Will We Ever Be Able to Harness Nuclear Fusion?

The year is 2050. The carbon crisis is a thing of the past. A new source of power delivers cheap, plentiful electricity to large, contained cities populated by millions of people. Fusion power has birthed a utopia on Earth by neutralizing the most imminent threat to human survival,the finite supply of fossil fuel, while eliminating a persistent source of conflict. All is well—until a robotic alien from outer space destroys your fusion plant along with the rest of your city.

The scenario just described is familiar to anyone who grew up playing the popular 1990s simulation game SimCity 2000. As far as fusion power is concerned, the predictions of Maxis (the company that designed SimCity) from two decades ago seem prescient: Steve Cowley, a plasma physicist and the CEO of the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority, expects the first viable demonstration reactors to be available sometime in the 2040s. That said, critics and proponents alike lament that nuclear fusion is “always 30 years away.” What’s changed? Recent breakthroughs indicate that the future of fusion is brighter than it has been in some time.

Physicists since the 1950s have been seeking to harness the power of the Sun. As it turns out, birthing a miniature star in a lab and keeping it under control is a difficult undertaking. The fusion reaction requires more energy than the reaction itself produces. It wasn’t until October 2013 that any project broke even, when the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California produced more energy than it consumed.

The success at the NIF, although exciting, is just another step on a long journey. To be commercially viable and to overcome basic inefficiencies in the conversion of raw energy into electricity, the reaction must continually produce 10 times the amount of power that goes into it. Candidates for exceeding this threshold include the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reaction (known as ITER, pronounced “eater”), a project with the backing of seven countries that should come online by the end of the decade. Recently, aerospace and technology giant Lockheed Martin’s covert Skunkworks facility has announced a breakthrough in fusion technology that may yield results within the decade.

Secrecy still surrounds the research, but Sientists hope that covert researchfacilities like Skunkworks will make “the impossible” possible.

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