
In the long term, the goal is to increase the amount of energy generated by fusion reactions from the 3.15 megajoules created last year to hundreds of megajoules. Richard Town a physicist, sees a viable path to increasing US National Ignition Facility’ (NIF) energy yields to tens of megajoules by, among other things, further boosting the lasers’ energy going into the target. The old joke about fusion energy is that it’s 50 years away, and always will be. Many scientists now say the front end of that equation is closer to 20–30 years, but it’s really just a matter of funding, says Pravesh Patel, a former scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab who currently serves as scientific director at Focused Energy in Austin, Texas, a private laser-fusion firm.