Harsh reality is again clashing with the fanciful hype of the past several years about fusion energy. The only credible attempt to harness the physics of the sun — ITER (Latin for “the path” and originally the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) — has again pushed back the date when it will attempt a sustained fusion reaction and the additional time before it can demonstrate even the possibility of practical energy production.
For the second time in two years, the 35-nation project has announced a snag in the project, although it has also some good news to report. At a July 3 press conference at ITER headquarters in France, Director-General Pietro Barabaschi said the new goal is to be able to run the toroidal magnets in the donut-shaped tokomak briefly at full power in 2036. The deuterium-tritium operation phase, where the fusion rubber really begins to meet the road, won’t occur before 2039.
The new timeline will add some $5 billion to the current approximately $20 billion + cost estimate for the pilot project. Exact costs are difficult to calculate as much of the support comes from in-kind contributions from the 35 member countries: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The United Kingdom participates through EU‘s Fusion for Energy (F4E), Switzerland participates through Euratom and F4E, and the project has cooperation agreements with Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan and Thailand. Europe provides about 45% of the ITER funding
What does this mean in terms of the many promises of fusion energy? In surprising candor, Barabaschi said, “Fusion cannot arrive in time to solve the problems our planet faces today, and investment in other technologies, known and unknown, is absolutely needed. But I expect fusion will make a difference when it arrives, and let’s not forget that there is not just the problem of solving global warming … energy is also needed for life on Earth.”
Science magazine added a caveat to that announcement. ITER’s tokomak machine will run in 2039 “only in short bursts, to satisfy safety concerns of the nuclear regulator in France, where ITER is under construction.” Even if ITER is a complete success, that’s only a first, albeit big, step. It will not generate electricity. That requires solving the gigantic problem of building a plant to convert the energy to electric power.
Barabaschi is far more open than his predecessor, Bernard Bigot, who was fond of fusion enthusiasm and downplayed the problems that have plagued the project throughout its life. Michel Claessens, who was ITER’s communications chief until Bigot fired him upon taking office in 2015, this year told Science|Business that too many fusion researchers and officials have become purveyors of what he terms “fusion propaganda.”
Claessens said, “We should be clear with the public. We are still in the research and development phase. We’re still far from commercial applications. I’m really upset, and I don’t think it helps, when people say fusion will be the energy of the future.”
The good news for ITER is that in April the project took delivery of the first of 19 giant toroidal magnets that are the heart of the magnetic confinement tokomak, prompting a July 1 celebration. All 19 of the coils (18 for the machine and one spare, 10 from Europe and 9 from Japan) are due to ITER’s southern France headquarters in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in three-and-a-half years. Barabaschi commented that the 17-meter-tall coils “look like science-fiction.” They are 40-times the mass of the magnets at the European nuclear research laboratory CERN, the largest operating magnets in the world today.
ITER had its beginning in 1978 as a modest proposal for an international program to develop a Tokomak fusion project. The project moved forward with little attention beyond technical circles, until it burst upon the public scene during the 1985 Geneva summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
In Geneva, the two major world leaders agreed to cooperate on fusion R&D, issuing a statement that “the potential importance of the work aimed at utilizing controlled thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes and, in this connection, advocated the widest practicable development of international cooperation in obtaining this source of energy, which is essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit of all mankind.” Reagan touted the collaboration in a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. than had an on-again, off-again relationship with the project as it began to put together what became ITER. The U.S. pulled out of the planning in 1998, complaining that the projected $10 billion cost was excessive. When the planners scaled back to effort to $5 billion in 2002, the U.S. rejoined. The original funding was $6 billion, with a 10-year time frame.
What are the major obstacles that practical fusion must overcome? Claessens outlines the most significant:
“The question of economic sustainability is so open today because these machines are very expensive.”
- Tritium. This extremely rare hydrogen isotope is crucial. Fusion optimists are counting on “tritium breeding” to overcome this fundamental problem. The concept is that the fusion machine will create more tritium than it uses. Claessens comments, “It is at least a question mark.”
- Economics. The fusion hype artists talk glowingly about “virtually limitless less energy,” as if hydrogen is a free fuel. Even if uranium were free, electricity from nuclear fission plants would still be expensive. Claessens: “The question of economic sustainability is so open today because these machines are very expensive.”
- Materials. The fusion reaction will involve enormous temperatures, perhaps exceeding those in the sun. Finding materials that can hold these hot plasmas is far from solved. The process will also produce copious neutrons that will irradiate everything in their path. There will be no spent fuel from fusion. There will be plenty of radioactive materials.
Unlike his predecessors, Barabaschi has not tried to paper over fusion’s problem. ITER communications chief Laban Coblentz, who took over when Claessens was fired, has said, “With Pietro’s arrival at ITER, there’s been a deliberate effort to look at how we communicate about fusion that is factual, avoids overpromising, and tries to address questions that fusion sceptics have in a fair and realistic way.”
Despite that, the fusion propaganda machine has produced a wave of mostly offbeat projects, more than 40 since 2018 by one estimate. The likelihood that any of these fusion pipedreams will produce anything other than red ink is less than slim.
–Kennedy Maize