Is Nuclear Fusion Really Possible? Well, Yes, But It's Like Medieval Cathedral Building. It Will Take A While!

Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin.

In a recent article in The Engineer, Jim Pickles, Tokamak Energy’s chief of material, predicted that artificial intelligence will soon enable the creation of a new materials database that will save millions of dollars and cut years off the global quest for clean, secure, and affordable fusion energy – the Holy Grail of energy production that could mean an endless supply of free energy to power the planet.

That, says Pickles, was the message at the 29^th Council of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan. The world, we are told, is so much closer to replicating the energy of the Sun itself – and in the process meet rapidly growing demand for affordable energy and also mitigate climate change.

While fusion development to many still sounds like science fiction – plasma temperatures reaching temperatures hotter than the sun’s core (as much as 10 times hotter) – it is, according to The Engineer, fast becoming the wave of the future thanks to worldwide collaborations and bold powerplant programs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan (China has its own fusion program, as well).

“The world needs fusion,” says the magazine, “and fusion needs teams around the world working together on solving big challenges.” Recent breakthroughs, they believe, show that fusion energy is no longer science fiction but could begin contributing to national energy grids by the 2030s.

The enthusiasm for fusion’s fast becoming commercial is shared by Focused Energy CEO Scott Mercer. The San Francisco-based German-American startup, which is planning a $65 millino facility to build lasers, has a goal of powering the entire city of San Francisco with “three soda cans” worth of fusion fuel per day – and, with fusion, there is no radioactive waste.

As Mercer sees it, “If humanity’s first foray into energy was the discovery of fire, harnessing fusion will be its culmination. We have the power to harness the universe's own source of energy within the next decade. And we will all be far better for it."

Up in Seattle, Zap Energy co-founder and University of Washington adjunct professor of applied mathematics Uri Shumiak has raised more than $330 million from investors and has a 150-person team working to deliver fusion energy to civilization.

The Zap Energy team is experimenting with its fusion reactor (called FuZE-Q) to try to produce a positive fusion energy output – the fundamental challenge fusion scientists everywhere are trying to achieve. The company’s claim to fame is its new prototype Century device, which relies on a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch rather than magnets, cryogenics, or lasers to achieve fusion.

Z-pinch fusion, a phenomenon in which electromagnetic fields are so strong they compress matter together, has been around since the 1950s but had been deemed ineffective because the plasma created fizzled out incredibly quickly. Zap claims that its sheared-flow stabilization extends the lifespan of the plasma produced almost indefinitely, allowing it to generate energy as long as needed.

Matthew C. Thompson, Zap’s vice president of systems engineering, explains that the company’s approach is pulsed so that it will “run like an internal combustion engine with cylinders firing all day long to produce steady energy output.” This, he added, generates large neutron flux and heat loads in the system – the energy output much desired. The Century device, he says, will test assumptions and define the best path toward commercialization.

Down in Georgia, Tokamak Energy has revealed the first design details of its high-field spherical tokamak, a fusion energy pilot plant that is a key participant in the Department of Energy’s milestone-based fusion development program. This competitive program seeks to encourage private companies to advance fusion technology towards practical commercial use.

Tokamak provided an early look at its operation at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics in Atlanta in October. The Tokamak pilot plant has a goal of generating 800 megawatts of fusion power and delivering 85 MW of net (carbon-free) electricity to more than 70,000 homes.

Meanwhile, New Zealand-based OpenStar now claims to be pursuing “the only viable path” to producing energy using nuclear fusion in the near future. The company is relying on a unusual reactor design it calls Junior, which is based on decades-old experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Most fusion researchers are relying on a donut-shaped (toroidal) tokamak reactor chamber, where a stream of plasma is held in place (away from its walls) by electromagnets. If they fail to keep the plasma condensed enough to encourage the charged atoms to fuse, or allow the superheated plasma to touch the tokamak walls, there will be no energy produced.

OpenStar, by contrast, uses one central magnet and an overall spherical shape. The lone magnet must be a superconductor and chilled to near absolute zero using ongoing and expensive equipment. OpenStar says its magnet will include batteries in order to extend its functional life while operating in the midst of a plasma stream that reaches over 100 million degrees Celsius.

For over a century, scientists have predicted that “Fusion is 30 years away from reality.” OpenStar now claims fusion is just six years away, “and we’re racing against the clock.” But Popular Mechanics writer Caroline Delbert is not that confident.

Some fusion programs around the world, she notes, have decades of iteration under their belts, notably the ITER project, Europe’s global-minded and grand-scale tokamak. Yet Scientific American in June 2023 said ITER was already “billions of dollars over budget and decades behind schedule” and with no vision as to how much more money and time it would require to achieve its goals.

Delbert says that the “strange dynamic” within proprietary and venture-funded fusion research, with its predictions of free energy tomorrow, is belied by one simple truth: “After 100 years of thought and 70 years of hands-on design work, how to heat the plasma enough is still a ‘core hurdle’.”

Maybe that’s why Zap’s Shumiak says, “We fusion researchers sometimes feel like medieval cathedral builders. You may never see the finished product, but nevertheless, you know you’re doing something great and beautiful [simply by advancing the science].”

Reposted from Real Clear Energy with permission from the author.

Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

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