On December 13, 2022, the United States Department of Energy announced that a gain factor greater than 1 was achieved by the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California using inertial confinement fusion, delivering 2.05 MJ to generate 3.15 MJ from the resulting fusion reaction. This is roughly equivalent to a gain factor Q = 1.54 and is the first time that a gain factor Q ≥ 1 has been achieved in the history of nuclear fusion, besides in thermonuclear weapons.
