Nuclear fusion
Energy released when light atomic nuclei join under extreme heat and pressure — the same process that powers stars.
When two light nuclei — typically isotopes of hydrogen — collide at temperatures above 100 million degrees, they fuse into a heavier nucleus and release far more energy than they required to collide. Unlike fission, the fuel (hydrogen from seawater) is abundant and the waste is short-lived helium. The hard part is confinement: no material can touch plasma at those temperatures, so reactors use magnetic fields or laser pulses to hold it long enough to extract net energy. Commercial fusion has been "decades away" for seventy years because sustaining the plasma costs more energy than it yields — that ratio, Q, is the scoreboard.
In megatrends
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The fusion scoreboard
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has started bolting in the 18 high-field magnets that the whole compact-fusion bet rides on — even as the company's own people quietly push the date for net energy from this year to next.
The fusion gun that isn't a power plant
A federal loan office has agreed to lend up to $263 million to finish a Wisconsin plant that fires fusion neutrons into liquid uranium — not to make power, but to make the medical isotope behind 40,000 US scans a day.
Fusion plant before the physics
Helion has started clearing ground in Malaga, Washington for Orion, a 50-megawatt plant it has contracted to sell Microsoft fusion electricity from 2028 — a building and a binding delivery date that exist before any of its machines has produced net power.
A decade of fusion, in one bet
ARPA-E pledged $135 million over 18 months to chip away at the toughest technical barriers blocking commercial fusion — almost exactly what the agency had spent on fusion across the entire prior decade.
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