An experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California has just brought humanity closer to harnessing energy from the same nuclear reactions that power the sun.

Scientists at the facility managed to generate a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules, which is about 70% of the power that was used to initiate fusion. The ultimate goal of nuclear fusion scientists would be to generate more power than what was put into the system, thereby creating a nearly limitless and clean source of energy.

For the experiment, scientists fired 192 lasers at a single point to generate pressures 100 times the density of lead and heat of more than 100 million degrees Celsius. The lasers, which required approximately 1.9 megajoules of power to operate, had kickstarted thermonuclear fusion inside a capsule that contained deuterium and tritium.

The reaction inside the capsule, which was about the size of a BB, produced more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for about 100 trillionths of a second. The power generated by the experiment is roughly eight times more than that generated by previous experiments.

DOE undersecretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA administrator, Jill Hurby, congratulated the team at the National Ignition Facility for their “extraordinary results.”

Debbie Callahan, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said the experiment’s success is a huge forward step for the entire fusion community as it will open new avenues of research.

“The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process,” the co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, Professor Jeremy Chittenden, said.