Media Hub

When Chris Day was in sixth grade, he didn’t feel like one of the cool kids. That is, until the day he broke his battery-powered toy truck and brought it to his dad, James. Instead of buying a new one — Chris knew there was little chance of that — James took a screwdriver to the chassis and pulled out the motor. Then he showed Chris how to wire it to a propeller from a balsa wood airplane. They hooked up a 9-volt battery and voilà: a homemade electric fan. “I brought the fan to school and the kids went crazy,” Chris remembers.

There’s an old joke about nuclear fusion: It’s the energy source of the future — and always will be. When headlines blared last month that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had hit on a history-making fusion breakthrough, the future felt one giant step closer. To get a sense of just how much closer, we reached out to Jim Bray, who’s worked for GE Research for 48 years and is now a chief scientist in its electrical power group — and the company’s go-to expert on all things fusion (including that joke).

Utilities around the world have been using turbines fueled by natural gas to generate electricity for decades. Power companies have long been drawn to their greater efficiency over earlier forms of electric generation, and their ability to power homes with fewer carbon emissions.