Carbon-Free Fusion Power Shows New Viability but Has a Long Way to Go

David Hart, a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and professor of public policy at George Mason University, concurred with Zuber's assessment, saying, "The main thing is you've got to have is some kind of dispatchable power, whether it's storage, whether it's, you know, natural gas with carbon capture, or whether it's nuclear."

"That's the hole that we'd have to fill out without emissions," Hart said, but he qualified that it's still unclear whether fusion will be up to the task.

"The inventors are always going to be, you know, super enthusiastic about their widget, and they should be," he said. "You want them to be working all night trying to make it work, but that doesn't mean every single one of them is going to succeed. Take them with a grain of salt."