When you think of the future, what do you think of? Flying cars, water desalination, and humanity on Mars. It all seems so possible! All you need is one small thing. Well, a big thing. It should be no shocker that the one thing humans lack is power. But recent hope has risen with the latest breakthrough in nuclear fusion and promises for copious amounts of clean energy.

Currently, the world uses roughly 25,000 terawatt-hours of energy annually. That’s the accumulated energy expenditure of every light, machine, and other energy user in the world. To compensate for our usage, we need sources of energy. However, finding a sustainable and clean source is difficult. Coal plants turn Earth into Venus. Dams bleed rivers dry. Nuclear power plants can make entire cities uninhabitable. Other “renewable” sources have other issues and can’t run 24/7.

Almost all sources. You forgot our friend, nuclear fusion: clean, economically viable, and renewable. The thing is, nuclear fusion isn’t a new concept. The bombs that the United States used on Japan to end World War II were fission bombs. After that, though, the United States decided that they would take their nuclear game a little further and have a really cold skirmish with the USSR, leading to the development of fusion bombs. What’s the difference? 

Nuclear fission is the process by which atoms break apart and their electrons get shot out, hitting other atoms and causing a chain reaction, releasing extreme amounts of excess energy. This mechanism allowed the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to vaporize anything in a 1 mile radius, level the cities with shockwaves, scald everything to death, and make radioactive fallout: cancer-giving dust. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is what happens in the sun. Fusion has the same destructive capabilities as nuclear fission, but via a different process and with the potential for more destruction with less material. Nuclear fusion produces absurd amounts of energy while being almost infinite and clean. There is no waste, no emissions, just energy. It’s done when elements that are chemically lighter fuse into chemically heavier elements, most commonly hydrogen to helium. Hydrogen already fuses under extreme heat and pressure in stars. The reaction’s allowed our star to illuminate the face of earth. It releases lots of energy, which is why the U.S. likes it. (It’s also good bomb material.)

Now, why can’t we use fusion for power? You see, trying to make a fusion reactor is trying to figure out how to have a small nuclear bomb constantly going off. In addition, it’s really hard to have a stable reaction, especially because it has to be so concentrated. 

On December 5th, 2022, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists managed to create energy from fusion. They used x-ray lasers and fused deuterium (a hydrogen atom with an extra neutron) by shooting the two atoms together. This was the first time fusion produced more energy than it used, almost 80 years exactly after the discovery of nuclear fission by Enrico Fermi. 

The hope created by this simple reaction was enormous. Scientists and civilians alike were shocked to learn of the potential this could bring. Climate change could be resolved with so much sustainable clean energy through nuclear fusion. Water desalination requires lots of energy and is viable but expensive. Nuclear fusion could solve that. Interstellar travel could theoretically be fueled by nuclear fusion. 

The possibilities of nuclear fusion are endless. It’s quite literally putting a star in a box. Maybe one day, the innovation will allow us to each keep a pet star to fuel our house. With theoretically 30 million years' worth of almost unlimited energy in seawater (that contains deuterium), humanity could solve a lot of its problems in the meantime. Obviously, this isn’t completely commercialized or ready to use yet, but it’s at least got a lot of us hoping for a better future. In the meantime, we’re still stuck with plastic stars in boxes.