less than the 20 megajoules that simulations indicate can be achieved. Everything would need to be redesigned to try to get to net power generation for the whole system. 422 megajoules of power are needed to charge the capacitors for each shot. It would probably need to have triple the 422 megajoules to get to replacement breakeven of the energy generation needed to get the power to the outlets to charge the capacitors.

The performance needs further improvement by over 1000 times, the system needs to be recreated with rapid pellet loading and handling in order to create anything approaching a viable energy generation system. This system is not the path to new energy generation. It is a decades-long research project for nuclear weapons.

A one-gigawatt nuclear fission reactor can generate about 8 terawatt-hours of power in a year. This is about 29 billion megajoules in a year. The LLNL nuclear fusion shot produced 22 billion times less energy.

Initial analysis shows an 8X improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021 and a 25X increase over NIF's 2018 record yield.

They focused many lasers target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second.

The experiment built on several advances gained from insights developed over the last several years by the NIF team including new diagnostics; target fabrication improvements in the hohlraum, capsule shell and fill tube; improved laser precision; and design changes to increase the energy coupled to the implosion and the compression of the implosion.