It wasn’t until 2022 that the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, smashed the record for the amount of energy created through fusion. Then, a multibillion-dollar fusion experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California finally produced a tiny isotope sample to emit more thermonuclear energy than was expended to ignite it. And that event, which lasted only about a tenth of a nanosecond, had to be triggered by the combined output of 192 of the world’s most potent lasers. Now, NIF routinely generates more energy from a fusion reaction than put in, although the NIF calculations do not include the entire energy required to run the entire facility.