On December 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that researchers had finally succeeded in extracting more energy from the process than they had put into it, after decades of trying. But how significant is the change exactly? What about the long-awaited goal of fusion producing an abundant supply of clean energy? 

This new finding is explained by Carolyn Kuranz, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who formerly worked at the plant that just broke the fusion record.
A nuclear event known as fusion joins two atoms to produce one or more new atoms with a somewhat smaller total mass. According to Einstein's famous equation, which states that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared, the difference in mass is released as energy.

 Due to the immense speed of light, transforming even a tiny amount of mass into energy, as occurs in fusion, results in the production of an equally enormous amount of energy.

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility of the US government in California have successfully demonstrated 'fusion ignition' for the first time. When a fusion reaction ignites, it creates more energy than it receives from outside sources and becomes self-sustaining.
The National Ignition Facility's method entailed directing 192 laser beams at a 0.04-inch (1-mm) fuel pellet made of deuterium and tritium, two forms of the element hydrogen with additional neutrons, that was housed in a gold canister. 

The fuel pellet is heated and compressed to around 20 times the density of lead when the lasers strike the canister, reaching temperatures of more than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (3 million degrees Celsius), which is roughly 100 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The fuel will fuse and release energy if these conditions can be kept for an extended period of time.

For almost 50 years, fusion energy has been the 'holy grail' of energy generation. There is still a long way to go before fusion is a practical source of energy, even though a gain of 1.5 is, in my opinion, a genuinely historic scientific advance.

The facility required roughly 300 million joules to produce the lasers employed in this experiment, despite the fact that the laser energy of 2 million joules was lower than the fusion yield of 3 million joules.