The NIF's (National Ignition Facility) shot had a one-off ignition event. An ICF-based power plant may need to fire up to 10 laser shots per second, consuming almost 1 million targets a day, and produce far more energy per shot than NIF did.

Longview Fusion

Ed Moses, a former NIF director, has founded a company, Longview Fusion, that hopes to start building a test plant in 5 years with twice as many laser beams (400) as NIF (192). It would shoot 10 targets per second—sheathed in lead instead of gold to lower costs—into a reaction chamber and blast them to produce a string of quick-fire fusion explosions. "It's not hard," Moses says. "The technology is all available, it just has to be integrated."

In December 2022, NIF produced a record-breaking 3.15 megajoules of energy from a 2.05 megajoule laser pulse, a gain of about 1.5, generating that pulse consumed hundreds of megajoules of electricity, and NIF can only do one shot per day. Most fusion experts give better odds to tokamaks, doughnut-shaped devices that use powerful magnetic fields to trap an ionized gas of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium and heat it to 100 million degrees Celsius so the nuclei crash together with enough kinetic energy to fuse. One big advantage ICF facilities have over tokamaks is that their different elements—lasers, reaction chambers, targets—can be developed and tested separately before they need to be combined.