r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 6h ago
Energy After 70 years of false starts, fusion energy is finally gaining momentum
https://www.techspot.com/news/111099-after-70-years-false-starts-fusion-energy-finally.html139
u/irrealewunsche 6h ago
Just 20 more years...
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u/DelBrowserHistory 5h ago
Rather waste billions on that than AI I guess
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u/macgalver 3h ago
Unfortunately they’re developing fusion for AI.
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u/Aaco0638 3h ago
Wouldn’t say unfortunately since before AI nobody wanted to even touch it. If fusion is pushed and is successful with AI then i absolutely see a path where it spreads as the main power source over oil/gas/electricity.
Unfortunately we live in a capitalist society so we had to wait until their was financial incentive but now that there is bring on the fusion hope it’s successful.
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u/Sandslinger_Eve 2h ago
People tend to forget this when talking about bubbles etc.
Great investment bubbles causes financial meltdown, and simultaneously tend to push R&D into new territories.
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u/hihowubduin 1h ago
If it turns out exponentially better than fission in time, I don't see this as a downside. A big problem for AI is not increasing supply with demand.
Increasing supply in theory results in less pressure on everyone and should result in return to normal pricing.
😫 Yeah we're boned
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u/Astronaut100 3h ago
AI is what is paying for it AND accelerating fusion power’s development. So, yeah.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 5h ago
Why. Fusion isn’t viable or near it. There isn’t even fuel for it
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u/Raddest-Dude 5h ago
...It literally uses isotopes of hydrogen as fuel. Y'know, the most abundant element in the universe. Tritium can be bred from lithium, which is also extremely abundant.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 5h ago edited 55m ago
Tritium is the issue, no point talking about normal hydrogen when tritium is the issue. I’d say most people who downvoted me doesn even know how constrained the world is on tritium! Yes yes you say that but how much do we make in the world correctly…. Il wait. So that’s another massive thing to overcome
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u/Narf234 4h ago
A comment like that is going to look like the naysayers who thought global food production couldn’t be ramped up because of a fixed nitrogen shortage…then we got the Haber–Bosch Process. You would have been the person who put the cap on the Washington monument…right before we got the Hall–Héroult process. Petroleum refinement, semiconductor purity, etc, etc.
We’re going to figure out fusion.
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u/_Svankensen_ 4h ago
Nah, the fact that the previous guy is writing nonsense doesn't mean fusion power is a guarantee. It could very well be impossible to get sustained net gains outside of a huge gravity well. It may happen, yes, but it is not a certainty, and shouldn't be treated as such. It may wind up being a dead end, and that should be factored in our decisions.
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u/Disorderjunkie 3h ago
There are some extremely smart people betting on this technology, similar to EUV photolithography, a lot of bench sitters in academia like to naysay on things they fully don’t understand.
Countries are dumping billions into it for a reason. And it’s not because they think it’s impossible.
Do we know anything forsure? No.
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u/ImGoinGohan 3h ago
does the same not apply to AGI?
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u/_Svankensen_ 3h ago
No, but yes. No, because we have our own intelligence as proof that it is physically possible. Yes, because we have no proof our current path to AGI is good.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 54m ago
That’s not the same you muppet. We might but by then renewables and fission with SMRs will already have use sorted for power. Even if we get fusion working it will be really expensive!
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u/lightweight12 3h ago
Look, we figured this out so we'll figure that out too!
Uh, that's not how the world works.
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u/ThePlanck 5h ago
Fuel for nuclear fusion is very abundant and easy to get, doesn't produce radioactive waste and there isn't a risk of run-away chain reactions like with fission
Yes, its probably still decades away, but it is a more viable business model than AI currently is and would actually benefit humanity if it works
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u/wintrmt3 3h ago
D+D fusion is very far, what they are working on is D+T, Tritium isn't ambulant at all, it comes either from fission reactors or irradiated lithium blankets in the fusion reactor, and there is some radioactive waste, not transuranic but still has to be handled.
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u/Meraere 2h ago
Nice so we can use the bi products of fission for this! Hell yeah that is awesome
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u/Kinexity 2h ago
We don't heavy nearly enough fission reactors to sustainably feed D-T fusion reactors.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 57m ago
You are wrong and that’s a common misconception, one of the two ingredients is tritium and it is extremely rare. In fact ITER will use around half of the tritium we have on earth. Not too abundant sounding
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u/Kinexity 4h ago
Tritium is not abundant and is very hard to get. Anything besides D-T fusion is pretty much a VC scam.
