Nuclear fusion is climate advocates' holy grail, and in recent months there has been some significant progress towards creating clean and virtually limitless energy. Fusion is the same process that powers our sun and other stars in the galaxy, and recent advancements in research are inching the ambitious goal of clean, unlimited power, closer to reality.

A Very Brief, Very Basic Explainer of Fusion

Scientists and researchers have been working on fusion since the 1920s. Unlike nuclear fission, which is used in the world’s nuclear plants today, nuclear fusion doesn’t produce radioactive waste. Fusion happens when two or more atoms are smashed together to form a more dense atom, and the process releases a ton of energy. The main byproduct of fusion is helium.

Most fusion work today involves two elements: Deuterium, which comes from seawater, and Tritium. Tritium is radioactive and comes from a lithium process, which makes it less climate-friendly, but most experts agree that the fuel used for fusion is relatively clean. If you’re interested in a getting deeper understanding of nuclear fusion, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a great primer on the topic, that is far better than this brief overview.

Some of the issues with fusion include everything from technical challenges like the development of materials that can withstand atomic bombardment inside a machine, and how exactly to harness the power to convert it into energy. There’s also a lot of misinformation in the public sphere about the risks of fusion (people frequently confuse it with fission) and those will have to be addressed.

Where Are We With Fusion Technology?

Over the last few years, there have been significant developments in fusion research. In 2022, a California lab made a key breakthrough: a fusion reaction produced more energy than was consumed. That result is known as “ignition” or net energy gain, and according to Bloomberg, when the team was able to replicate it again in July of 2023, “It suggested that the core physics of controlled fusion had been cracked, creating the possibility of a process to produce cheap, carbon-free electricity.”

A flood of investment has come into the space, too, both in private, public, and governmental forms. While many experts say we’re anywhere from 10 to 30 years away from commercial nuclear fusion, as Bloomberg reports, “Investment surged to $2.6 billion in 2021 from about $300 million in 2020. It fell back to $1.2b in 2022 and was at $544m in the first half of 2023, according to BloombergNEF.” Bloomberg says that the biggest backers of fusion start-ups are big, recognizable names like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel.

On the government and international front, in November of 2022, the US and UK announced a partnership to accelerate the development of fusion technologies. In December of the same year, the EU and Japan began fusion testing at the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion plant just outside Tokyo. Then there’s the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is the biggest research project in history based in France, which was recently delayed by ten years (and rising costs) because of supply chain issues, amongst other things. In 2024, the U.S. government has also significantly increased funding for fusion energy research, allocating $790 million for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. In the U.S., there is also the Fusion Energy Bill, which is focused on fusion commercialization, which passed through Congress in June this year and is headed to President Biden’s desk for signature.

The Last Few Months in Fusion News

Innovation and research in the nuclear fusion space hasn’t slowed down, either. In February of this year, scientists near Oxford set a nuclear fusion record by sustaining 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds using only 0.2 millgrams of fuel. According to CNN, that equates to enough energy to power approximately 12,000 homes for five seconds of time. That experiment was the last one for the JET (Joint European Torus) tokamak, which has been in operation for the last 40 years.

As it turns out, February this year was a big month for fusion news.Researchers at Princeton University demonstrated the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to control fusion reactions more dynamically. AI can dynamically manage multiple and various types of instability that come up in the fusion process. Reportedly, their approach not only promises more effective control of fusion reactions but also offers insights into the underlying physics of fusion, potentially accelerating the development of practical fusion energy solutions.

In April this year, South Korea’s “Artificial sun” set a record for time, holding 100 million degrees, which happens to be seven times hotter than the core of the sun. Sustaining the high temperatures is considered to be a critical step in scaling up fusion operations to commercial levels.

Finally, just last month, scientists at the Unversity of Wisconsin at Madison recently announced that they’d created their first plasma with their magnetic mirror device called WHAM or Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror. The system only became operational on July 15, and on July 22,the team at UW-Madison created the plasma. That plasma, while it may not necessarily be directly comparable to that created in a fusion reactor, as Interesting Engineering notes, was able to remain stable at ten times the density limit (called the Greenwald limit) where plasmas become unstable. This is an important breakthrough because the more dense the plasma is, the more nuclei crash into one another, and the more efficient the reaction becomes.

While these aren’t all the advancements that have happened in nuclear fusion, they are relatively big events in the advancement of the science and scalability of fusion.

Nuclear Fusion Facilities around the World

ITER was finally completed in July this year, but as I mentioned above, actual testing has been delayed from 2025 to 2039, at the earliest. ITER is a big international project that’s been in the works and under construction since 1988. Ground didn’t break in the project until 2007, and some believe that the significant delay to first plasma, will likely make it useless to stave off or reduce the effects of climate change. ITER is focused on proving the “feasibility of fusion as a large-scale feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.”

Once ITER is up and running, plans are to start on another facility known as DEMO, which will be ITER’s successor. DEMO will focus on turning the power generated from fusion into useful electricity.

The Future of Nuclear Fusion and Commercial Production

The fusion sector is seeing increased investments worldwide. Novel fusion reactor systems and smaller fusion players are receiving substantial funding, which shows a growing interest in diverse approaches to achieving practical fusion energy. Despite the massive amount of investment as well as global interest, commercializing nuclear fusion is still a significant challenge, with plenty of engineering and scientific obstacles to overcome. Continued progress and investment indicate that fusion could become a part of the green energy mix in the latter half of the century, though its unclear how much impact these technologies can have on the rapidly heating planet. Yet, a sustainable and carbon-free energy source for the future is well worth the wait.

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