FIA Archive

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.

For decades scientists have tried to replicate nuclear fusion – the process that powers the Sun. If successful it would provide a source of energy with far less waste than the current generation of fission reactors and would generate electricity without carbon emissions.

In the suburbs of Vancouver, a team is working on what they think is humanity’s best chance at clean, unlimited power, something we desperately need. A startup called General Fusion is building a nuclear fusion reactor and, if they succeed, it could mean the end of the fossil fuel era. Instead, we’d get our power from the…

John Holdren has heard the old joke a million times: fusion energy is 30 years away—and always will be. Despite the broken promises, Holdren, who early in his career worked as a physicist on fusion power, believes passionately that fusion research has been worth the billions spent over the past few decades—and that the work…

Limitless power with virtually no greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. For decades, researchers have looked for ways to control, confine and sustain fusion as an energy source. But there has been a lot of progress on a small scale, building on years of…