United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7’s laudable ambition to produce affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for all has to confront the immense challenges of its realisation in a wide variety of ways. These are accentuated by accelerating global demand for energy, increasing damage by current carbon-producing energy sources, and intensifying national concerns over energy security.
Meeting this ambition requires extraordinary and diverse efforts in the search for new sources of energy, involving nuclear. This includes fusion, the subject of our recent book: In Search of Viable Fusion Energy: In Pursuit of the Sun Gods (Mark Dodgson and David Gann, Springer, 2026). Briefly, fusion energy has the potential to be reliable and not dependent, for example, on weather conditions, and abundant in that core fuels are found in water. It holds the possibility of being efficient in its power density such that theoretically 1kg of fusion fuel is equivalent to 4kg of nuclear fission fuel and 4 million kg of fossil fuel; clean being low-carbon and low land use; safe as it is readily and safely controllable; and limitless in the manner in which its operation could create its own fuel.
Governments are investing billions of dollars to develop fusion energy, joined by numbers of fusion companies backed by billionaires including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Significant challenges have to be addressed before fusion can contribute to the UN’s sustainable development goal of affordable and clean energy. Fusion machines are highly complex, and different designs are being explored. They include tokamaks which use powerful magnets to contain the high temperatures of plasma needed for particles to fuse to produce energy. These temperatures can exceed 150 million degrees Celsius necessary for fusion to occur, which is ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. And they include inertial confinement which uses some of the most powerful lasers in the world to compress fuel capsules. A key challenge is the production of a fuel, tritium, but despite the many profound engineering difficulties faced, records of the duration of fusion reactions produced are regularly being announced.
A number of factors led David and I to write our book. We have a life-long interest in studying innovation, including the journey from basic research to commercialized technologies, and fusion provides an exemplary case study. As the previous Chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and current Chair of UK Fusion Energy Ltd., which is a multi-billion dollar public-private partnerships programme to develop a prototype fusion powerplant, David is playing a role in the technological and commercial development of the fusion industry. And, perhaps most importantly, we want our children and grandchildren to live in a world where there is access to cheap, reliable, and non-polluting energy.
In the book we argue the viability of fusion will depend on its economics: the cost of developing and building fusion machines and the fully accounted price of their energy provision compared to alternatives. We contend two major contextual factors surround fusion’s future potential and the speed of its development. The first is the need for nations and firms to make large, long-term, risk-taking investments. The second is the effectiveness of fusion innovation ecosystems, involving scientists in research laboratories and universities, governments as investors and regulators, and large and small firms, all working effectively at combining their existing and developing skills and capabilities together. Due to the scale of the scientific and technological challenges it is large, publicly-funded organizations that have led the development of fusion energy. The next stage of the development of the fusion energy innovation ecosystem will of necessity involve greater action on the part of industry. The task, essentially, if fusion is to be viable, is to create a fusion industry. On the supply side this will involve innovative small firms producing new components and systems and offering new services, and large construction and engineering firms capable of building highly complex machines integrated into power supply systems.
Fusion will not have a short-term impact on the UN’s SDG 7, nor is its contribution guaranteed, but it is one of the very high potential new sources of energy that could make a valuable contribution to the realization of its goals. As it has to date, along the way the development of fusion energy will produce valuable new scientific breakthroughs and numerous fusion technologies of use in sectors such as space, engineering, and medicine. And even more profoundly the complexity of its challenges and the manner in which they are being addressed reveals much about the insatiable curiosity and noble ambitions of the human race.
Mark Dodgson AO
Mark Dodgson is a researcher, teacher, and author with extensive experience in academia and business. He is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland and Executive-in-Residence at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
David Gann CBE
David Gann is a leader in the field of business, innovation, technology management and entrepreneurship. His research explores why and how innovation happens, the ways it continually transforms the world we live in, and how it can be managed. David has published nine books to date and numerous academic papers.