Curb your nuclear enthusiasm

FUSION energy, the magical MacGuffin technology that has powered innumerable science fiction universes for the better part of a century, appeared to have achieved a breakthrough in real life earlier this month when researchers in the US announced that, for the first time that anyone is aware of, a fusion reactor briefly produced more energy than it used to create the reaction.

The result was achieved by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, an amazing place that, among other superlatives, is home to the world's most powerful laser. Using that laser, the scientists have been smashing together atoms of deuterium and tritium — two isotopes of hydrogen — which, if done at an insanely high temperature and pressure, about the same as those found in the center of the Sun, forms helium and releases a free neutron and a massive amount of energy.