Fusion energy may not be too far away

The ‘breakthrough’ announced by the US National Ignition Facility has focused the spotlight on nuclear fusion. NIF reported a net energy gain (more output than input), which is deduced to have come from two nuclei of hydrogen atoms fusing to form a helium nucleus. But this is a baby step; there is a lot of runway to cover before nuclear fusion takes off, experts say.

But developments elsewhere seem to challenge this view.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) was set up in 2018 “on the basis of decades of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) fusion research”. It has raised $2 billion from the likes of Bill Gates, Google, Eni, Khosla Ventures, Soros Fund Management, and Temasek.

In collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and…