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fusion energy engineering

ITER, the international tokamak under construction in southern France, remains the largest attempt to demonstrate sustained net energy gain at a scale relevant to power generation, though its own schedule has slipped substantially from original projections and it is not designed to generate electricity itself — it is a physics and engineering demonstrator. Several well-funded private fusion companies have announced more aggressive timelines for commercial power, generally in the 2030s, but these targets depend on engineering steps that have not yet been demonstrated at the scale claimed, and private fusion timelines as a category have a consistent history of slipping.

• Wall-plug efficiency of the lasers used at NIF is roughly 1 per cent, meaning the facility as a whole still consumes far more electricity than any single shot releases.
• Magnetic confinement devices such as tokamaks aim for continuous or long-pulse operation rather than single laser shots, which is a more directly relevant configuration for a power plant.
• No fusion facility anywhere has yet demonstrated sustained net electrical output to the grid.
• Materials that can survive prolonged neutron bombardment from a fusion reaction without excessive degradation remain an active area of research rather than a solved problem.