In the rolling hills of East Tennessee, a team of scientists and engineers is working to create a sun on Earth. They’re at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, once an integral part of the Manhattan Project’s experiments with nuclear fission. More than 70 years later, these 100-odd researchers are focused on nuclear fusion, the other side of that atomic coin. They say they and their counterparts in the European Union, Russia, and China are less than a decade away from a successful demo of the technology needed to build a reactor that generates a city’s worth of energy and emits zero carbon.
The project in Tennessee feeds into work on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, a collaboration among 35 countries that’s under construction in the south of France. Pretty much every expert in the field says the project is a sure thing. By 2025, the consensus goes, the scientific joint venture should be able to create and sustain a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it took to start, a major step toward making fusion a sustainable way to run the world’s power plants. And all for roughly $20 billion, about what the U.S. spent, adjusted for inflation, to build Oak Ridge in the 1940s.
