It’s out there. We have faith that some day it will come and we will be saved — saved from the inevitable destruction we bring upon ourselves. And when it does come, it will bring us a new era of world prosperity and peace.

I don’t mean the second coming. I mean the technological breakthrough, the big one, the one that will bring us energy so plentiful and so cheap it will end all our troubles, spare our polluted atmosphere and light the fires of our sputtering world economy. We won’t have to cover the bare land of Earth with solar cells and windmills, or dig our coal and pump our fossil fuel and perpetually spew their fumes skyward, smothering and cooking the planet to sustain our lifestyle. We can look to a future that is star bright.

The breakthrough has been imminent all our lives, and our parents’, but has yet to come. There are always prophets who say the day is at hand. They have, so far, always been wrong.

Is it coming now? The latest issue of Newsweek suggests the possibility with an article on nuclear fusion experiments under way at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Conventional nuclear power runs on fission — splitting an atom in two and releasing energy. Fusion melds two atoms together to release vastly more energy. It is the same force that powers the sun and, incidentally, the hydrogen bomb. The trick, Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons reminds us, is to control the rapid hydrogen-bomb blast of energy and make it like the sun — powerful, but steady. A fusion reactor could power cities with a lump of fuel the size of a jelly bean, made from isotopes extracted from water.

Scientists have been searching for the answers to fusion for three generations. The physicists in California say they are on the brink. The are building the world’s most powerful laser to zap a fuel pellet with enough energy to spark the fusion of deuterium and tritium molecules. They will test it next year. Other scientists quoted by Newsweek call them “snake-oil salesmen” grubbing for government grants with a lot of useless flash. They’ve spent $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars so far. I suggest rooting for the fusion advocates and hoping that for the first time, the naysayers are wrong.

Elsewhere, the other energy messiah would probably be the fuel cell, a rather small contraption that extracts energy from the chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen. Fuel cells are proven — they’ve powered most of our spacecraft. The trick is making them cheap and practical. General Motors tried, hoping to see fuel-cell- powered electric cars roaming America in just a few years. It found it could build a fuel-cell-powered car, but not at anything approaching a practical price. Now this month’s issue of The Atlantic includes a short article on a company called Bloom Energy, whose CEO, K.R. Sridhar, wet his fuel-cell feet building oxygen generators for NASA. The company says it will soon have ready for market a cell they call a Bloom Box, described as “the size of a large coffee table and capable of powering a 5,000-square-foot house.” It can run on any fuel, like propane or natural gas or ethanol, and produce energy with a fraction of the emissions of natural gas generators. And this will be at “a price he says will be competitive with existing energy options.” They all say that. Maybe this time it will be true.

Imagine the potential. They say you could use hopelessly intermittent wind and solar power to produce hydrogen, save it and turn your fuel cell into a giant battery. Or you could build that house off the grid, anywhere you want. Or you could bring electricity and pumps and water purification to the world’s poor and backward places, without stringing wires or building big power plants.

The breakthrough. Is it coming? Faith can be rewarded.

Tracy Warner’s column appears Tuesday through Friday. He can be reached at warner@wenworld.com or 665-1163.