In 2001, nuclear fission power plants generated a record 6.6% of the world's primary energy, though total production has somewhat declined since then as the world's total energy demand has increased. Nuclear fusion is an entirely different physical reaction which has been actively investigated since the 1940s. Fusion power has several potential advantages over fission: lower accident risk, less radioactive waste, and cheaper fuel. However, all reactor designs tested as of 2024 require more energy to operate than the amount of energy they produce.

The primary challenge is that while it's relatively straightforward to make fusion happen—we did it all the time with thermonuclear weapons—it's much more difficult to make the reaction slow and controlled while extracting useful energy from it. —Sutter (2024)

David Kirtley, CEO of Helion, a startup that aims to produce fusion energy, said to Forbes in January 2022: “In 10 years we will have commercial electricity for sale, for sure.” In the same article, Forbes quotes Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard, who predicts “a working reactor in 6 years.”

Later in 2022, a research team within leading AGI company DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) successfully controlled the nuclear plasma in a fusion reaction chamber with deep reinforcement learning. This was arguably a key breakthrough towards making fusion energy a reality.

In November 2021, Helion raised $500 million in funding, with commitments for another $1.7 billion linked to certain performance milestones. According to Bloomberg, Helion set a goal to achieve net electricity from fusion in 2024. They do not appear to have achieved that goal yet, halfway through 2024, though on June 5 it was announced that Helion had partnered with OpenAI—another leading AGI company—to “power superhuman AI” (Cuthbertson, 2024).

In October 2021, the US Energy Information Agency projected the world's total primary energy consumption to grow from 601.5 quadrillion BTUs in 2020 to 886.3 quadrillion BTUs in 2050. Most of that growth is expected in non-OECD Asian countries. Renewable energy is expected to grow from 14.7% of the world's energy in 2020 to 26.5% in 2050, with nuclear fission projected to remain at 4% in the same period.