[arethuza]

Well, there is an expensive plant in France that will be manufacturing helium from raw materials ;-)

http://www.iter.org/

[venomsnake]

Nuclear fusion has always been 10 years away. Lets hope that they will succeed this time.

[shabble]

The fusion itself is (afaik) essentially a solved problem. The trick is extracting net energy from it, since you use a lot in generating the plasma, massive magnetic fields to keep it contained, etc.

But if you just cared about the byproducts, I think that's a much easier problem.

Probably still 10 years though :)