The elusive power source can’t save us from the need to cut emissions now. But a $20-billion reactor approaching completion in southern France could pave the way for the future
For seven years, Bernard Bigot oversaw the construction of a building so ambitious and challenging, and of such significance to humanity, he sometimes thought of it as a cathedral.
All of this in service of an audacious goal and a half-century old dream: To generate energy by harnessing nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars. Fusion, if it can ever be tamed, promises abundant power without smokestack fumes or planet-baking carbon emissions, without reactor meltdowns or long-lived radioactive waste—power on demand 24/7, with seawater as the ultimate source of fuel.
Harnessing nuclear fusion is among the hardest things humankind has ever attempted, and the technology’s elusiveness has long made it the butt of a joke: for more than half a century, fusion energy has always been “30 years away.” But that bitter joke might finally be wearing thin. A fusion plant would be fundamentally different from today’s nuclear power plants. They rely on nuclear fission, which releases energy when large, heavy atoms—such as uranium—break apart due to radioactive decay.
Achieving these conditions—let alone maintaining them—has been a decades-long quest. For years fusion experiments set one-off records for plasma temperatures, plasma densities, or confinement durations, but not all at once. This bonfire has taken longer than expected to ignite. Since the 1950s, researchers have built a series of bigger and more powerful experimental fusion reactors, many based on the tokamak, which was originally developed by the Soviet Union. A 1985 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev opened the diplomatic door, and the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to collaborate on building a tokamak large enough to achieve scientific breakeven.
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