вЂњAnd I was seeing that despondency in the faces of my students, too.вЂќ It was 2013, and M.I.T.вЂ™s experimental fusion device had lost its Department of Energy funding, for no clearly stated reason. вЂњTo be honest, I was feeling pretty despondent,вЂќ Dennis Whyte, the fifty-seven-year-old director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, at M.I.T., said. вЂњPretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there.вЂќ The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to вЂњFusion Never.вЂќ вЂњAnd thatвЂ™s about whatвЂ™s been spent,вЂќ the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. For around nine billion a year in todayвЂ™s dollars-described as the вЂњMaximum Effective EffortвЂќ-it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. Fusion, as of now, has no place in the Green New Deal. Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldnвЂ™t cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldnвЂ™t be too pricey-if only we could figure out all the вЂњdetails.вЂќ (A joke I heard is that fusion operates according to the law of the вЂњconservation of difficultyвЂќ: when one problem is solved, a new one of equal difficulty emerges to take its place.) The details are tremendously complex, and the people who work to figure them out have for years been dealing with their own scarcities-scarcities of funding and scarcities of faith. Fusion remains the great clean-energy dream-or, depending on whom you ask, pipe dream.ДЇusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues our planet has enough of fusionвЂ™s primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years. All these tools figure extensively in decarbonization plans laid out by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, according to those plans, even when combined with one another the tools are insufficient. Carbon capture, which is like a toothbrush for the sky, is compelling, but after you capture a teraton or two of carbon thereвЂ™s nowhere to put it. Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages. Solar energy gets more efficient and affordable each year, but itвЂ™s not continuously available, and it still relies on gas power plants for distribution. The accelerating climate crisis makes fusionвЂ™s elusiveness more than cutely maddening. As the White Queen, in вЂњ Through the Looking Glass,вЂќ said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they вЂњpinchedвЂќ plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. When those magnetic bottles leaked-because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine-they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas they did that, too, by making вЂњbottlesвЂќ out of strong magnetic fields. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma they did that. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. LetвЂ™s say that youвЂ™ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that youвЂ™ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed.

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