After three decades of expensive government-funded research that has failed to produce tangible breakthroughs, nuclear fusion has gone from a promising source of effectively limitless power to something more like a punch line.
In the past year, that has started to change, however. Several privately funded companies and small university-based research groups pursuing novel fusion reactor designs have delivered promising results that could shorten the timeline for producing a prototype machine from decades to several years. Commercial power generation from fusion is still a long way off, but the outlines of such a reactor can now be perceived.
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