How private companies are bringing clean, green, nuclear fusion energy closer to reality

IMAGINE A POWER source that produces hardly any waste and is carbon-free. That’s the tantalising promise of controlled nuclear fusion, which physicists have been trying to achieve for 70 years. It is a simulacrum of the process that powers the sun, colliding atomic nuclei of various sorts to release huge amounts of energy.

Fusion research was once the provenance of governments and national laboratories, but now private companies are getting in on the act. Dozens of them are exploring different ways to create the extreme conditions needed to achieve fusion here on Earth. And contrary to the old joke that fusion power is thirty years away, and always will be, some of them think they can get there in a decade.