This is a rendition of the SPARC high-field tokamak experiment, which would produce the first fusion plasma to have a net energy gain. | Ken Filar

This is a rendition of the SPARC high-field tokamak experiment, which would produce the first fusion plasma to have a net energy gain. | Ken Filar

Anyone looking for a bright side in the climate crisis may want to learn about a potentially revolutionary research project that could help redefine energy as we know it.

Researchers are gathering at a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Portland, Oregon, this week to deliver a kind of state-of-the-science report on fusion energy, the space-age technology that promises essentially infinite and carbon-free electrical power.

Scientists from MIT and the privately funded energy company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are presenting critical updates on their SPARC project, an effort to manufacture the world’s first fusion power generator. If successful, the accomplishment could, like the Wright brothers’ first flights at Kitty Hawk, change everything.

Fusion energy is a form of power generation in which energy is produced through controlled nuclear fusion reactions, which is essentially the same process that powers the sun and other stars. Fusion occurs when the nuclei of small atoms bind together (or fuse) into a single, larger atom, releasing colossal amounts of energy in the process.

For terrestrial utility purposes, that energy can then be harnessed to provide the heat required for various kinds of electricity generation. A fusion energy plant could potentially operate entirely carbon-free and issue very little waste material, while at the same time offering ridiculously powerful energy yields. Theoretically, it would be the ultimate alternative energy source, deriving power from the same process that lights up the cosmos.

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But generating fusion energy on Earth presents some daunting challenges. The process requires superheating a dense plasma of subatomic particles inside a fusion device called a tokamak at extremely high temperatures — like, inside-of-a-star kind of temperatures, millions of degrees Fahrenheit, which is too intense for solid materials to contain.

Small fusion reactions, isolated from ordinary matter within magnetic fields, have been produced in labs. But so far, the conditions for net energy gain haven’t been achieved.