According to the World Nuclear Association, fusion offers a nearly endless energy source with close to zero emissions. Surging power demand from AI and other applications for carbon-free energy sources that operate 24/7 are steeply increasing levels of interest in nuclear energy. Nuclear energy produces about 10% of the world’s electricity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Small modular reactors

It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it proved fusion could be a power source, rather than a power drain. Then, in 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved ‘Lawson’s criterion,’ making the first net-positive energy gain from a controlled fusion reaction. Scientists have been conducting fusion reactions since 1952, but these reactions always consumed more energy than they produced. With fusion, our oceans contain enough energy for billions of years. And it will be the cheapest reliable power, and incidentally, the cleanest power too. By the time their children retire, fusion may be the world’s dominant energy source, ushering in an era of energy abundance, not scarcity.

Meanwhile, the space economy is expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035 as space-enabled technologies advance. For over half a century, microchips have paved the way for increasingly powerful electronic devices. Sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles increased by 12% in March compared to the same month in 2023, data from Rho Motion shows.

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Can we get to fusion temperatures in a compact device? So instead of building ever larger tokamak devices, with huge costs and long timescales, we can see a way forward by increasing the magnetic field in more compact devices. The second tackled one of the toughest of the engineering challenges of a compact spherical tokamak – the shielding of the centre. Start-ups are also rising to the challenge – each with new, smaller solutions to the fusion problem. Lockheed Martin aims to build a compact fusion reactor in 10 years using a cylindrical design with magnets at each end. In recent years, some have been questioning the possibility of a smaller way to fusion.

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“If we want to take this forward, public-private partnerships are going to be essential,” she said. Using laser beams, the amount of energy from the fusion reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target for an instant. In August 2023, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California repeated a breakthrough they first made in December 2022, achieving a “net energy gain” in fusion ignition. It produced 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds – or enough energy to heat up to five hot baths, according to the BBC, triple what it generated back in 1997. The most promising combination for power on Earth today is the fusion of a deuterium atom with a tritium one.

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CFS is racing against Helion, another US fusion startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which plans to bring a fusion power plant online by 2028 and has signed Microsoft as its first off-take partner. In parallel, governments, fusion markets review utilities and private industry are expanding the fusion ecosystem. A new fusion roadmap published by the US Department of Energy in October outlines how the technology could enter that country’s energy mix by the early 2030s.

• Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation.
• Early power-purchase agreements from end users such as Google, global energy company Eni and Microsoft signal rising industry confidence.
• 4 ways the private sector can empower utility resilience amid severe climate risks
• The energy crisis in Europe (and parts of the US) is making this winter a particularly cold one for many people struggling to afford the high costs of gas and oil for home heating.

The transition to nuclear fusion in the coming decade could provide just that. The US Department of Energy has announced a breakthrough on nuclear fusion, achieving a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers. Unlocking Latin America and the Caribbean’s clean energy future “SMRs are compact, reliable, versatile, require minimal land and have potential for standardized mass-manufacture production that can achieve the scale of deployment required to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centres and transport.” Emissions-free nuclear fusion technology could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change, if it can be scaled up. The buzz around fusion energy as a way to reduce emissions keeps building.

SMRs could also help decarbonize heavy industry due to their ability to be located very close to the source of demand. AI is helping researchers speed up fusion progress by modelling and analysing complex systems. Many experts think that fusion is still two or three decades away from being commercially viable, though some start-ups aim to have plants up and running by the 2030s. We will deliver net energy conditions well before the end of the decade and commercial net energy by the early 2030s. For example, two hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, releasing far more energy than fission.

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He was launching an international engagement plan – involving 35 countries – to boost nuclear fusion through research and development. The breakthrough came after the final experiment at the UK’s JET fusion laboratory in Oxford produced a new world record for fusion power generation. There are several “recipes” for cooking up nuclear fusion, which rely on different atomic combinations. China has entered the nuclear fusion race, according to reports in Nature and the Financial Times in August and September 2024. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and stars, merges two atomic nuclei into a larger one, releasing energy.

In the US — where the heating oil used to fuel furnaces in the northeast is in short supply, and the closure of nuclear plants across the country is leading to skyrocketing electric bills — many are in the midst of a cold and expensive winter. Commercial fusion power generation is expected by some to roll out in the 2030s — which could give the world a seismic final push to meet the UN’s 2050 climate goals, if implemented broadly and quickly. Pioneering inventors, including TAE Technologies in Southern California, are racing to bring this natural process that fuels the sun down to Earth, with terrestrial fusion power plants. While the growth in renewables over the past decade has been promising, nuclear fusion is only beginning to gain the recognition and support required to push it toward commercial use.

• At the same time, the Forum is also working to support a more integrated approach to energy solutions, including advanced nuclear, clean fuels, hydrogen and carbon removal.
• By using reinforcement learning, scientists were able to predict plasma tearing in the tokamak reactor DIII-D at the National Fusion Facility in San Diego, which would disrupt the reaction.
• Australia, Germany and Japan are also pursuing fusion, according to Reuters.
• That ability could come from commercial fusion energy, creating a game changer for desalination by taking the energy overhead costs of desal and cutting them to nearly zero.

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Platforms like the Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community can help speed up this cooperation and accelerate the deployment of new technologies from decades to years, such as clean fuels and hydrogen, advanced nuclear, storage and carbon removal. At the same time, the Forum is also working to support a more integrated approach to energy solutions, including advanced nuclear, clean fuels, hydrogen and carbon removal. It is a cross-industry platform building new coalitions and delivering insights required for a sustainable, secure and just energy future. The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities.

Reshoring manufacturing from Asia and overseas to the US already cuts down on emissions both from shipping and production (for example, Chinese factories often rely on coal-fired power plants). More recently, factories still need some proximity to high-wattage transmission lines that can supply large quantities of electricity. As technology developed in the early 1800s, turbine systems could power mills of all sorts.

Heat pumps are already gathering momentum

We are working to shepherd fusion energy’s leap from experimental laboratories to grid-ready power plants in the 2030s. That’s a huge step forward for the decades-long global mission of fusion scientists, providing humanity with a cheap, limitless and carbon-free source of electricity. How is the World Economic Forum facilitating the transition to clean energy?

AI and nuclear fusion

The energy crisis in Europe (and parts of the US) is making this winter a particularly cold one for many people struggling to afford the high costs of gas and oil for home heating. Within electric vehicles, there’s an energy ecosystem that needs improvement to make electric vehicles a more viable choice for everyone too. Under the fusion-powered grow lights, hydroponically grown strawberries or lettuce or other crops can be grown to maturity without the use of pesticides and other harsh chemicals.

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Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation. Since fusion power is dispatchable and constant, it offers a solution while reducing costs. Energy consumption and production contribute to two-thirds of global emissions, and 81% of the global energy system is still based on fossil fuels, the same percentage as 30 years ago.

One new way we could grow food that would be more environmentally sustainable would be hydroponic vertical farms — if the need for electricity to power the grow lights and other necessary equipment weren’t so high. With fusion powering the factory (and the logistics infrastructure too), those reductions would be even greater. That ability could come from commercial fusion energy, creating a game changer for desalination by taking the energy overhead costs of desal and cutting them to nearly zero. It’ll take years to get there, but at fusion’s fullest capacity, anyone will be able to use as much electricity as they need, with no environmental costs and very little expense. It helps increase public confidence in advanced energy solutions, technology readiness, demand and business cases while enabling collaborations and informing policy.