Years of work, scientists have made a breakthrough that could change the future of energy. The Lawrence Livermore national laboratory and the Department of Energy announced this week, they successfully achieved energy producing nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is when two atoms are smashed together, which generates additional energy, at least in theory, up until now. With scientists using a fusion reaction process that produced more energy than they put into it. U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm called it a huge achievement for science and for clean energy. This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society. I spoke to Carolyn Quran's a plasma physicist at the University of Michigan's department of nuclear engineering about how this process works. We are literally fusing two light atoms together to make a heavier atom and then there's a slight difference in the mass between the atoms and that is released in energy. And it's actually the amount of energy is from Einstein's famous equation. E equals mc². So mass contains an absolutely enormous amount of energy that can be released using the fusion process. And so whereas the typical nuclear reactions that we all know about are involved in splitting atoms apart, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion pushes them together and makes energy that way. That's exactly right.