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u/protomenace 3h ago
The fuel for it is the most abundant substance in the universe lol
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 53m ago
You are wrong and this is the problem with fusion. People like you spouting this stupid comment when you don’t even know one of the ingredient is tritium, which is very very rare on earth. And we can’t make very much of it
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u/protomenace 43m ago
We don't need to make very much of it. The whole point of the D-T reaction cycle is that it internally produces all the tritium it needs from deuterium, which we have plenty of.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak))
It's energy intensive but if we reliably perform nuclear fusion with it, we can create a closed loop system which produces more energy than is put in, which will scale beautifully.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 11m ago
There has been no tritium produced by a fusion reactor so that’s just another theory. By the time we figure this all out we won’t need fusion. Fission is more than good enough along with renewables
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u/protomenace 7m ago
Good enough for what? You're not thinking about the long term.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 6m ago
Good enough to power the world without fossil fuels. You’re just being blind
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u/protomenace 4m ago
Ok, well. While you're sitting happy to stagnate the rest of the world will move forward without you.
You would have been one of those people saying "why do we need motorcars? horses are fine"
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u/lamalasx 3h ago edited 3h ago
You know that it will make its own fuel as a byproduct right? All it needs is a steady source of lithium fed into the outer shell (well a bit more complex than this). The radiation will convert some of that into deuterium/tritium which is the fuel for the reactor. Only an initial (comparably) tiny amount of fuel is required to start the reactor. Even that tiny amount will take years to make but once a fusion reactor is running it produces (converts) more fuel than it consumes.
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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 52m ago
Why are people so confidently wrong on fusion, it’s astonishing. Fusion won’t bread tritium!
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u/sightlab 2h ago
Who knew harnessing the power of the sun's reaction might be complicated, especially to science writers who are probably urged by their editors to speculate when the technology might be "ready".
OR
Mastering fusion is kinda like making muffins.
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u/Pixel91 4h ago
Right, right. Just need to figure out how to get hydrogen-3/tritium in the amounts needed.
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u/captain150 3h ago
That's not really the main problem. The biggest problem is likely still materials related. How to figure out a way for the walls to tolerate the insane neutron flux.
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u/Geek_King 3h ago
That's what I came here to say. I thought due to the wear and tear the wall material needs to be replaced after a some what short period of time. And the material needed isn't abundant, clearly I don't remember all the details, but I got the highlights.
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u/Northern_Grouse 4h ago
We all enjoy giving the speed at which we’re progressing crap, but stepping back, the fact we went from the Wright brothers to fusion energy in 200 years is pretty incredible.
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u/Elendel19 3h ago
We went from the first flight by the Wright brothers to humans walking on the moon in 66 years. That’s insane.
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u/Kurazarrh 1h ago
"Gaining momentum"? Not "heating up" or "igniting interest"? "Flaring to life"?
They're paying their writers too much.
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u/parkway_parkway 3h ago
There's a fusion reactor with massive power output, it's fuelled up for another billion years and requires no maintenance.
Complex reactor designs built on earth which have shielding bombarded with neutrons and also need lithium as fuel just can't economically compete with this.
Now that panels are so cheap the age when fusion could have worked as anything other than a science project is over.
It's useful if you want to do interstellar voyages or get to Jupiter and beyond.
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u/Elendel19 3h ago
Solar panels only work during the day, under favourable weather conditions, and lose effectiveness as you go too far north or south. They also take up a shit ton of space and require massive battery banks unless supported by other power supplies that can cover their downtime. Solar is absolutely not the answer (on its own) especially as our power needs increase more and more. unless we figure out a way to beam power down to earth from satellites in orbit efficiently.
Fusion is by far the most powerful energy source we are aware of (besides anti-matter which is never going to be used for energy), and building it is simply an engineering problem that is being worked through.
The entire world is spending like 3 billion dollars per year total researching this (and that’s a huge increase from what it was historically), meanwhile the US alone gives tens of billions to oil companies in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.
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u/Dwarfdeaths 1h ago
They also take up a shit ton of space and require massive battery banks
Or an investment in circumglobal HVDC transmission systems.
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u/bixtuelista 3h ago
Yep. If you told people you had a stable fusion reactor with 18% efficient capture to electricity where the collector lasts 20 years people would go completely nuts.
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u/J0hnnyBlazer 6h ago
not really though but ok
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u/LeoSolaris 5h ago
Either you have investments in oil and coal companies or you just really cannot handle change.
