Strangely, the power used in each trial is only enough to provide electricity to about 100 houses for two minutes.
Electricity is provided by ordinary wall current from a local utility company.
This achievement resulted from advances in theory and experiments by a team involving DOE and Department of Defense labs, and universities. Other experiments in a still smaller volume target suggest temperatures may eventually be achieved on Z in the range of 2.0 to 2.2 million degrees. The now-realistic goal of reaching 2.0 million degrees is so significant because radiation temperatures in the range of two million to three million degrees are generally considered an essential condition for nuclear fusion. This potential for the Z facility was demonstrated in experiments performed by a group from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a group from Sandia in New Mexico. These small-volume experiments have thus far been limited by implosion instabilities, but the most recent results indicate that these instabilities can be controlled.