Deep under the Nevada desert in the 1980s the US conducted secret nuclear weapons research.

 

Among the experiments was an effort to see if nuclear fusion, the reaction which powers the sun, could be sparked on earth in a controlled setting.

The experiments were classified, but it was widely known among physicists that the results had been promising.

That knowledge caught the attention of two young graduate students working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late 2000s, Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys.

The Los Alamos lab was originally set up in 1943 as a top-secret site to develop the first nuclear weapons. Located near Santa Fe, New Mexico it is now a US government research and development facility.

“When Alex and I learned about those tests at Los Alamos, our reaction was like ‘wow, inertial fusion has already worked!’. Laboratory-scale pellets were ignited, the details were classified, but enough was made public that we knew that ignition was achieved,” says Mr Galloway.

 

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