Fusion energy and the coming fight for the Moon

It’s been hard to miss the excitement since the US Energy Department announced that its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had produced a fusion reaction, which, for the first time, unleashed more power than it took to create.

Using an array of 192 lasers to superheat and compress hydrogen atoms to more than 100,000,000°C, scientists managed to release 3.15 megajoules of energy for every 2.05 megajoules their experiment required.

Sounds impressive. But what exactly do these developments mean, and, more importantly, what do they foretell? Many things, certainly, including a fight for the Moon.

For more than half a century, physicists have known that there are two ways to harness the power of the atom: fission and fusion. Fission, most dramatically represented by the A-bomb, releases energy by splitting atoms. Fusion, the technology behind the H-bomb, combines atoms in such a way that their residual energy is unleashed, replicating the very process by which the stars shine.