The Race To Harness Nuclear Fusion

The experiment, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showed ignition : a fusion reaction generating more energy out than was put in.

In addition, the past few years have been marked by a multibillion-dollar windfall of private investment in the field , principally in the US.

But a whole host of engineering challenges must be addressed before fusion can be scaled up to become a safe, affordable source of virtually unlimited clean power . In other words, it's engineering time.

As engineers who have been working on fundamental science and applied engineering in nuclear fusion for decades, we've seen much of the science and physics of fusion reach maturity in the past 10 years.

There are two approaches to achieving fusion in the lab: inertial confinement fusion, which uses powerful lasers , and magnetic confinement fusion, which uses powerful magnets .