U.S. Department of Energy Expected to Announce Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Research Transcript

Speaking of energy, we could get a glimpse of the future today. This morning, the US Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research.

And according to experts, the discovery could create a sustainable, clean energy source changing the way we power our world.

Who knows, perhaps by mid-century there could be a fusion reactor in your neighborhood.

A lot of scientists say they are giddy. They’re excited about what could become a safe, abundant, and clean source of energy, nuclear fusion. It involves combining atoms, and it’s what powers the sun. But here on Earth, scientists have struggled to get more energy out of the reactions than goes into them. A source says the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California figured it out.

The holy grail of energy research is to put the sun in a bottle, and that’s apparently what they did in California.

It’s taken decades of research around the globe to reach this point.

There’s an old joke among physicists that fusion is that technology, it’s just a decade away and always will be.

Experts say it could take years more for fusion to become a large scale commercial energy source.

The scale of course, of the market and the need of the market is so enormous that hopefully multiple of us in multiple geographies be able to lifting this out of the R and D into the real commercial use.

Some climatologists were quick to tweet. They think the world should use existing renewables in the meantime.

It certainly will mean a lot more investment and a lot more debate about priorities as other renewables like solar and wind are about to explode.

All right. We’ll see what happens. So last year, scientists near Oxford, England, they used fusion to generate what was then a record breaking amount of energy.