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As AI, clean tech, climate response, and other uses grow, concerns are rising that the U.S. and the world are going to run out of electricity (and here). As John Ellis reports, there’s a controversial potential answer closer to hand than many had thought…

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature super-conducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.

“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.

A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65 percent of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90 percent by 2040.

The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions…

firstlightfusion.com, cfs.energy, telegraph.co.uk, web.mit.edu, ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp

From New Items (@EllisItems)

For a series of less-optimistic takes on the prospect of power from fusion: “Why are nuclear fusion reactors difficult?

* Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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As we ponder power, we might spare a thought for Irène Joliot-Curie; she died on this date in 1956. A chemist and physicist, she followed in the footsteps of her mother (Marie Curie), sharing the Nobel prize in Chemistry (in 1935, with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie) for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, and making her and her mother the first (and so far only) mother–daughter pair to have won Nobels.

Sadly, Irène also shared her mother’s fate: she died of leukemia resulting from radiation exposure during research.

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