There’s Another Fusion Breakthrough to Report

⚡️ European scientists working in the UK announced a new record for generating and sustaining the holy grail of renewable energy: nuclear fusion.

• Their experiment at the Joint European Torus (👆) in Oxford produced a record ~11 megawatts of energy for five seconds, breaking the previous record of 4 MW set in 1997.
• While that isn’t a huge amount of energy – about enough to boil 60 kettles’ worth of water – the scientists said their experiments are proof that a far bigger and more powerful fusion machine being built in the south of France, called ITER, should achieve its goal of net-positive energy after it goes live in 2025.
• ITER’s aim is to eventually produce a tenfold return on energy (i.e, put 50 MW in, get 500 MW back). For context, 500 MW is enough to power ~325,000 homes.

👀 Looking ahead… If all goes well with ITER, the next step is to build a European fusion power plant that hooks up to the electricity grid.

+Zoom out: In recent years, investors have poured money into several different projects attempting to build the first commercially relevant fusion reactor that produces net-positive energy, including a Chinese ‘artificial sun’ reactor, and a custom design from MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

+Fun fact: Besides being a safe, emission-free source of power, nuclear fusion is also extremely attractive due to the fact that one pound of fuel contains roughly 4 million times as much energy as a pound of coal, oil, or gas.