energy comes out than went in. with no risk of nuclear meltdown or radioactive waste. in a fusion power plant, you would shoot the same target over and over about ten times a second. so you need a target loader. we need a target loader, exactly. so there are many, many technology jump that s we need to make. that s what makes it so exciting, right? a lot of people are saying you invested all this money. time to pull the plug because you haven t achieved ignition. it s called the ignition facility, right? i mean, it s really hard to replicate the process that s happening on the sun on earth. it is just really hard. so when that happened in december, what it said is that this is actually possible. it is no longer weather. it is just when. when fusion is actually possible. now let s get to work. conventional wisdom and the
reporter: in the middle of a december night, they did it. and you only need a tiny little bit of fuel. that s right, yeah. our little pellet that sits right in the middle, you can t even see it, is just two millimeters in diameter. reporter: that target includes an abundant isotope found in sea water and goes into a chamber about the size of a beach ball in the 60s but is now a round room 30 feet across with 192 massive lasers aimed at the center. they re big, 40 by 40 centimeters. each one alone is one of the most energetic in the world. every time we do a shot, it is a thousand times the power of the entire u.s. electrical grid. but your lights don t flicker at home when we take a shot. we re taking a huge amount of energy and compressing it down. it s about $14 of electricity. reporter: the national ignition facility then amplifies all that concentrated energy on the target. if they get it just right, more
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Scientists based at MIT have claimed that if all nuclear reactors in the US were to stop working, pollution-related deaths could dramatically increase.