<\/a> The holy grail of fusion was achieved: ignition. Since then, ignition has been repeated many times; in February 2024, 2.2 MJ of laser energy produced 5.2 MJ from fusion, and in 2025 a record 8.6 MJ from 2.08 MJ\u2014more than a fourfold gain relative to the energy delivered to the target.<\/p>Meanwhile, private companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems are building compact SPARC tokamaks with next-generation superconducting magnets. China touts the “artificial sun” EAST, which can sustain plasma at temperatures over 100 million degrees for nearly 18 minutes. The race continues.<\/p>
And yet there is something deeply ironic about all of this. Hero of Alexandria, in the first century AD, constructed the aeolipile\u2014a rotating sphere powered by steam. Nearly two thousand years later, once we have learned to harness the reactions occurring in the Sun\u2019s core, we still rely on the principle the ancient Greeks knew: puff of steam, wheels in motion.<\/p>
Why? Thermodynamics is unforgiving. Today\u2019s thermal power plants have their limits: the best coal-fired units reach about 45\u201347% efficiency, and even the most advanced gas combined-cycle systems slightly exceed 60%. Thermoelectric devices, which convert heat directly into electricity thanks to the Seebeck effect, barely exceed a few percent, which is great for space probes, but they won\u2019t power a metropolis. Indeed, high-temperature SOFC fuel cells can theoretically reach 60\u201370% efficiency, but they require expensive catalysts and degrade at temperatures above 800\u00b0C. The steam turbine, refined over a century and a half, remains unbeatable.<\/p>
There is no shortage of visionaries trying to break out of this vicious circle. Scientists are experimenting with hybrid systems that combine fuel cells with thermoelectric generators that recover waste heat. Other teams are working on the direct conversion of nuclear energy into electricity, but that’s a matter for the very distant future. For now, H\u2082O reigns.<\/p>
There’s a certain melancholy to it. Imagine a world where energy flows directly from nuclear reactions, without boiling water as an intermediary, without giant turbines, without cooling towers shaping the industrial landscape. A world where miniature backpack-sized reactors power vehicles and homes, where an interplanetary ship draws its power from a pocket-sized sun. Science fiction (from Asimov to modern space operas) has promised us such a future for decades.<\/p>
Ironically, the ones closest to this vision today are… rocket engineers. At the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, work is underway on the Direct Fusion Drive: a propulsion system that generates thrust directly from the fusion of deuterium and helium-3, completely bypassing the steam stage. In space, where mass is everything, steam turns out to be unnecessary ballast. According to calculations, it could deliver a probe to Pluto in four years instead of nine. This concept also underpins the vision of the Chrysalis spacecraft, which would send several thousand people to Proxima Centauri in a mere 400 years.<\/p>
For now, reality is proving more conservative. Even the most revolutionary technology must ultimately make peace with the tried-and-true. Nuclear fusion\u2014if we master it\u2014will not replace steam. It will only supply more of it, cheaper and cleaner.<\/p>
Perhaps this is the true lesson for the future. Technological revolutions are rarely total. More often they resemble geological stratification: the new is laid down on the old, the advanced grows out of the primitive. The twenty-first century will be the century of fusion. And it will still be the century of steam.<\/p>
Hero of Alexandria would be proud.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year is 2045. At a fusion facility near Marseille, where the successor to the ITER project has just achieved a stable thermonuclear reaction at a temperature of one hundred million degrees, an engineer is checking the parameters… of a steam boiler. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":17262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[863,754],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[38],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-17295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-and-science","category-hai_premium","difficulty-level-medium"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17296,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions\/17296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=17295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}