“This is extremely exciting, it’s a major breakthrough,” says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work.Mark Herrmann, who leads NIF as the program director for weapons physics and design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says it feels “wonderful,” adding: “I’m so proud of the team.” The result, announced today by officials at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), represents a shot in the arm for fusion researchers, who have long been criticized for overpromising and underdelivering.Many researchers believe furnacelike tokamaks are a better design for commercial power because they can sustain longer fusion “burns.” In a tokamak, microwaves and particle beams heat the fuel and magnetic fields trap it.They also made the capsule slightly thicker, which provided more momentum for the implosion but required a longer, more powerful laser pulse.It relies on “indirect drive,” in which the laser blasts the gold can to generate the x-rays that actually spark fusion."