Is it time to plan fusion regulations?
Is commercial fusion energy so much closer to reality than most believe that a need to start thinking about how to regulate the technology and structure the business enterprise is required? That was the assertion behind Tuesday’s public zoom meeting among the Department of Energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Fusion Industry Association (FIA).
The boldest statement came from Paul Dabbar, DOE under secretary for science and in charge of the U.S. fusion program. Dabbar came to the Trump administration from a job as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan (he’s also a former Navy nuclear officer). Fusion, he said, is “getting closer than what most people think. It’s no longer 30 years out, but much, much closer.” He offered no specifics.
Dabbar also noted that Congress seems to share his vision and has been “highly enthusiastic” about funding DOE’s fusion research. The budget is up “31% since three years ago.” He, and others, also insisted that it was important for the first commercial fusion power plant “to be built in the U.S.”
NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki pointed to the NRC’s current investigation of risk-related regulations for advanced fission reactors (none of which currently exist) as a “template” for how to approach fusion machines, in whatever form they may take. She said the NRC has identified “no obstacle today” that stops the agency and industry from moving forward on the framework for fusion regulations.
Andrew Holland, executive director of the 22-member, two-year-old FIA, said the goal of the effort should be toward “ensuring regulatory certainty,” echoing a decades-old complaint of the fission industry. He called for a “framework to remove fusion from the regulatory approaches that the federal government has taken toward fission.” He said the France has applied a fission-oriented model to regulations for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which has burdened the project.
The fusion optimism may be misplaced. Robert L. Hirsch, a fusion pioneer who in the 1960s helped the develop the first working fusion machine, the “fusor,” along with TV inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, is skeptical about fusion’s imminence.
Hirsch led the Atomic Energy Commission and Energy Research and Development Administration fusion program, including the development of the “tokamak” magnetic confinement approach to controlling fusion plasma. In an article in the August 2020 issue of the journal Fusion Science and Technology, Hirsch and others note that deuterium-hydrogen fusion, as in the ITER magnetic confinement project, raises a host of nasty regulatory issues, including the need for very large and robust “containment structures and various safety measures for each component.” Among the elements that must be contained are radioactive tritium, corrosion products, coolant, and “activated elements in the air.” ITER is the only fusion project far enough along to present a the beginning of a full range of regulatory issues.
In an email to The Quad Report, Hirsch said the zoom meeting (which had 193 virtual attendees) offered “very little substance to me until there is a specific system for regulators to consider.”
Tomorrow (Oct. 7) The National Academies is holding a virtual meeting, funded by DOE, titled “Key Goals and Innovations Needed for a U.S. Fusion Pilot Plant.”
— Kennedy Maize