IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE...:

At the National Ignition Facility, which is the size of three football fields, super powerful laser beams recreate the temperatures and pressures similar to what exists in the cores of stars, giant planets and inside exploding nuclear weapons, a spokesperson tells CNBC.

On Aug. 8, a laser light was focused onto a target the size of a BB which resulted in "a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second," the written statement says.

What's key is that the results make "a significant step toward ignition," said a statement from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"Ignition is a tipping-point in the fusion process where the fusion heats itself and overwhelms all the cooling losses that can occur," Hurricane told CNBC. "Once this happens a feedback process is generated where heating creates more fusion, which creates more heating, which creates more fusion, and so on."

Getting to the place where a fusion reaction makes more energy than it uses, ignition, is something of a holy grail for companies which are trying to commercialize fusion and sell it as a clean energy source.

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