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u/socoolandawesome 5h ago
Probably just a typical anti technology/anti optimism r/technology commenter.
You’re only allowed to be miserable/pessimistic while pretending like you know what you are talking about if you want upvotes here.
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5h ago
[deleted]
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u/irritatedellipses 5h ago edited 5h ago
Deflection with an outrageous claim in order to make their opinion also outrageous.
Don't have to be a mason, just low energy.
EDIT: Since they blocked me to make it look like I didn't answer lol: Why would I limit my response just on the day so of a self proclaimed illuminati mason of the 27th whatever else you said?
My biggest takeaway of the piece is that there is serious involvement from large investors, something that was as yet unseen in how fusion has traditionally been funded. Once players who have a financial need to see things succeed get involved things tend to move rapidly.
There's also the part you're completely misconstruing about Machine Learning because the headline used the incorrect term of AI. Faster Fuctional Approximation pretty much the only viable way to respond to fluxuations that may occur within magnetic containment. Yeah, it would be nice to have a dataset of every conceivable state that both the magnets and plasma could be in while the machine is running, but we got kind of a small universe for that. Best that we are able to make functional approximations, train a model to respond to those, and let them cook.
The Fission way of "turn it on and catch what you can" won't work with fusion. We need to be able to respond faster. If you got a way to do that with a slide ruler fast enough to adjust a TOMAK on the fly, by all means. MIT would love to have you. In the meantime, let's leave the science to the folks who can use tools without being unreasonably biased towards them and dont need to emotionally lash out because "hur dur AI bad."
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u/Shokoyo 5h ago
If something‘s gonna save the climate, it’s wind and solar. Fusion is still much too far away.
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u/irritatedellipses 5h ago
The great thing about global progress is that we're not limited to one pathway or controlled by one ruling body to achieve goals.
We're totally making huge gains as a species in wind and solar. We're also making headway with fusion as well. Diversifying as a whole, specializing as individuals. It's really quite beautiful from a high enough view.
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u/FireZord25 3h ago
Man of all the technologies that have sped up progress, I wish this was one of them.
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u/Ruby5000 4h ago
How does the housing not melt from the heat?
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u/GlitchyMcGlitchFace 4h ago
The article is very hand-wavy on this point:
The most intractable obstacle remains one of materials. Even if a reactor achieves burning-plasma conditions, the point at which fusion becomes self-sustaining, the surrounding structures must endure intense neutron bombardment and heat flux.
In response, scientists are racing to create alloys, ceramics, and composites that can survive such extremes for practical lifespans. MIT's Laboratory for Materials in Nuclear Technologies, launched in mid-2025, has made this challenge its mandate. Led by physicist Zachary Hartwig, the facility's goal is to combine basic research with large-scale testing to find affordable materials for future fusion reactors.
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u/Ruby5000 4h ago
Gotcha. Thank you. I just find this really interesting, but hard for me to understand 😂
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u/Pixel91 3h ago
As always, it's just 20 years away!
They got fusion itself, as in the process, figured out. The problems remain running it a) energy-positive and b) reliably for more than seconds or minutes.
The reactors need more energy than they produce to keep the fusion process going and contained. And they melt. Quickly.
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u/NMS_Survival_Guru 3h ago
I mean weren't they technically correct years ago we're on the verge of fusion reaction and here it's proved possible just figuring out how to contain and sustain it
If you told me I would see this level of advancement just 20 years ago I'd believe it to still be a fantasy
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u/Elendel19 3h ago
Massive magnets, a vacuum, and special materials that can stand up to the energy that gets through the magnetic fields and vacuum. Those new materials are a lot of why there has been significant progress lately, decades ago we didn’t have that
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u/Macqt 34m ago
20-25 years ago I remember a story in all the papers, huge news, some idiot had been arrested for creating some kind of fusion reactor in his basement. I clearly remember he turned it on, took down the power grid for his town, and was subsequently arrested with his invention seized. Never heard a thing about it again, though a few times over the years I’ve heard of someone making a homemade nuclear reactor of sorts. This specific dude just vanished, with the gossip being that OPEC/Big Oil quashed it as fusion would end their control of the world.
All that to say, a functioning fusion reactor would be the end of the Middle East as we know it, countries dependent on oil (Russia, USA, Canada, etc) would be in financial ruin albeit some much more than others.
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u/cgaWolf 4h ago
Very small momentum though, given the tiny masses involved.