In a nondescript facility in Denver, a small team of physicist-engineers is attempting something that sounds like science fiction: igniting a miniature star on Earth. (See how China came close to making an artificial sun).

If they pull it off, the consequences would ripple across every corner of the global economy, and nowhere more dramatically than Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich kingdoms of the Middle East.

Xcimer Energy, founded in 2022 by Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys, is betting that powerful ultraviolet lasers can crack the fusion puzzle that have eluded scientists for 70 years. Green Prophet’s scientist Brian explains fusion and what makes it so hard here.

The premise behind Xcimer is simple even if the physics is anything but: fuse light atoms together the way the sun does, release enormous amounts of energy, and do it without carbon emissions, without meltdown risk, and without the mountains of radioactive waste that plague conventional nuclear power. Clean, dense, effectively limitless energy which is the holy grail of human civilization. With fusion we could run air conditioners all day and all night. We could live well on the equator or run our heaters in the arctic and enjoy limitless travels to space.

What makes Xcimer genuinely different from the fusion experiments that have come before is its choice of laser technology. Rather than the expensive solid-state systems used at the US National Ignition Facility, which achieved a landmark ignition milestone in 2022 but at staggering cost, Xcimer uses krypton-fluoride excimer lasers, borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing.

These deliver high-efficiency ultraviolet pulses at a fraction of the price, and in 2025 the company completed the first privately funded excimer fusion laser of its kind built in over two decades. That’s not a press release milestone. That’s real hardware.

“We’ve already begun using Xcimer’s LPK experimental testbed to validate laser models and inform the design of our future systems,” said Conner Galloway, CEO and Chief Science Officer of Xcimer. “This milestone also sends the strongest signal yet that the private sector can build on decades of public investment to turn transformative research into commercially viable systems. We’ve seen this transition before in industries like space—and we’re beginning to see it happen in fusion.”

The roadmap is ambitious but structured. A Phoenix laser system in 2026 will validate the core physics. A Vulcan facility around 2030 aims to cross the holy grail of breakeven, which is producing more energy from fusion than was put in.

Xcimer is already taking proposals on prospective new sites nationwide to house Vulcan, which would directly employ hundreds of people in a large variety of jobs, including physicists, technicians, and support staff.

Vulcan’s location could pave the way for a future regional source of zero-carbon energy expertise, making the location attractive to more emerging businesses such as artificial intelligence and software companies, robotics manufacturers, and medical research facilities. 

By the mid-2030s, Xcimer envisions a prototype power plant delivering electricity to the grid at roughly $40 per megawatt-hour, competitive with natural gas and cheaper than most new coal. That’s when things start to get fun. Just like in solar. Every year the cost for producing solar goes down.

The US Department of Energy has already selected Xcimer as one of eight companies in its fusion commercialization program, lending the venture both credibility and critical public-private backing.

Now consider what this means for Saudi Arabia, and by extension the entire OPEC architecture that has shaped global geopolitics and which has supported a whole lot of evil and terrorism for half a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Saudi Arabia and Iran-mullahs run on oil feeding terror operatives money in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Unlike the UAE which has diversified, the Saudi economy runs on one thing: the world’s insatiable need for oil.

Renewable energy has already begun chipping at that foundation, and oil prices are dowb, but OPEC countries know that solar and wind have an Achilles heel because they are intermittent energy sources.

“We use the same approach as America’s National Ignition Facility – the only system in the world to demonstrate fusion ignition. We don’t need to spend time and money to demonstrate unproven plasma confinement physics; we combine NIF’s proven inertial confinement fusion approach with breakthrough laser technology. We’re driving down cost and complexity so we can deliver electricity on a pragmatic timeline and business model.”

Batteries help, but not enough. Fusion has no such weakness. It runs continuously, day and night, in any weather, in any country. A fusion-powered world wouldn’t just reduce demand for oil; it would collapse it entirely.

The leverage that petrostates have wielded for decades, over energy prices, over foreign policy, over global inflation, over terrorism, evaporates the moment civilization has access to a cheaper, cleaner, inexhaustible alternative.

