Nuclear fusion as a source of electricity always seems to be just around the corner. As the old joke goes, “Thirty years ago, fusion was 30 years away from becoming a viable commercial reality”—a comment borne out in the Bulletin’s own pages, if not precisely on a 30-year timescale. In 1971, physicist Richard Post of what was then the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory published a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ article featuring a chart that showed how fusion—that is, the fusing of hydrogen atoms to release energy, a process that powers all stars, including the Earth’s sun—would be widely available on a commercial scale, routinely pumping electrons to the electrical grid, by the year 1990 (although he hedged his bets by labeling it “An Optimist’s Fusion Power Timetable” [emphasis added]). That optimism was widely shared, judging from the literature in the science and technology press of the time. But it proved to be misplaced; although militaries have thousands of nuclear warheads based on the fusion process, everything about commercial fusion as an energy has proven harder and taken longer than expected. For example, more than 60 years passed since the development of the first fusion “tokamak” reactor in the old Soviet Union to the first sustained fusion “burn,” or ignition, at the National Ignition Facility in the United States in 2022.

Full opinion : Is nuclear fusion the only way to fulfil the insatiable energy needs of tomorrows world.

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