nuclear-news

Nuclear fusion’s moment of truth

No fusion experiment has yet produced more electricity than the facility consumes,

let alone demonstrated a powerplant that can operate reliably.

No fusion experiment has yet produced more
electricity than the facility consumes, let alone demonstrated a power
plant that can operate reliably.

 The precarious fusion boom. Start-ups are attracting billions. Some
scientists think the timeline is far too optimistic.

In late August, amid
the blinding New Mexico heat, politicians and investors wielding ceremonial
spades broke ground for a new facility that aims to trap the Sun in a
bottle. Pacific Fusion, a start-up founded and backed by elite scientists
and tech entrepreneurs, is building a nuclear fusion test site in
Albuquerque that it hopes will be a crucial step towards generating
commercial electricity from the same reaction that powers the Sun.

For now,
there is little more than pale, sandy earth to suggest what might
eventually rise there. But politicians attending the event spoke of fusion
as a historic transformation, with one Democratic senator comparing its
potential significance to humanity’s discovery of fire. Eric Schmidt, the
former Google chief executive and an investor in Pacific Fusion, said on
stage that if fusion eventually produced the majority of America’s
electricity, “it solves all the problems” created by the energy demands
of AI.

In the first eight months of this year, fusion start-ups attracted a
record $3.8bn in private funding, according to PitchBook, overtaking last
year’s total of $3.3bn, which was itself an all-time high. But while
there is broad agreement that fusion science has advanced substantially,
experts and start-ups disagree over how soon companies can deliver
meaningful power to the grid and whether providing that electricity will
make commercial sense.

No fusion experiment has yet produced more
electricity than the facility consumes, let alone demonstrated a power
plant that can operate reliably. Alain Bécoulet, chief scientist of the
publicly funded international fusion research project ITER, says connecting
a fusion power plant to the electricity grid “will never happen” within
the next five to 10 years.

 FT 16th Sept 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/ef511d46-a689-4868-9654-15b96a71586d

September 18, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA