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fusion power
Sign in to saveAlso known as nuclear fusion power
experimental type of electricity generation using nuclear fusion
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- energy technology
Show 8 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Fusion power
- described by source
- Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia
- Commons category
- Nuclear fusion
- uses
- fusion reactor
- has characteristic
- Fusion energy gain factor
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
- topic has template
- Template:Fusion experiments
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject International relations
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Encyclopedic overview
Fusion plasma in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak. Fusion power is a potential method of electric power generation from heat released by nuclear fusion reactions. In fusion, two light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus and release energy. Devices that use this process are known as fusion reactors.
Research on fusion reactors began in the 1940s. As of 2025, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the United States is the only laboratory to have demonstrated a fusion energy gain factor above one, but efficiencies orders of magnitude higher are required to reach engineering breakeven (a net electricity-producing plant) or economic breakeven (where the net electricity pays for the plant's whole-life cost).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “fusion power” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.