FIA Archive

Walking with Michl Binderbauer into his 2-acre laboratory feels a bit like taking a factory tour with Willy Wonka. In one corner Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies, shows off a new machine that blasts cancer tumors with a neutron beam. Engineers huddle in a control room. Beyond their window: Norman. 

On a Friday afternoon, a small group of scientists gathered in front of a bank of computer screens near a Ping-Pong table in a warehouse close to Britain’s Oxford University. Scattered conversations and laughter hushed as a siren started blaring.

In 1920 Arthur Eddington, an English astrophysicist, gave a lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the internal structure of stars. In it, he hypothesised that what makes the sun shine—then a matter of much debate—was some sort of nuclear reaction.

For decades, the quest for nuclear fusion energy has been driven by giant government-led projects — with giant price tags to match.

Not long before he died, tech visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-country quest to replicate the workings of the Sun. The goal is to one day produce clean, almost limitless energy by fusing atoms together rather than splitting them apart.

For the entirety of recorded history, humans have worshipped nuclear fusion. It’s gone by different names over the millennia, of course: the Egyptians called it Ra, the Greeks called it Helios, and the Aztecs knew it as Tonatiuh.

The prospect of fusion energy—a potentially limitless and clean source of power—has just edged a little closer. Scientists believe they have solved a fundamental problem with building reactors that produce fusion power.