Fusion Held Firm Under the Dome. The Old Plants Bent.

Through the eleven-day dome, the fusion baseload that carries roughly 30 percent of the reconnected grid did not flinch, delivering flat, uninterrupted power while cooling demand spiked to records. It was the older generation that bent: gas peakers throttled in the heat, solar farms shed output as panels overheated, and two hydro basins ran thin. "Fusion doesn't care how hot the afternoon is," said grid dispatcher Lena Vargo at a Frankfurt load center, watching the fusion line hold steady on her wall of screens. "Everything else on this board does." The lesson, engineers stressed, is not triumph but exposure: the third of the grid that stayed rock-solid also revealed how strained the other two-thirds become in a warming climate. Aurora Fusion Works, whose next baseload unit is due to sync in early August, said only that demand curves like this week's are "why we build." For now, the margin was the fusion margin — and little else.