Nuclear Fusion Is Unlimited Clean Power. So When Can We Have It?
“We knew that if you could build very strong magnets, you could put it in the realm of commercially doable,” Bob Mumgaard, chief executive officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, says on this week’s Zero podcast.
Photographer: Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/AP
Scientists have been trying to understand — and mimic — the way the sun produces energy for centuries. But recreating nuclear fusion on Earth presents an array of technical challenges. It involves merging atoms in a process that generates temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius, and building a reactor that can handle those temperatures and produce more energy than it consumes.
Bob Mumgaard, chief executive officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, started working on some of those technical questions as a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CFS grew out of that work. “We knew that if you could build very strong magnets, you could put it in the realm of commercially doable,” Mumgaard tells Akshat Rathi on this week’s Zero podcast.