Last year, researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California announced they had achieved a major breakthrough by heating up a peppercorn-sized sample of two hydrogen isotopes well past the temperature of the Sun's core using a massive laser.
Scientists said at the time that it was the most significant advancement in fusion since it began.
"To me, this is a Wright Brothers moment," Hurricane said at the time.
A year after the landmark achievement, follow-up experiments are falling far short of expectations, forcing the researchers involved to take a step back and reexamine the entire thing.
Their best results have only been able to get to 50 percent of the energy that was produced.
It's an unfortunate mistake that shows how far away we are from creating a sustainable and green source of energy by fusion.
Hurricane said that the fact that they have done it is proof that they can do it. Our issue is persistently doing it.
The experiment yielded 1.3 megajoules of energy after 192 laser beams shot 1.9 megajoules of energy. The experiment crushed the previous record by 1,000-fold.
A more conventional attempt to turn fusion energy into reality involves heating the plasma to millions of degrees inside a donut-shaped reactor.
Hurricane and his colleagues are trying to figure out why they can't reproduce these numbers. According to Nature, the trials yielded between 400 and 700 kilojoules.
The technology is still in its infancy and it's hard to predict.
That does not bode well for the future of the program.
Stephen Bodner is a physicist who headed a similar program at the US Naval Research Lab.
The laser-fusion facility is going back to the drawing board.
The startup says it is working on a simple solution for practical fusion power.
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