Aurora's New Reactor Steadies a Grid That Ran Hot All Summer

The baseload reactor Aurora Fusion Works synchronized to the grid two Fridays ago has spent its first fortnight doing the least glamorous and most useful thing a machine can do: holding a line that wobbled all summer. Fusion now supplies a little over 31 percent of the reconnected grid, up from the roughly 30 percent that held for most of the year, and the marginal points matter most on the days when cooling demand across the northern megacities spikes past every forecast. "You do not notice baseload until the afternoon it is not there," said Aurora's chief executive, Emeka Okonkwo, who was careful to call the gain incremental rather than transformative. Operators in three heat-stressed regions credited the unit with shaving the rolling brownouts that had become a July ritual. The reactor is one machine, and the grid is a continent of them; but in a summer that punished every margin, one more steady source of power is the difference between a warning and an outage.