Alex McColgan

Then in late 2023, the experimental jet reactor in the UK, Atocamac, generated a world record 69 MJ of energy from just 0.2 mg of DT fuel.

And while international behemoths like ITER inch closer to operation,

A flurry of private investment has also entered the field, exploring alternative fusion technologies.

One is the Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, backed by Google, Nvidia and Bill Gates.

It proposes using high-temperature superconducting magnets to produce a more compact tokamak.

CFS claims it will have a commercial plant online by the early 2030s.

Another outfit based out of Washington state, Helion, believes it is going to get there even earlier.

Backed by the likes of Sam Altman, this company has taken a completely new approach to reactor design.

It fires two rings of plasma together at a million kilometers per hour to generate fusion conditions, a sort of halfway house between magnetic and inertial confinement.

This approach allows them to react deuterium not with tritium, but a reactive isotope of helium, helium-3, doing away with the problematic tritium entirely.

The use of helium-3 is key to Helion's approach, because instead of producing an alpha particle and a neutron, these reactants generate an alpha particle and a proton.

Vitally, this means there is no neutral particle whizzing off out of the reactor carrying all the energy.

Energy is retained within the plasma itself.

As the reaction proceeds, the energy generates an increase in internal pressure and a change in magnetic field, which can be used to generate electricity directly, no Victorian steam turbines involved at all.

So, what's the catch you might rightfully ask?

Well, just like tritium, helium-3 is incredibly rare, and also has to be bred, this time from deuterium-deuterium reaction.

and this process does generate those pesky reactor-damaging neutrons.

One of Helion's proposed solutions is to separate the two reactions, having commercial plants that will use deuterium-helium-3 and feeder reactors specifically for generating helium-3 that have planned shorter lifespans.

But there is another issue with deuterium-helium-3.

This mixture requires much higher temperatures and fuel densities than conventional deuterium-tritium fuel.