We make lightning now, and it has two opposite jobs
Lightning used to belong to gods.
In New Mexico a fusion machine is going up: over 150 truck-sized capacitor modules ring a central chamber like a giant crab's legs. Fired together they release a pulse thousands of times stronger than any lightning bolt; the magnetic field squeezes a pea-sized hydrogen capsule until its nuclei meld into helium.
Pacific Fusion (founded 2023, over a billion raised on milestones) bets on being the first machine to make more energy than it uses: 80 megajoules in per shot, about 100 out, by decade's end. Its edge: NIF first reached ignition in 2022 with 192 lasers, yet under 1% of its energy reaches the fuel; pulsed power should deliver ~12%.
The second job is stranger. It rises near Sandia National Laboratories, the nuclear-weapons lab, helping tune pulsed power for weapons research: the ageing US warhead stockpile. Its CTO calls it transformative for fusion energy and defence.
One bolt, two assignments: light the grid, keep the bombs honest. Even at full design each shot yields about a fifth of what a power plant needs, and one fusion engineer says there's still a long way to go. The gods had it simpler.