By Kennedy Maize
While fusion energy — yielding enormous amounts of heat from the violent combination of elements — has long been touted as the holy grail of energy future, that’s a dead end, according to a new article in the prestigious journal Nature Energy.
“While nuclear fusion power is often hailed as a future source of abundant, clean energy, current dominant fusion designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are unlikely to become competitive due to their expected low experience rates,” concludes the article by a team of researchers led by Lingxi Tang of the Energy and Technology Policy Group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
The article says “policymakers should not rely on, or fund, fusion power as a core pillar of future clean energy systems unless designs with different characteristics are developed.”
The article focuses on the current mainstream approaches to fusion — combining atoms through magnetic confinement or laser-induced confinement — concluding that they are “inherently large in unit size, extremely complex in design, and require moderate to high customization.”
Estimates of the costs of fusion, based on their research, range from $1,400 per kilowatt to $43,000 per kilowatt. These wildly divergent estimates lead the researchers to conclude that “fusion power is likely to remain uncompetitive relative to other low-carbon electricity supply technologies. This casts considerable doubt on the future role of fusion power in a net-zero energy system and whether current investment levels from both the public and private sectors are justified.”
The article is a direct shot at the long-running, often-troubled, multi-billion-dollar, 34-nation ITER project in France. Originally the “International Thermal Energy Reactor” project, the tokamak magnetic confinement machine has been under construction since 2013 and now hopes to achieve its first plasma in 2036.
The analysis also targets the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In 2022, researchers were able to use focused lasers to achieve “break even,” producing more power output than the energy input, by a tiny margin. That event generated a lot of publicity and optimism at the time, but little has been heard from Livermore since.
More recently, several startups claiming they are on the cusp of achieving practical fusion energy have raised a lot of venture capital, without actually delivering energy. All aim for smaller projects, with potentially multiple sales. None have reached the point of having a licensing proceeding at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a requirement before they can be commercially deployed.
Among them:
- Helion Energy, based in Everett, Wash., founded in 2013. The company claims it has a smaller approach to fusion, which it terms “aneutronic fusion,” minimizing the production of neutrons with a pulsed linear magnetic confinement technology. It has backing from Open AI’s Sam Altman. The company has a 2023 agreement with nearby Microsoft to supply 50 MW of power in 2028 for a data center.
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston spin-off from MIT’s fusion energy program, developing a down-sized tokamak using high-temperature superconduction magnets to, the company claims, lead to “high performing, fusion systems at significantly lower cost.” The company has a deal, details unspecified, with Google, an investor, for “an offtake agreement for 200 megawatts (MW) of clean fusion power” in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
- General Fusion, headquartered in British Columbia, with subsidiaries in the U.S. and the U.K., and founded in 2002. The company’s technology, magnetized target fusion, combines both conventional approaches to achieving high-temperature plasma as a fusion starting point. In January, the company announced it is going public on the NASDAQ through a deal with a special purpose acquisition company, Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, to eventually become listed as NASDQAQ:GFUZ.
- TAE Technologies, based in California and founded in 1998, the company bases its fusion technology on a hydrogen-boron process, known as known as proton-boron or p-11B. rather than the conventional merging of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. This reduces production of neutrons. It aims for a prototype commercial reactor by 2030, which it plans to be in the 350-500-MW scale. The company recently merged with the Trump family’s Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. with a self-proclaimed value of $6 billion and a CNN warning of “serious ethics concerns.”
All the recent flurry of fusion fascination prompted one long-time observer of the story to quip, anonymously, “The folks who brought us the most expensive way in the world to boil water, fission, now want to double down with fusion.”
Always controversial and often outrageous commentator and mega-billionaire Elon Musk, no friend of fusion, commented on Twitter last December, “The Sun is an enormous, free fusion reactor in the sky. It is super dumb to make tiny fusion reactors on Earth.
“Even if you burned 4 Jupiters, the Sun would still round up to 100% of all power that will ever be produced in the solar system!!”
