Nuclear fusion — the same process that powers the Sun — has been a scientific goal since the 1950s. Fuse hydrogen isotopes, release enormous energy, produce no long-lived radioactive waste, and use seawater as fuel. The physics has always been sound. The engineering challenge has been immense.
The NIF Milestone In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore fired 192 laser beams at a target smaller than a pea. The result: 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy from 2.05 MJ of laser energy — ignition, for the first time in history.
By 2024, NIF repeated and improved on the result. These experiments use inertial confinement fusion (ICF): extreme compression and heating of a deuterium-tritium pellet until fusion begins.
The caveat: those 2 MJ of laser light required ~300 MJ of grid electricity to produce. Wall-plug efficiency remains the central engineering problem.
Tokamaks and ITER The other main approach — magnetic confinement in a donut-shaped tokamak — reached a milestone in 2022 when JET (Joint European Torus) set a world record: 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy over 5 seconds.
ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in France, is 10x larger than JET. First plasma is targeted for 2025. ITER is not designed to generate electricity — it is designed to demonstrate Q>10 (10x energy out vs. in).
Private Fusion Companies Over 40 private fusion startups have attracted billions in investment. Commonwealth Fusion Systems aims to use high-temperature superconducting magnets to build a compact tokamak (SPARC) by 2027. TAE Technologies pursues a field-reversed configuration. Helion Energy — backed by Sam Altman — has a signed power purchase agreement with Microsoft.
Fusion is no longer just a government science project. Whether it will deliver grid power in the 2030s remains genuinely uncertain — but the gap between physics and engineering has never been smaller.