National Ignition Facility
National Ignition Facility is a inertial fusion device run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in United States. It is operating. Like every fusion device built so far, it has produced no net electricity.
Achieved fusion ignition in December 2022: 192 laser beams delivered just over 2 MJ to a deuterium-tritium pellet, which yielded 3.15 MJ of fusion energy. Ignition has since been repeated ten times, with a record yield of 8.6 MJ in April 2025.
The most misreported result in fusion. NIF's gain compares fusion energy out against laser energy delivered to the target, not against the energy drawn from the grid to fire the lasers, which is on the order of 300 MJ. It is a genuine and important scientific milestone, and it is not net energy in the sense a power plant means. NIF is also a weapons-physics facility first; energy research is a secondary use.
| Organisation | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
|---|---|
| Approach | inertial |
| Confinement | inertial |
| Country | United States |
| Status | Operating |
| First plasma | 2009 |
| Target date | none stated |
|---|---|
| Power target | none stated |
| Energy gain target | none stated |
| Net electricity | No. no fusion device has produced any |
Other inertial projects
| Project | Status |
|---|---|
| Laser Mégajoule |
Fusion needs tritium, and the world's civilian stock comes mostly from CANDU fission reactors. See the fusion overview.
National Ignition Facility in context
2 of the 24 fusion projects on record use the inertial approach: 2 operating, 0 under construction, 0 planned.
Its first plasma is dated 2009, 17 years ago: the 6th earliest of 15 projects on record with a first-plasma date.
| Measure | National Ignition Facility | Median of all projects | Standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| First plasma | 2009 | 2015 | 6 of 15 (earliest first) |
Worked out from the entries on this site only, so a figure compares National Ignition Facility with what is recorded here, not with everything that exists. An entry with no value for a measure is left out of that measure's ranking and median.
Sources
- World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Fusion Power · retrieved 2026-09-07
How these sources are used, including the corrections applied on top of them and what is deliberately left blank · download the underlying data