Scientists studying fusion power at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had passed a long-awaited milestone by reproducing the sun’s energy in a laboratory.

The result of such an experiment has responded to the search to release an energy source devoid of pollution and greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, that use the division of uranium to produce energy.

For decades, researchers have tried to recreate nuclear fusion, replicating the energy that feeds the sun, however, this is the first time they have successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction that results in a net gain of energy, instead of reaching the equilibrium point as previous experiments had done.

Thus, the successful experiment meets the ignition objective that was promised when the construction of the National Ignition Facility since 1997, because when it began operating in 2009, the facility barely generated fusion, a shameful disappointment after an investment of 3,500 billion dollars from the federal government. 

Despite this encouraging scenario, scientists say it will be a long time before fusion is available on a practical and widespread scale. They need to figure out how to produce much more power from nuclear fusion on a much larger scale.

At the same time, they need to find out how to eventually reduce the cost of nuclear fusion so that it can be used commercially, and the energy produced by fusion will need to be harvested and transferred to the power grid as electricity. It will take years, and possibly decades, before fusion can produce unlimited amounts of clean energy.

However, this field has open up great advances and it will have loads of benefits, not only for humanity but also for combating the effects of climate change that threaten life as we currently know it.

For this reason, it can be assured that we are facing a technology that can transform the world and open a new era, with economic, social and geopolitical consequences that are still unpredictable, regardless of collateral developments and unexpected discoveries to which they may lead to pending investigations, the features will open up new challenges within in the intellectual property field, specially, in regard to patents.