Xcimer has raised just over $111 million from leading energy investors since its founding in 2022. It’s part of the DOE Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, a highly competitive public-private partnership program designed to accelerate the development of fusion energy on the power grid. Xcimer was awarded $9 million, one of the most significant awards under the program’s first budget period.

Xcimer also collaborates with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Savannah River National Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, General Atomics and Westinghouse. 

::Xcimer

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Why China’s “Artificial Sun” Density Breakthrough Matters

Nuclear fusion is often described as the holy grail of clean energy: a process that could one day provide abundant power without carbon emissions or long-lived radioactive waste. It has so much promise, but it’s difficult. This article on fusion explains why. But turning fusion into a practical energy source depends on solving a set of extremely difficult physics problems. One of the most important is how to keep plasma — a super-hot, electrically charged gas — dense, stable, and confined long enough to produce useful energy.

In January 2026, researchers working on China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), often called the “artificial sun,” reported a breakthrough in this challenge in Science Advances. Their experiment showed that plasma could operate at densities 30% to 65% higher than EAST normally achieves — beyond a long-standing boundary known as the Greenwald density limit — while remaining stable. They reported their breakthrough in the journal Science Advances. Their plasma burned 5 times hotter than the sun.

Why does density matter? Fusion reactions become more efficient when more particles are packed into the plasma. High density is essential to meeting the Lawson criterion, the basic condition for producing more energy than the reactor consumes. For decades, however, increasing density has usually caused plasma to become unstable and suddenly collapse, ending the experiment.

The EAST team overcame this by using a carefully designed start-up method that combines traditional electrical heating with electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH), a microwave technique that warms electrons directly. They also adjusted the amount of neutral gas in the chamber before ignition. Together, these changes allowed the plasma to enter what scientists call a “density-free regime,” predicted by a recent plasma-wall self-organization theory.

Burns 5 times hotter than the sun

In simple terms, this means the plasma and the reactor walls interacted in a way that reduced harmful impurity radiation — one of the main causes of instability. With fewer impurities cooling the plasma, the system could tolerate much higher densities.

The experiment achieved line-averaged electron densities up to 1.65 times the standard operating range of EAST. Importantly, the results matched theoretical predictions, strengthening confidence in the underlying physics model.

This does not mean fusion power plants are now close to commercial operation. EAST did not produce net energy from fusion, and many engineering and materials challenges remain. However, the study demonstrates that a fundamental limitation in tokamak operation may be more flexible than once believed.

For the public, the importance is simple: every improvement in plasma stability and density brings fusion researchers closer to designing reactors that could one day operate continuously, efficiently, and safely. This work shows that the “rules” of fusion confinement are still being rewritten — and that progress is coming from careful physics, not science fiction.

If you are a science geek, you can read all about it here.

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Fusion energy is hard to create and it’s hard to explain. Brian gives a great background here. International design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota, together with Italy’s energy company Eni, present a project dedicated to magnetic confinement fusion, one of the most innovative technologies for the decarbonization of energy systems. The project showcases the mock-up of a Tokamak reactor, built within a former gasholder in Rome, Italy, in order to inform visitors about this breakthrough technology with Italian flair.

It was released in 2022. 

The project by CRA and Italo Rota is part of Maker Faire Rome, Europe’s leading event for the community of Makers. It is situated in the site of Gazometro Ostiense, one of the foremost symbols of the Italian capital’s modern industrial heritage, located just three kilometers southwest of the Colosseum. Inside a 50-meter-high, 40-meter-wide gasholder, visitors can explore the conceptual model of a Tokamak, a fundamental component in magnetic confinement technology processes. After an ascending path, people can access inside the Tokamak. Here, within a red-lit circular corridor, a series of multimedia content narrates the technology and its ongoing scientific investigations.

 “Magnetic confinement fusion is a clean technology that has the potential to be one of tomorrow’s key decarbonization solutions,” comments Carlo Ratti, founder of CRA and Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab. “With the project, we wanted to start an open-design process to imagine how fusion power plants will be integrated in sub-urban areas – prompting makers and architects alike to join a discussion on our future energy landscape.” 

