The mighty firm Microsoft has just made an astonishing bet that sustainable nuclear fusion power generation may be much closer to realization than most people think. This is given the decades-long running joke that working fusion reactors are always 30 years away. Microsoft has done a deal to purchase electricity generated from fusion by a company called Helion as early as 2028! A speculative long-shot investment, given the checkered history? Very probably, but at long last, some significant milestones have recently been achieved in fusion research from both the East and the West.
But how excited should we be about the combined Eastern and Western promise of safe, limitless energy? How does the reality stack up against the hype, and how does this news compare with other international efforts in this vital research field? Can one camp win on its own, or should we be looking for closer international collaboration and cooperation? Will it be that this will deliver, at last, a technology that will be profoundly transformative for humanity if fusion power can be unleashed? Let’s have a closer look.
The prospect of creating sustainable fusion power as a clean, low-waste energy-generating technology that will solve our electricity supply needs has been the holy grail for decades. (No long-term nuclear fusion radioactive materials are produced, unlike with atomic fission.) There has been hype, hope, hand-wringing, massive expenditures, and significant and competing international collaborations over the promise of fusion power for just as long. Despite grandiose claims, announced breakthroughs, and reported advances, we never seem to be actually any closer to practical delivery of fusion power to feed into the grid. The promise appears to keep receding into the distance like a running joke. However, the potential benefits are so enormous that vast resources have continued to be fed into fusion research for more than 70 years.
If we could achieve stable fusion that was affordable, scalable, and deployable, then we would indeed enter a new golden age of effectively limitless energy for our planet. Unlimited because the fuel comes from the most abundant and simplest element in the universe: hydrogen (and its rarer isotopes of deuterium and tritium, often used in fusion experiments). As most of us know, hydrogen is combined with oxygen to form that vital and ubiquitous molecule H2O, or water, which makes up 75 percent of our bodies and fills the world’s oceans.
Nevertheless, the promise of ITER is a significant, bold, and massive demonstration that international scientific collaboration between East and West for the benefit of all of humanity is alive and well in this most important of human endeavors — of power to the people
The fundamental problem for fusion, however, is that unlike nuclear fission, which involves “splitting the atom” to release vast energy — a technology we have mastered since World War II for both power and destruction — fusion involves fusing four hydrogen atoms together to form helium. Simply put, the slight reduction in resultant atomic mass in transforming the four protons of hydrogen needed to create the two protons and two neutrons of the element helium is converted into energy by the famous Einstein formula of E=MC2. This fusion process powers our sun and enables all life on Earth.
Unfortunately, achieving fusion on Earth is a fundamentally extremely challenging problem. This is because the process that sustains our sun requires an almost unimaginable combination of pressure and temperature, millions of degrees. The technologies needed to create the extreme physical conditions required here on Earth are complicated, complex, and extremely expensive. The last 50 years of fusion effort and experiment have been dominated by American, European, Russian, and Japanese efforts, sometimes independent, sometimes coordinated. The technologies being investigated are also quite different but dominated mainly by magnetic confinement of super-hot plasmas of ionized gas in so-called Tokamak* doughnut-shaped enclosures.
Break-even has been achieved over the last few years on several occasions where for short periods of time, the amount of energy released by fusion has at least met the amount of energy put into facilitating the fusion process. But we have been talking about seconds and not minutes nor the hours, days, and weeks needed for practical applications.
However, fusion research has now been really “heating up”, so to speak. First came the announcement from America in early December 2022 that fusion “ignition” had been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility (NIF**), i.e., the point where the amount of energy being released by a fusion process exceeds the amount of energy expended to get fusion to start. This was a world first. Coincidentally, on Dec 30, 2021, there was exciting news surrounding real progress and breakthroughs with the Chinese fusion energy research program and its aptly named EAST reactor (EAST stands for Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak*). EAST, based in Hefei, in East China’s Anhui province, broke its own world record set in the middle of 2021 of 101 seconds by sustaining a high temperature (about 70 million degrees C) plasma for 17.6 minutes at a level that could eventually support fusion. Taken together, these combined results show real promise at last.
The Chinese results, in particular, feed into the next generation of massive Tokamak called ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, whose acronym means “The Way” in Latin), currently under construction in southern France. It has 35 major international players in fusion research collaborating together, including the USA, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and major European powers, and a price tag of a cool $22 billion! It is a momentous undertaking that promises to deliver practical fusion by 2035. Sadly, this may be a decade or two too late to avoid the impending climate catastrophe unfolding by the day, so renewables and nuclear must step up before then to replace fossil-fuel burning as much as possible.
Another significant change of the last decade has been the move to commercial companies entering the fray with various competing fusion technologies attracting mostly private investments at $2.4 billion. Could there emerge an equivalent of a Space-X for fusion and turbocharge the situation? We can only hope. Nevertheless, the promise of ITER is a significant, bold, and massive demonstration that international scientific collaboration between East and West for the benefit of all of humanity is alive and well in this most important of human endeavors — of power to the people!
*A Tokamak is a toroidal doughnut-shaped enclosure in which plasma is heated to millions of degrees and kept from touching (and so destroying) the walls of the chamber using magnetic confinement technologies
**The $3.5 billion LLNL experiment combines the hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium together into a tiny capsule about the size of a pea. Then it fires 192 powerful lasers directly into the capsule, which compresses and heats the fuel until the physical conditions for fusion are created, just like for our own sun.
The author is a professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Hong Kong, the director of its Laboratory for Space Research, and vice-chairman of the Orion Astropreneur Space Academy.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
