A Sixth.

$10 billion overdrawn.

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1. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature super-conducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.

“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.

A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65 percent of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90 percent by 2040.

The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions. (Sources: firstlightfusion.com, cfs.energy, telegraph.co.uk, web.mit.edu, ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp)

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2. Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, yesterday announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called “Devin”. While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. (Sources: cognition-labs.com/blog, venturebeat.com, italics mine)