Fusion will be cracked “within 30 years”

ITER, or “the way” in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.

The idea is to fuse two atoms of hydrogen using powerful magnets to form helium. A small amount of mass is lost when the hydrogen atoms combine, in the process releasing vast quantities of energy.

The science is very interesting, and the rewards would be enormous, but fusion has proven to be a tough nut to crack. In the 1980s I read a DOE report on fusion, and they described the same laser and plasma strategies I had read in sci-fi books in the 1960s. As one of the commenters notes, nuclear fusion has always been just a few decades away.