By Anna Tong

(Reuters) – The chief engineer for nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is joining nuclear fusion startup Fuse, the company said Thursday.

James Owen spent over 28 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, focused on weapons engineering.

The New Mexico-based lab, set up in 1943 as the top-secret facility for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, maintains the nation’s largest nuclear weapons arsenal, and oversees the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

At San Francisco Bay Area-based Fuse, Owen will be leading the company’s efforts to sell to U.S. governmental agencies, in areas including radiation services, a critical component of nuclear fusion energy.

Fuse is one of a number of startups, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-backed Helion, that is racing to commercialize nuclear fusion technology as a source of clean energy, though some experts have said its commercial viability is still decades away.

“If I thought it was well outside of my career horizon, I’d be less interested in trying to solve this problem,” Owen told Reuters. “Some argue it’s within a decade, others argue it’s beyond that, but recent advancements give me hope.”

Fusion, which fuels the sun and stars, is in the experimental stage on Earth, but could one day generate enormous amounts of energy that emits virtually no greenhouse gas and without generating large amounts of long-lasting radioactive waste.

Fusion is of particular importance to the artificial intelligence industry, which has been hamstrung by not having enough power to fuel the ever-growing computing clusters it needs to train smarter AI systems. Altman has said that an energy breakthrough such as nuclear fusion is necessary to the future of artificial intelligence.

(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Michael Perry)