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The sun may be suspended in a far-off corner of our galaxy, some 91 million miles away, but on Wednesday, humans moved one step closer to mimicking its power on Earth.
Scientists at the Joint European Torus, a nuclear-fusion experiment based in the UK, announced on Wednesday that they had more than doubled the record for sustained nuclear-fusion time in December.
- JET’s tokamak produced 59 megajoules of energy over a “fusion pulse” for five seconds, compared to the previous record of 21.7 megajoules for about four seconds, set in 1997.
Even before this milestone, the commercial fusion industry was growing fast—there are at least 35 companies working on fusion worldwide, per the Fusion Industry Association. And late last year, the funding record for a fusion company was broken first by Helion, which raised $500 million in November, and then again by CFS, which raised $1.8 billion in December.
Looking ahead…JET’s breakthrough wasn’t enough to achieve nuclear fusion’s holy grail—generating more power than is used to fuel the reaction. But, according to Nature, it does provide hope for ITER, a $22 billion follow-up project slated for 2025, which will use the same approach to try and produce net power. ITER, based in France, is the world’s largest fusion reactor and a product of collaboration between 35 countries.
- “JET really achieved what was predicted. The same modeling now says ITER will work,”Josefine Proll, fusion physicist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the latest research, told Nature. “It’s a really, really good sign and I’m excited.”
- Some of those well-capitalized private fusion companies are also jockeying to be first to demonstrate net power: Helion wants to do so in 2024, while CFS is shooting for 2025.
But net-power demonstrations—a potential next step for fusion after this achievement—are just another waypoint on the journey to commercially deployed nuclear-fusion energy. Some experts think it will take two or three decades for fusion to make it to the grid.