In recent years, some have been questioning the possibility of a smaller way to fusion. The magnetic fusion approach uses strong magnetic fields to pressurize and trap the hot plasma fuel. The challenge is that fusion only happens in stars, where the huge gravitational force creates pressures and temperatures so intense that usually repulsive particles will collide and fuse.
With fusion powering the factory (and the logistics infrastructure too), those reductions would be even greater. That ability could come from commercial fusion energy, creating a game changer for desalination by taking the energy overhead costs of desal and cutting them to nearly zero. It’ll take years to get there, but at fusion’s fullest capacity, anyone will be able to use as much electricity as they need, with no environmental costs and very little expense.
As the electric vehicle’s story shows, a technological resurgence can take time and may need to demonstrate breakthroughs in adjacent fields – e.g. the electric car brought advances in high-capacity batteries and low-losses electrical engines. But recent advancements in manufacturing technologies, particularly additive manufacturing, address this problem very well. This challenge was especially true for stellarators with more complicated coil configurations than tokamaks. Meanwhile, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which made a long-awaited breakthrough in fusion late last year, suffered a setback as five similar shots have since failed. In February 2023, it reached a milestone by achieving an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules, with the discharge lasting a record eight minutes.
The global impact of electricity from fusion will be huge. In 2013, Lockheed Martin showed how compact fusion could meet global electricity consumption (44,000,000 GWh per year) by 2045. The JET tokamak at Culham Laboratory achieved 16MW of fusion power in 1997 with 24MW of input power. A nuclear fusion reactor in South Korea has set a new record, superheating a plasma loop to 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds.
And, can we go on from that to build reliable, economic, fusion power plants? General Fusion in Canada, Helion Energy in the United States and others fusion markets review are investigating new approaches to fusion energy. Different approaches to fusion energy are being pursued – from cold fusion, which still lacks evidence and may never work, to inertial fusion, which could work, to magnetic fusion, which really does work. The world needs abundant, clean energy.
Nuclear fusion has been described as harnessing the same reaction that powers the sun and stars on Earth. OpenStar says its design – which turns the ‘tokamak’ design used by many other fusion projects “inside out” – could be faster to scale and commercialize than other. Global goals, agreed at COP28, of tripling renewable capacity and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 are crucial for limiting global temperature rises to below 1.5C. Annual investment in the global energy sector must grow by more than 2.5 times to stick to a 1.5C pathway, IRENA says.
The result of the US presidential election has had a negative impact on the country’s clean energy sector, according to the FT, with some developers putting projects on hold and investors dumping shares. To meet net-zero commitments and energy demand, nuclear new builds of multiple sizes and technology types will be needed, the report adds. Creating plasma is the first step towards nuclear fusion, and while much higher temperatures are needed to achieve that goal, the test was notable due to the unconventional design of the reactor, the FT says. In the Sun, massive gravitational forces create the right conditions for nuclear fusion in the star’s core, but on Earth, they are much harder to achieve.
Our current nuclear power stations use nuclear fission – essentially splitting an atom’s nucleus. Through its Centres, the World Economic Forum integrates public-private efforts to achieve greater impact. While advancements in AI, quantum computing, biotech, robotics and automation and other fields present numerous opportunities, new technologies are also hiking energy demand. A competitive race and more private investment would be good for the progress of fusion. We have built and demonstrated a tokamak with all its magnets made from HTS and we are now designing the device to get to fusion temperatures.
With energy superabundance, desal would not only be able to keep California’s desert cities hydrated, those plants would be able to supply irrigation for vast carbon sequestration projects across the arid world. Even in a drought, when freshwater supplies are scarce, it’s not cost-effective to run most desal plants because of energy costs. One problem was that the process, which usually involves distilling seawater multiple times until all the salt is removed, uses an incredible amount of energy. Access to fresh water is drying up around the world, focusing attention on desalination (desal) technology, which can make plentiful drinking water from the sea. Fusion energy is arguably the most exciting human discovery since fire. The framework is intended to be a coordination tool for leaders across the nuclear ecosystem to align on actions and strategies to accelerate advanced nuclear and SMR deployment across nine priority areas.
AI is helping researchers speed up fusion progress by modelling and analysing complex systems. Many experts think that fusion is still two or three decades away from being commercially viable, though some start-ups aim to have plants up and running by the 2030s. We will deliver net energy conditions well before the end of the decade and commercial net energy by the early 2030s. For example, two hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, releasing far more energy than fission. Given the difference in the maturity and level of development of these technologies, let’s unpack the status of each and the expected outlook.
Inexpensive, plentiful power derived from a nuclear fusion-fueled grid could spell the end of heating-season chaos like we’re seeing this winter. Nuclear fusion power would revolutionize the energy sector — and one of the most environmentally impactful and increasing needs is in home heating and cooling. Companies have raised around $5 billion in private funding for nuclear fusion, in a quest to replicate the power source that fuels the sun, Reuters says. Both reactions release large amounts of energy, but with nuclear fusion, there is a high energy yield and low nuclear waste production. Meanwhile, work is underway on “the UK’s NASA moment” – a nuclear fusion energy plant in the north of England.
In addition, fast neutron reactors can utilize spent fuel from existing power plants and provide a sustainable solution to the issue of waste. They use fission technology, so they’re not as frontier as fusion, but they’re closer to becoming a reality. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are another promising area of advanced nuclear energy.
Major hurdles remain, however, before fusion becomes a staple of the energy mix. A recent report from Swiss company EconSight, which tracks technology trends and patents, shows China leading the field, filing 67% of world-class fusion patents between 2016 and 2023, compared to 19% in the US and 5% in Europe. Since the 1980s, 33 nations and thousands of engineers and scientists have collaborated to build and operate a “tokamak” – a magnetic fusion device – as part of the ITER project, the world’s largest fusion experiment.
In New York City, heat pumps are becoming common in new developments, and a new programme will start introducing them into the city’s public housing this winter, which has long-standing problems with broken furnaces and inadequate heat. The technology still needs to overcome the common misconception that heat pumps can’t hack it anywhere that experiences true winter. Despite doing all the work of central heating and cooling, heat pumps use far less energy than an oil burner or HVAC systems. By harnessing the energy in the outside air, which is present even on cold days, and moving it inside in the form of heat, heat pumps can efficiently warm a home. Nuclear fusion, however, was not a major part of the conversation — but as the drought and heat waves in Europe, the flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria and every other climate catastrophe has recently shown, we need large-scale changes.
Using laser beams, the amount of energy from the fusion reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target for an instant. In August 2023, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California repeated a breakthrough they first made in December 2022, achieving a “net energy gain” in fusion ignition. It produced 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds – or enough energy to heat up to five hot baths, according to the BBC, triple what it generated back in 1997. The most promising combination for power on Earth today is the fusion of a deuterium atom with a tritium one. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and stars, merges two atomic nuclei into a larger one.
In December 2017, it set a new stellarator world record for fusion products. In 1968, scientists in the Soviet Union released the results of their tokamak machines, which were simpler to make, as part of the magnetic field cage is created by a strong current flowing in the plasma. The stellarator concept was an elegant solution to a fundamental problem in fusion research but it was challenging to build such a device to the precision needed.