U.S. scientists are at the threshold of fusion ignition after achieving a large amount of energy in an experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the LLNL said in a new statement . Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ)—an advancement that puts researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition. Fusion ignition is an important goal of the NIF, and opens access to a new experimental regime, the laboratory said. Although nuclear fusion has been long recognized as totally carbon- and by-product-free and the source atoms in hydrogen are abundant on Earth, replicating fusion energy generation on Earth has been a challenge. That’s because this fusion needs to take place at extremely high temperatures that create hot plasma and because researchers have struggled to obtain more energy from those plasmas than the energy input to run them. […]