neon54 Inching Toward a Fusion Energy Future

Updated:2024-12-11 01:50    Views:178

In 1952neon54, a machine with a funny name and a funny shape was zapped to life in the mountains of New Mexico. The Perhapsatron, a doughnut-shaped glass tube surrounded by magnets, was one of the world’s first nuclear fusion devices. Its name reflected the feelings of its creator, James Tuck, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory: “Perhaps it will work and perhaps it won’t.”

For a long time, that’s how fusion was. Perhaps we could use the process that powers the sun to produce clean, abundant energy on Earth. Perhaps it would help us move past fossil fuels and global warming. Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Recently, though, in talking with dozens of people across the fusion world — start-up founders, investors, scientists at government labs — I’ve been hearing many fewer perhapses. There’s a confidence that commercial fusion is at last within striking distance, a prospect that I explored recently for The Times.

Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of the fusion company TAE Technologies, summarized where we are on the mountain: “The fog has cleared. We know where the peak is. We obviously have a journey still. We think we know how to ascend the last steps.”

What cleared the fog? You may have heard about a couple recent breakthroughs, like when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California produced more fusion energy than the energy in the incoming laser beams for a tiny moment in 2022. Behind those are advances on several fronts: Better computer modeling, to design better reactors. Better technology and better materials, to push the limits of what we can build.

But also, more people and more companies are putting in the work, and there’s more money, to construct prototypes and test out ideas — “blood, sweat and tears,” as Ben Levitt, vice president of research and development at the fusion start-up Zap Energy, put it.

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