“Sooner or later this will be cracked,” he says. Chris Kelsall, chief executive of Tokamak Energy, agrees. “I’m convinced that it’s going to happen”, says Chapman. State support is also likely to be needed to build a fusion power plant that actually feeds electricity into the grid, adds Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).īut whether it comes from small-scale private enterprise, huge national or international fusion projects, or a bit of both, practical nuclear fusion finally seems to be on the horizon. “I think bold targets are necessary,” she says. Timelines that companies project should be regarded not so much as promises but as motivational aspirations, says Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist who is the FIA’s UK director of communications, and a communications consultant for the fusion firm Tokamak Energy, in Culham. “They all have stated constantly to be about ten years away from a working fusion reactor, and they still do.” “Private companies say they’ll have it working in ten years, but that’s just to attract funders,” says Tony Donné, programme manager of the Eurofusion consortium which conducts experiments at the state-run Joint European Torus, established at Culham in the late 1970s.

Several fusion researchers who don’t work for private firms told Nature that, although prospects are undeniably exciting, commercial fusion in a decade is overly optimistic. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s. “There’s a very good shot to get there within less than ten years,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. “Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build,” says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Īnd just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion - desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy - within a decade. “We can smell that we’re getting close.” Investors sense the real prospect of returns on their money: Google and the New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, for instance, are among those funding the fusion company TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, California, which has raised around $880 million so far. “The mood has changed,” says Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. This is “the SpaceX moment for fusion”, says Mowry, referring to Elon Musk’s space-flight company in Hawthorne, California.

That, too, was once confined to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private enterprise. In this respect, advocates of fusion technology say it has many parallels with the space industry. Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021 Lead image: The world's strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet will be used in a 2025 fusion reactor in Massachusetts. Key to these efforts are advances in materials research and computing that are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long.Īrtist’s impression of General Fusion’s planned plant at Culham, UK.

There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector the 18 firms that have declared their funding say they have attracted more than US$2.4 billion in total, almost entirely from private investments (see ‘Fusion funding’). Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. But next year, construction will start here on a gleaming building of glass and steel that could house what many people consider to be an essential technology to meet demand for clean energy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The ancient village of Culham, nestled in a bend of the River Thames west of London, seems an unlikely launching pad for the future.

Nuclear fusion vs fission fuel supply