To me this is the most important part of the article, “It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Co

To me this is the most important part of the article, “It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”