Across the world more than 30 private fusion firms – fuelled by billions of investor dollars – are scrambling to be the first to make fusion energy commercially viable. However, according to an article in Nature, while companies might say it will be a reality within 10-years, that’s an overly optimistic forecast.

That said, according to Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, “We can smell that we’re getting close.”

According to ITER (“The Way” in Latin) the quest for fusion is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today. In southern France, 35 nations* are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars.

“The next decades are crucially important to putting the world on a path of reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” says ITER. “A new large-scale, sustainable and carbon-free form of energy is urgently needed.”