For decades it has been the modern version of turning lead into gold but its promise of clean inexhaustible energy is coming closer every year.

The atomic process that powers the sun has the means to alter how we harness energy to power our world, but conquering the physics of containing a fusion reaction has proven to be enormously difficult.

Yet the nation that creates a genuine, sustained, fusion reaction will own the future.

Not to be confused with a fission hydrogen bomb (that splits the nuclei of atoms into smaller atoms), physicists explain that a controlled fusion reaction (that combines the nuclei of atoms) creates temperatures up to one hundred million degrees Celsius.

It is difficult to conceive of mastering a reaction that is almost ten times the temperature at the Sun’s center.

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However, researchers in multiple nations have created what is called a tokamak reactor that uses enormously powerful magnetic fields to contain the reaction for milliseconds of time.

Part of the challenge is how to use less energy to create that reaction than the energy required to sustain it.

Read more: Gatestone Institute