One reason it’s so hard to make predictions about the fusion age is that we’re still not sure what the best fusion device will even look like. A tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine Commonwealth is building? A giant laser, like Livermore Lab’s? Or one of the many other shapes and concepts that other start-ups are working on?

At this point, aren’t we pretty sure that laser confinement won’t easily scale to continuous operations? All the fusion startups I can think of are using some form of magnetic confinement.