from Hacker News

Yesterday’s news about EAST achieving a record-breaking 1,066 seconds of sustained fusion has me both excited and curious. This milestone feels like one more step toward making fusion a practical energy source, but it got me wondering: how far away are we, really, from sustaining fusion long enough to make it plausible as a power source?

To explore this, I set an arbitrary goalpost: sustaining fusion for 24 hours straight. Using historical data from previous breakthroughs, I tried to extrapolate when we might hit that mark.

Here’s the dataset I worked with:

    Year Duration (s)
    2006 3
    2007 5
    2011 30
    2016 102
    2023 403
    2025 1,066

I ran a few different models to predict when we might achieve a 24-hour run:

    3rd Degree Polynomial: 2067 (but this model doesn’t fit the earlier data well)
    Exponential: 2034
    Logistic: 2035
    Power Law: 2037

The more plausible models suggest we could hit 24 hours of sustained fusion in about a decade.

What do you think? Are these estimates realistic given the pace of fusion research and other factors (e.g., engineering challenges, funding, or new breakthroughs)?