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Besides the NIF, the biggest, there are the Megajoule Laser facility in France and the Shenguang-III laser facility in China; Russia also might be pursuing this approach, but the details are hard to ascertain.

Although the December 2022 shot at NIF produced a record-breaking 3.15 megajoules of energy from a 2.05 megajoule laser pulse, a gain of about 1.5, generating that pulse consumed hundreds of megajoules of electricity, and NIF can only do one shot per day.

The latter advantage means that although land-use effects alone add an extra 4–26 grams of CO2 emissions per megajoule of energy delivered from soya-based fuels, according to Field, carinata cuts 9–13 grams of emissions per megajoule from fuels.

It took far more energy in total — on the scale of 300 megajoules — to produce that 3.15 megajoule result.

However, that 2.05 megajoule input did not represent all the energy that went into the ignition process — just the amount that inefficient lasers managed to get to the hydrogen pellet.