The U.S. fusion power industry last month received a positive and a negative jolt from the news. On the plus side, laser technology continues to move along the path toward ignition with promising results from tests that lasted slightly longer than a nanosecond. On the negative side, the newly proposed 2013 federal budget cuts the funding for one of the country's three experimental magnetic-fusion facilities.
On March 15, technicians at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory moved a step closer to achieving fusion ignition and energy gain in a lab setting when its 192 beams delivered a record 1.875 million joules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to the facility's target chamber center in Livermore, Calif.