the first design with the specific goal of reaching ignition. Nova also failed, this time due to severe variation in laser intensity in its beams (and differences in intensity between beams) caused by filamentation that resulted in large non-uniformity in irradiation smoothness at the target and asymmetric implosion. The techniques pioneered earlier could not address these new issues. This failure led to a much greater understanding of the process of implosion, and the way forward again seemed clear, namely to increase the uniformity of irradiation, reduce hot-spots in the laser beams through beam smoothing techniques to reduce Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities and increase laser energy on target by at least an order of magnitude. Funding was constrained in the 1980s. National Ignition Facility The resulting 192-beam design, dubbed the National Ignition Facility, started construction at LLNL in 1997. NIF's main objective is to operate as the flagship experimental device of the so-called nuclear stewardship program, supporting LLNLs traditional bomb-making role. Completed in March 2009, NIF experiments set new records for power delivery by a laser. As of October 7, 2013, for the first time a fuel capsule gave off more energy than was applied to it. In June, 2018 NIF announced record production of 54kJ of fusion energy output. On August 8, 2021 the NIF produced 1.3MJ of output, 25x higher than the 2018 result, generating 70% of the break-even definition of ignition - when energy out equals energy in. Fast ignition Fast ignition may offer a way to directly heat fuel after compression, thus decoupling the heating and compression phases. In this approach the target is first compressed "normally" using a laser system. When the implosion reaches maximum density (at the stagnation point or "bang time"), a second short, high power petawatt (PW) laser delivers a single pulse to on one side of the core, dramatically heating it and starting ignition. The two types of fast ignition are the "plasma bore-through" method and the "cone-in-shell" method. In plasma bore-through, the second laser bores through the outer plasma of an imploding capsule, impinges on and heats the core. In the cone-in-shell method, the capsule is mounted on the end of a small high-z (high atomic number) cone such that the tip of the cone projects into the core. In this second method, when the capsule is imploded, the laser has a clear view to the core and does not use energy to