At a time when our need for electricity is growing rapidly, why are we creating a system based on intermittent wind and solar generated power? In 2025 U.S. spending on renewable energy generation primarily wind and solar was $108.7 billion.  Unfortunately in the same period the U.S. spent a paltry $2.64 billion on power generation by nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and all other stars. It is a process where two light hydrogen atoms under extreme temperatures and pressure combine to form a single helium atom releasing massive amounts of energy. This reaction is required to overcome electrostatic repulsion which is the repulsive force that pushes two objects away from each other when they have the same type of electric charge as is the case with the helium atoms.

In a reactor fusion occurs when two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium-tritium (D-T); under high pressure at temperatures of a million degrees are combined to create a helium nucleus and a neutron. This reaction produces great amounts of energy.

Nuclear fusion produces heat that is transferred to water to produce steam that drives turbine powered electric generators.

Fusion generation is attractive because it generates millions of times more energy per pound of fuel than fossil fuels with zero carbon emissions. It also provides safe, continuous baseload power, or the minimum amount of electric power delivered or required over a given period of time at a steady rate, using virtually inexhaustible fuel sources, like hydrogen extracted from seawater.

The key benefits that make nuclear fusion a revolutionary prospect for generating electricity are that the Fuel Supply is limitless because Fusion primarily uses isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium). Deuterium is extracted easily from regular water, and tritium is bred from lithium, a nuclear process used in fusion energy where a lithium atom absorbs a high-energy neutron and splits into an atom of helium and an atom of radioactive tritium. This acts as a self-sustaining fuel manufacturing system meaning the fuel supply is essentially inexhaustible.

The fusion reaction yields nearly 4 million times more energy than burning the equivalent amount of coal, oil, or gas. There are Zero Carbon Emissions. The fusion reaction process creates clean electricity without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The only major byproduct is harmless, inert helium gas, the gas that keeps the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloons afloat. Unlike a nuclear reactor, fusion reactors cannot undergo a runaway chain reaction. If any system malfunction occurs, the plasma naturally cools and the reaction simply stops. There is no long lived nuclear waste produced. Unlike traditional nuclear fission, fusion does not produce long-lived, high-level radioactive waste. Thus there is no need to develop storage facilities for those products.

The international race for fusion energy is primarily led by the United States and China, each dominating different aspects of the sector. The U.S. leads in private sector investment and startup innovation, while China leads in public funding, patent generation, and critical supply chain manufacturing.

The U.S. government established that fusion was viable when the National Ignition Facility, the world’s largest and most energetic laser-based inertial confinement research device, using a method of generating nuclear energy by blasting tiny fuel pellets with intense laser beams, made scientific history on Dec. 5, 2022, by becoming the first laboratory on Earth to achieve fusion ignition.

Today American leadership today is driven primarily by the private sector

The U.S. commands roughly 53% of global private fusion funding. The majority of U.S. fusion growth comes from private capital. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and others have attracted billions in private backing, driven by the rapidly increasing energy demands of artificial intelligence. However U.S. government funding has remained largely stagnant in comparison to China, leaving America with a lack of new, large-scale publicly funded fusion facilities.

China accounts for roughly a third of global fusion investments and outpaces the U.S. with 10 times the number of doctorates in fusion science. China also holds the highest number of global fusion patents and dominates the manufacturing supply chains for critical components like thin-film processing and large metal-alloy structures which are two highly specialized manufacturing processes that are vital for advanced engineering, most notably in the global race to build commercial nuclear fusion reactors.

While the U.S. and China lead in capital and patents, other regions are making major structural and scientific contributions. The EU hosts the massive global ITER project that is the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment, a collaboration among the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. Germany is a recognized leader in a nuclear fusion device called stellarator that uses a highly complex cage of external magnetic coils to confine superheated plasma in a twisting, doughnut-like shape used in the Wendelstein 7-X reactor that is the world’s largest and most advanced stellarator-type nuclear fusion reactor.

Fusion has been a long time coming with theoretical research beginning in the 1920s and 30s, continued in secrecy during the period from 1940 to 1960 with major breakthroughs coming in the early 2020s which have accelerated the timeline making the process more attractive to private investors with private companies aiming for demonstration plants later in the current decade with true commercial fusion plants coming online sometime between 2040 and 2050.

In the process of writing this piece I have come to the firm conclusion that with the increasingly rapid and successful developments in power generation through fusion reaction that it is the only viable replacement of fossil fuel generation. It will meet the demands for greater and reliable baseload power for electric grids. Renewables, with the exception of hydropower, are not constantly available, mar our land and seascapes and endanger wild life on land and in water.

Thomas Kirkpatrick Sr. is a Silver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com