There is a joke that fusion power is 30 years away and always will be. But 2022 has seen records broken and hypotheses confirmed by experiments. The remaining hurdles are issues for engineers, not physicists, at the University of Manchester, UK, told New Scientist earlier this year.
In February, the Joint European Torus reactor near Oxford in the UK sustained super-hot plasma for 5 seconds, producing a record 59 megajoules of energy. The hope is that ITER, a larger reactor being built in France, will build on this once it is running in 2025.
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Another step forward came in the same month at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where the TCV reactor ran for 2 seconds controlled by an artificial intelligence. Taming the hot plasma in a reactor is crucial, and DeepMind鈥檚 AI shaped this in various ways, some of which may improve plasma stability.
In September, in South Korea, a further advance arrived, with a fusion reaction notching up a remarkable combination of duration and heat: 30 seconds at more than 100 million掳C.
And in a test on 5 December, the US National Ignition Facility fusion reactor generated more energy from a reaction than was put in by a laser 鈥� a first for a fusion experiment. It seems the question now isn鈥檛 whether it will work, but who will get there first.
