Raymond Zhong in the New York Times:
Big-name investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman have staked hundreds of millions of dollars on this, fusion’s potential Kitty Hawk moment: the one that shows that the limits of our species’ mastery have once again been catapulted forward.
Today’s fusion start-ups aren’t just preparing for this moment in the lab. They are signing presale deals with customers, developing supply chains, cultivating a work force, talking with regulators — all the elements that will be needed to make fusion an affordable, practical power source, not just a science experiment.
And yet, closer than ever does not necessarily mean close. Fusion’s history is a graveyard of missed deadlines and thwarted milestones, bursts of excitement followed by bruising disappointments.
The sunny view is that the start-ups are moving more quickly than government labs ever could. They can try, fail and try again.
More here.
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