The advantage of nuclear fusion over the current technology would be a cleaner process. Enriched uranium would not be the primary fuel and plutonium would not be the result. The process basically pushes atoms of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) together to form helium, releasing huge amounts of energy. The deuterium is extracted from seawater, which makes up about 75 percent of the Earth's surface.

This is the reaction that powers the sun as well as hydrogen bombs. The project seeks to develop methods to control the reaction in a safe manner and harness the released energy. Hydrogen is one of the most readily available elements on the planet.

Ian Fells, of the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain and an expert on energy conversion, described the project as a huge physics experiment. "If we can really make this work, there will be enough electricity to last the world for the next 1,000 to 2,000 years. So it is really quite important but quite difficult to do it," Fells said.