“We have the chance to explore new forms of storytelling about energy,” adds Italo Rota, co-designer of the installation. “We believe that design is a powerful tool to turn a narration into an experience, allowing visitors to sense the energy while being surrounded by a unique atmosphere.”

The project follows Eni’s work on magnetic confinement, which has been unfolding in the last few years through a series of academic collaborations – most notably, with the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) – and the energy company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). During the process of magnetic confinement, the fusion of two hydrogen nuclei releases an enormous amount of energy, similarly to how it happens inside the sun and other stars. The most substantial advantage of this technology is that it does not emit greenhouse gases or highly polluting or highly radioactive substances. Furthermore, it is safe and virtually inexhaustible. 

In the past years, CRA has been developing several energy-related projects on different scales: from the Helsinki Hot Heart, a series of islands with the dual function of thermal energy storage – currently the largest urban decarbonization project in the world – and recreational public spaces, to the masterplan for MIND (Milan Innovation District) to CapitaSpring, a 280-meter-tall high-rise oasis in Singapore designed together with BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group.

Over the past years, CRA and Eni have been collaborating to promote new forms of circularity and sustainable energy production. Their projects have been showcased at international events such as the Maker Faire in Rome, Milan Design Week, and Expo Dubai 2020.

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Unlike most oil and gas companies, Italy’s Eni is walking the walk and aims to be carbon free by 2050. In a bold move Eni invested in an American fusion company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and have recently announced a power offtake agreement worth more than $1 billion, expanding a longstanding strategic partnership between the companies to commercialize fusion power.

For a backgrounder on fusion and why it’s so hard, our writer Brian Nitz explains.

The power purchase agreement (PPA) concerns Eni’s acquisition of decarbonized power from CFS’s 400 MW Chesterfield County, Virginia, which is expected to connect to the grid in the early 2030s. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. This is the second offtake agreement that CFS has signed in three months for its first grid-scale fusion power plant.

“The agreement with Eni demonstrates the value of fusion energy on the grid. It is a big vote of confidence to have Eni, who has contributed to our execution since the beginning, buy the power we intend to make in Virginia,” said Bob Mumgaard, Co-founder and CEO of CFS. “Our fusion power attracts diverse customers across the world — from hyperscalers to traditional energy leaders — because of the promise of clean, almost limitless energy.”

“This strategic collaboration, with a tangible commitment to the purchase of fusion energy, marks a turning point in which fusion becomes a full industrial opportunity,” said Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi. “Eni has been strengthening its collaboration with CFS with its technological know-how since it first invested in the company in 2018. As energy demand grows, Eni supports the development of fusion power as a new energy paradigm capable of producing clean, safe, and virtually inexhaustible energy. This international partnership confirms our commitment to making fusion energy a reality, promoting its industrialization for a more sustainable energy future.”

Eni is a global energy tech company operating in 64 Countries, with about 32,500 employees. Originally an oil & gas company, it has evolved into an integrated energy company, playing a key role in ensuring energy security and leading the energy transition. Eni’s goal is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 through the decarbonization of its processes and of the products it sells to its customers.

In line with this goal, Eni invests in the research and development of technologies that can accelerate the transition to increasingly sustainable energy. Renewable energy sources, bio-refining, carbon capture and storage are only some examples of Eni’s areas of activity and research.

In addition, the company is exploring game-changing technologies such as fusion energy – a technology based on the physical processes that power stars and that could generate safe, virtually limitless energy with zero emissions.

The PPA follows CFS’ $863 million Series B2 round in which Eni increased its investment in CFS. Eni, which was among the first to invest in CFS in 2018 and believe in fusion, is today a strategic shareholder.

In 2023 the two companies signed a collaboration agreement to accelerate fusion energy development. The collaboration between the companies includes operational and technological support; project execution through the sharing of methodologies learned from the energy industry; and relationships with stakeholders.

The PPA further validates that CFS is on the most promising path to deliver commercial fusion power in the coming years. The company has demonstrated its capabilities by developing key advances in high-temperature superconducting magnets and sustaining its execution velocity in the construction of the SPARC fusion demonstration machine in Devens, Massachusetts.

