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Using the most powerful laser system ever built, scientists have brought us one step closer to nuclear fusion power, a new study says.

The same process that powers our sun and other stars, nuclear fusion has the potential to be an efficient, carbon-free energy source—with none of the radioactive waste associated with the nuclear fission method used in current nuclear plants.

Thanks to the new achievement, a prototype nuclear fusion power plant could be operating within a decade, speculated study leader Siegfried Glenzer, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Glenzer and colleagues used the world’s largest laser array—the Livermore lab’s National Ignition Facility—to heat a BB-size fuel pellet to millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

“These lasers are pulsed, and for a very short amount of time”—one ten-billionth of a second—”the power they produce is more than all the power generated by the entire electrical grid of the United States” at any given moment, Glenzer said.

The test confirmed that a technique called inertial fusion ignition could be used to trigger nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—which can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

The laser demonstration means scientists are now much closer to triggering nuclear fusion in a controlled setting—something that’s never been done before and which is necessary if fusion is to be harnessed for energy.

Science is sexy!

Credit to Ker Than of National Geographic News