Fusion Technology Is Reaching a Turning Point that Could Change the Energy Game

Our society faces the grand difficulty of offering sustainable, secure, and affordable forms of generating energy while trying to reduce CO₂ emissions to net 0 around 2050. To date, advancements in fusion power, which potentially ticks all these boxes, have been funded nearly exclusively by the public industry. Nevertheless, something is changing.

Private equity investment in the world fusion industry has more than doubled in just one year– from US$ 2.1 billion in 2021 to US$ 4.7 billion in 2022, according to a survey from the Fusion Industry Association.

So, what is driving this current change? There’s lots to be excited about.

Before we explore that, let’s take a fast detour to recap what fusion power is.

Merging atoms together

Fusion functions the same way our Sun does, by merging 2 heavy hydrogen atoms under extreme heat and pressure to release vast quantities of energy.

It’s the opposite of the fission process utilized by nuclear power plants, in which atoms are split to release huge amounts of energy.

Sustaining nuclear fusion at scale has the potential to create a secure, clean, almost inexhaustible energy source.

Our Sun sustains fusion at its core with a plasma of charged particles at around 15 million degrees Celsius. Down on Earth, we are aiming for hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius due to the fact that we do not have the enormous mass of the Sun compressing the fuel down for us.

Researchers and engineers have worked out several designs for how we may achieve this, but most fusion reactors utilize strong magnetic fields to “bottle” and confine the warm plasma.

Generally, the main difficulty in overcoming on our road to commercial fusion power is to offer environments that could contain the intense burning plasma needed to create a fusion reaction that is self-sustaining, producing more energy than was required to get it started.

Joining the public and private

Fusion advancement has been advancing since the 1950s. Most of it was driven by government funding for fundamental science.

Currently, a growing number of private fusion companies worldwide are forging ahead toward commercial fusion energy. A modification in government attitudes has been essential to this.

The US and also UK governments are fostering public-private collaborations to complement their strategic study programs.

For instance, the White House recently announced it would create a “bold decadal vision for commercial fusion energy.”

In the U.K., the government has invested in a program to link a fusion generator to the national electricity grid.

The technology has actually advanced, too

In addition to public-private resourcing, the technologies we require for fusion plants have come along in leaps and bounds.

In 2021, MIT scientists and Commonwealth Fusion Systems created a record-breaking magnet that will permit them to build a compact fusion tool called SPARC “that is substantially tinnier, lower cost, and on a quicker timeline.”

In recent years, many fusion experiments have also reached the all-important milestone of sustaining plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius or above.

These include the EAST experiment in China, Korea’s flagship experiment KSTAR, and UK-based company Tokamak Energy.

These excellent feats demonstrate an unprecedented capacity to replicate conditions discovered inside our Sun and keep extremely hot plasma trapped long enough to encourage fusion to happen.

In February, the Joint European Torus– the world’s most powerful operational tokamak– announced world-record energy confinement.

And the next-step fusion energy experiment to show net power gain, ITER, is under construction in France and currently about 80 percent complete.

Magnets are not the only path to fusion, either. In November 2021, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California achieved a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion.

By focusing almost 200 powerful lasers to confine and compress a target the size of a pencil’s eraser, they created a small fusion “hot spot,” generating fusion energy over a short time period.

In Australia, a company dubbed HB11 is creating proton-boron fusion innovation through a combination of high-powered lasers and magnetic fields.

Fusion and renewables can go hand in hand

It is essential that investment in fusion is not at the cost of other types of renewable energy and also the transition away from fossil fuels.

We could afford to expand adoption of current renewable energy innovations such as solar, wind, and pumped hydro while also creating next-generation solutions for electricity manufacturing.

This exact method was outlined recently by the USA in its Net-Zero Game Changers Initiative. In this plan, resource investment will be targeted to creating a path to rapid decarbonization in parallel with the commercial development of fusion.

History reveals us that incredible scientific and engineering progress is possible when we work along with the right resources– the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines is just one recent example.

It is clear many researchers, engineers, and now governments and private investors (and also fashion designers) have decided fusion energy is a solution worth pursuing, not a pipe dream. Right now, it is the best shot we have yet had to make fusion power a viable reality. The Conversation

Nathan Garland, Professor in Applied Mathematics and Physics, Griffith College, and Matthew Hole, Senior Research Fellow, Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University

Read the original article on: Science Alert.

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