Eni, a global tech energy company based in San Donato Milanese, Italy, has been active in the US energy sector since 1968. The company’s operations include oil and natural gas production, renewables and biofuel. Eni also invests in innovative technologies for the energy transition through its Boston-based corporate venture capital division, Eni Next.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is the world’s largest and leading private fusion company. The company’s marquee fusion project, SPARC, will generate net energy, paving the way for limitless carbon-free energy. The company has raised almost $3 billion in capital since it was founded in 2018.

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In the quiet suburbs of Everett, Washington, a small private company is building what could be the most important machine on Earth. Its name is Helion Energy. Its mission? Nothing less than bottling a star—and lighting up our future—clean, limitless, and faster than China.

Helion is developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water. Green Prophet’s Brian writes here: What is fusion and why is it so hard?

While the world scrolls TikTok and argues about AI doom scenarios, a real technological arms race is unfolding: Who will master fusion energy first—and rewrite the next century’s economic and political order? If Helion succeeds in its mission it might also put terrorists out of business.

Helion Energy thinks they have the answer. And they have AI on their side.

Fusion at the Speed of Algorithms

Unlike mega-government projects like Europe’s ITER, which has been famously “30 years away” for 30 years, Helion is running on Silicon Valley speed. Their weapon of choice is magneto-inertial fusion, squeezing plasma with magnetic fields instead of building reactors the size of cathedrals. Here’s where AI comes in.

Helion’s plasma accelerators generate a storm of complex data—magnetic fields, particle velocities, temperatures over 100 million degrees. Too much for any team of humans to control in real-time.

Instead, Helion uses machine learning to tweak and optimize reactor operations pulse-by-pulse. Every shot teaches the system something new: how to better confine the plasma, adjust the magnetic fields, prevent instabilities, and reach the holy grail of energy gain—producing more energy than it consumes. In 2021 cleantech blog Canary Media asked if VCs were throwing $500 million at science fiction. Let’s see who has the last laugh.

Without AI, we’d still be waiting for fusion in 2080?

With AI, Helion is betting on delivering grid-ready fusion electricity as soon as 2028, through a historic deal signed with Microsoft. If they succeed, it would mark the first time in history that humanity pulls useful electricity directly from fusion reactions—the same reactions that power our sun.

The Real Race: Helion vs. China

But it’s not just a scientific experiment. It’s a race—and the finish line could define the balance of world power for centuries. China’s state-backed fusion programs, like the EAST “artificial sun” project, are pushing hard, using their own AI systems to optimize plasma confinement. Their fusion reactors are holding plasma steady for record-breaking periods, and they aren’t slowing down.

In a recent warning, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said that leadership in clean energy—including fusion—will define who leads global economies, militaries, and industries in the 21st century. Like the Ukraine and Russian war upended the world –– and it was over energy imbalance –– whoever wins fusion will no longer be dependent on fossil fuels—and will hold the power to cripple rivals who still are.

Oil Powers Beware: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran on Notice

If fusion becomes cheap and reliable, it will collapse the global demand for oil and gas. All these mega projects and oil-funded terrorist activities in Iran, in Yemen, in Syria and in Lebanon, will end. Saudi Arabia is signing the Abraham Accords with Israel to join the wave of the west and the United Arab Emirates is already there. Oil nations know that the demand for oil is temporary. A giant shift in energy acquisition will change the game for good.

Terror groups that thrive on petrodollar-funded instability—from Hezbollah to ISIS and beyond—would find their cash flow cut off. Countries that are developing on nations without restraint (read our latest on the Seychelles and Qatar) will be cut off from the flow of funds and wealth. Without oil as leverage, authoritarian regimes built on energy riches would face either collapse—or painful transformation. We see that Saudi Arabia is opening up to the world in archaeology, development, tourism. And this will protect its survival of a nation.

In simple words if fusion energy works, is not just about lighting up your house. It’s about turning off the money tap that funds wars, terrorism, and dictatorship.

Helion’s Big Bet

Helion’s model plays to America’s old strength: innovation through agility, not top-down megaprojects. Instead of waiting for 2050, Helion’s compact reactors aim to deliver electricity in a matter of years—and not just for cities, but for data centers, isolated industries, military bases, even disaster zones. Their current prototype, Polaris, is scheduled to fire in 2025. If Helion succeeds, it won’t just disrupt global energy. It could redraw the world map.

