As I promised, text for this week is present status of inertial confinement fusion (ICF). I guess you would agree that present should come after the history ;)
The article will enlist the largest modern ICF machines and end with some scientific status up to date.
Europe
France is the leader in ICF in EU, with two large machines: LULI2000 and Laser Megajoule. First one is located near Paris and represents a flexible system of nano- and pico-lasers. The second one is in Bordeaux, has 176 lasers that deliver 1.8 megajoules of power to the target.
Next laser facility in line here is PALS (Prague, Czech Republic). It is a high power laser, that can achieve the energy of about 1 kilojoule. I was working at the same institute, but a different department.
Asia
Asia is quite poor in ICF, and I think it is for a good reason. There is no real commercial potential - only military.
The largest device is in Osaka (Japan), called GEKKO XII. It has 12 lasers that totally can reach about 10 kilojoules.
USA
The USA is the leader in this field. Or to be more precise - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (near San Francisco), as almost all ICF-relevant facilities, were, are and being build there.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the current largest ICF machine is located there. It is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF for short. It has 192 laser for delivering of 1.8 megajoules.
Fusion product
Notice that NIF has "ignition" in its name, and this is the picture that shows what do they expect:
Source: Research Gate
You can see that they present how NIF is a counterpart of ITER - first MCF machine that will give more energy out of the plasma than you give in. But this is far from true, as NIF is far from that goal. They are actually a counterpart to JET - a machine that should prove that ICF is possible scientifically...
However, their stuff was claiming that they have succeeded in getting ignition. But this was just due to their not-so-fair calculation. They divided output energy with the ABSORBED input instead of TOTAL input. If things are calculated properly they fall from "ignition" (over 100%) to less than 2%... while JET did 60% with such calculation.
So in the real situation, NIF did make ICF closer to JET on the following figure*:
Source: Figure 10.7 from McCracken & Stott, "Fusion - The Energy of Universe"
but still, faaaaaaaar from JET and even further from the ignition . . .
*I know, I call this picture for the fourth time. But it is really a good one :)
Next topic: the present of MCF
Please feel free to ask anything in the comments. I will either try to answer you in the comment or even make the new post.