Many major news outlets are today reporting that the U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to make an announcement on at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Tuesday about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion.
There is speculation that the announcement will be about reaching a new milestone in fusion energy production, and that it is possible that experiments at the National Ignition Facility have achieved a net energy gain, in which more energy is produced from a fusion rection than is input into the system.
This is the goal that fusion scientists have been working towards for decades, and reaching that point would be a major achievement. An article in the Financial Times states that sources reported to the newspaper that 2.5 megajoules of energy were produced in a system that consumed 2.1 megajoules, however there is still analysis going on and these numbers are not yet confirmed.