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Fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the “hot” fusion that is known to take place naturally within stars and artificially in hydrogen bombs which leave radiation behind. The promise of fusion of hydrogen atoms has come and gone over the last 40 years, with headlines being made in science once again. If we can solve fusion, we’ve solved climate change and greenhouse gases forever. Hydrogen is available and abundant and we could all have shisha-like reactors at home, charging our private EV everything, but fusion, well, it’s not so easy. We are going to explore the how, why and whens of fusion.

According to both the Financial Times (Mar 23, pg. 1, 26, and 22) and the Wall Street Journal (Mar. 23, b1 & b8) two scientists will announce indications of room temperature fusion of heavy hydrogen (deuterium): This announcement appeared in the Sci.physics Usenet group on March 23, 1989 –– only ten days after a new technology known as the World Wide Web was announced on Alt.hypertext. The net was alive with excitement about the possibility of cheap and clean energy from a tabletop fusion device somewhat resembling a Shisha Middle East smoking pipe, or a Belgian syphon coffee maker.

The price of palladium used in their device rose 30% and the USSR minted a palladium coin. Research teams around the world scrambled to reproduce this “cold fusion” with varying degrees of success. Father of the Hydrogen-bomb Edward Teller expressed scepticism over Pons and Fleischmann’s  fusion breakthrough but later worked with researchers. He was hopeful that the fusion that made his weapon so devastating could finally be tamed to serve humankind. It seemed too good to be true! Clean and cheap energy, forever. And it was.

One of the mistakes Pons, Fleischmann and others made is something Green Prophet discussed in our recent article on geological hydrogen. They had assumed electrolysis was 100% efficient but in reality at least 30% of the energy input is converted to heat. They mistook this resistive heating as fusion energy. The good news is that it didn’t work and hit Pons and Fleischmann with a fatal dose of neutron radiation. Fusion faded into the fringe and lost momentum as its proponents moved to more profitable junk science. But hot fusion research continued its slow and unsteady pace.

Fusion, here we go again?

Anyone old enough to remember the fusion debacle should be forgiven for being sceptical when the America’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced a fusion breakthrough at their National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022. This new hot fusion device didn’t resemble Pons and Fleichmann’s contraption at all.

It looks more like something Dr. Evil would fire at a comic book superhero. The LLNL scientists used 192 lasers, each with a beam width of about a meter. Together they can produce up to 500 trillion watts. Their light was focused and timed so their ten billionth of a second (0.1 nanosecond) pulses of light each about 1 inch long would simultaneously hit a cylinder containing a sphere smaller than a peppercorn. The sphere contained two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. This hot fusion experiment was a success.

The lasers pumped 2 megajoules (MJ) of energy into the cylinder generating X-rays which compressed and heated the deuterium and tritium enough that some fused and output 3 megajoules. The net energy gain was 1.5 times. 

Fusion energy enough for a tea party

The extra megajoule generated by the NIF fusion experiment was enough energy to bring a few cups of water to a boil. That’s worth about three cups of tea. When we put it that way it doesn’t sound like much does it? This experiment was never meant to become a commercial fusion reactor but it shows that it is possible to use laser confinement to release more fusion energy than is put into the system.

This breakthrough is comparable to the Wright brother’s 12-second flight in 1903. We can’t imagine flying across the world with 36 meter 12 second hops but the brother’s Kitty Hawk experiment with kite and bicycle parts proved that heavier than air flight was possible.

Likewise, LLNL showed that a laser confinement fusion power is possible even if it isn’t practical until it can target its lasers at more than one peppercorn for longer than a ten-billionth of a second.

Composite photograph showing three stories of the Target Bay and many of the final optics assemblies and diagnostics surrounding the Target Chamber at the center. Credit: Jacqueline McBride LLNL.

