Fusion power, the Holy Grail of the scientific community, is predicted to operational (at least operational for their experiments) by the year 2014 (though it might be earlier if all the lasers do not need to be built).

From the Times-Herald Online article:
When completed, a 192-beam instrument is expected to be both the world’s largest and its most intense laser, capable of creating temperatures and pressures similar to those inside stars. When all 192 lasers in the NIF are operating, they’ll focus 500 trillion watts – more than 1,000 times the power generated in the United States – on their target, albeit only for a few billionths of a second. But, as Dr. Craig Wuest, NIF assistant project manager, explained on a recent tour, before the beams are powered up by pre-amplifiers and huge main amplifiers, they barely have the power of a spark. “(The pre-amplifiers) take the energy of the very low-energy master oscillator – it’s only about a billionth of a joule – and they amplify it 10 billion times to a few joules … A billionth of a joule is very small; it’s like the amount of energy a fly uses to push off a tabletop.”

The entire project is estimated to cost $3.448 billion, “roughly the initial cost of the Hubble Space Telescope plus a B-2 ‘Stealth’ bomber.”

I believe that research like this, however costly, is necessary for our future energy requirements. Providing that we can produce fusion power that gives off more energy that it can take in, this will be money well spent towards the continuing growth of the world population.