A brief history of fusion and why it’s so hard

The first nuclear fission chain reaction occurred under the bleachers at University of Chicago’s abandoned Stagg Field. Enrico Fermi led his team to build the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) atomic pile out of graphite, uranium, wood and other materials beneath a University of Chicago football stadium. At 3:25 p.m on December 2, 1942 a Manhattan Project scientist named George Weil pulled a control rod from CP-1. With the neutron-absorbing control rod removed, each neutron released by a uranium atom would trigger the release of more than one neutron.

Image from Forest Preserves of Cook County

Chicago Pile-1 became the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear fission reactor. This Lego video explains CP-1 atomic fission history”

Until LLNL produces its own Lego fusion video, we have this explanation of December’s NIF laser confinement fusion breakthrough:

Swords, ploughshares, bombs and cups of tea

The December 1942 CP-1 fission experiment ran for 28 minutes, about 16 quadrillion times longer than NIF’s laser fusion breakthrough but CP-1 only produced about 1/2 watt. This wasn’t even enough power to make a nice cup of tea but shortly afterwards Leo Szilard, the man who invented and patented the nuclear chain reaction told Enrico Fermi that this would be a “black day in the history of mankind.” Szilard was right: the Chicago Pile-1 paved the way for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan less than three years later. 

The first nuclear fusion bombs were tested only six years later and the first nuclear fission reactor began generating electricity at Windscale UK in 1950, only eight years after CP-1. Today there are more than 10,000 atomic bombs in at least nine countries and 400 nuclear fission reactors in at least 30 countries. But as of December 2022, 80 years after Chicago Pile-1 we did not have a single self-sustaining fusion reactor.

Why is fusion better than fission?

In nuclear fission, protons and neutrons are split from a heavy atom’s nucleus, generating energy, radiation and lighter elements. In nuclear fusion, the nucleus of light elements are fused together, releasing energy, radiation and heavier elements. One of the advantages of fusion is also what makes it so difficult. In December’s NIF experiment, carefully timed lasers and perfectly spherical heavy hydrogen capsules could only keep the reaction going for about a ten billionth of a second. Alternative tokamak fusion experiments using doughnut-shaped magnetic confinement instead of lasers have also shown promise but so far the longest sustained fusion reaction was only 17 minutes.

But once a nuclear fission chain reaction starts it will run its course unless something stops it. Chicago Pile-1 had no cooling system and its control system relied on pulleys, clotheslines, electric motors, emergency buckets of cadmium salts and a manual control rod operator named George Weil. In retrospect they were lucky. Building an atomic pile beneath an urban football stadium sounds like a “hold my beer” kind of thing to do. If these scientists had removed the control rods and abandoned the project, the nuclear reaction might still be running today after melting a radioactive hole in the earth near downtown Chicago. 

CP-1, CP-2 and CP-3 were eventually decommissioned and buried beneath a wooded picnic area. In the 1970s to 80s they were found to be leaching radioactive material into the soil and ground water. This gives us the other big advantage of nuclear fusion: The fuel and fusion reaction can be designed to minimize radioactive waste.

In NIF and other deuterium-tritium fusion reactors, two isotopes of hydrogen (tritium being radioactive with a half-life of 12.33 years) are fused into helium. Most of this helium is the same non-radioactive isotope children use in party balloons. The neutrons released during the reaction can make parts of the reactor radioactive but this is easier to manage than the messy mix of spent Uranium, cesium-137 (half-life 30 years), strontium-90 (half-life 29 years), plutonium-239 (half-life 2400 years), technetium-99 (half-life 211,100 years) released into our water, land and air by fission power plants at Windscale in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, Fukushima in 2011…

There are plenty of reasons why we should continue research into fusion power. One of the reasons we’re impatient with the slow pace of green technological progress may be that our pop-culture mythology distorts the true history of technology. I previously wrote about the long history of efficient lighting. The same could be said of many other things. Rev. Dr. J. W. Carhart was driving a steam-powered car he named The Spark 13 years before Carl Benz patented his first automobile.

An electric skateboard invented by a Roman Catholic Priest named Ányos Jedlik in 1828 predated Elon Musk’s appointment as CEO of Tesla by 180 years. Rather than obsessing over the question “Are we there yet?” we should ask whether we’re still making progress. December’s NIF experiment shows that, yes, we are still making progress towards the goal of fusion energy.

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