The ITER tokamak will have the world's largest plasma volume of 840 m³. Despite billions of dollars invested over decades, controlled fusion has yet to be demonstrated experimentally and fusion power is nowhere near commercial application. (Credit: ITER International Organization, modified by F. Diaz-Maurin)
Recent White House and Energy Department pronouncements on speeding up the “commercialization” of fusion energy are so over the top as to make you wonder about the scientific competence in the upper reaches of the government.
In April 2022, the White House launched what it called a “bold decadal vision” for a 10-year program to “accelerate the realization of commercial fusion energy.” The “bold” part is the proposal, in questionable analogy with high-speed computing, to do in parallel all the development steps that are typically done sequentially to bring a new technology to the market. According to the White House, this parallel processing would include: technology development, preparing a regulatory system (including rules for fusion reactor exports), securing the supply chain, identifying high-value markets, training a diverse workforce, and gaining public support, all “to support the rapid scale-up of fusion energy facilities.”
The special attraction of fusion is of course that it offers a potential source of abundant carbon-free energy that does not generate radioactive nuclear waste. But just because it would be nice if controlled fusion could work doesn’t mean it’s on the verge of doing so. The hard truth is that scientists and engineers don’t even know yet whether controlled fusion can be achieved to make useful work, at least anywhere outside the sun (and other stars, of course).
A historical perspective is useful to understand where the hype about commercial fusion is coming from.
We have known about fusion powering the sun since Hans Bethe explained it in 1939. This was also almost exactly when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered uranium fission (and Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch explained it). Then in 1942, Enrico Fermi and a small number of co-workers demonstrated a controlled fission chain reaction in a squash court at the University of Chicago. Fermi spent about $50 million in today’s dollars on building his 20-foot-tall atomic pile.
More than 80 years later, the corresponding control-of-fusion principle has yet to be demonstrated experimentally and the US government already made $35 billion in cumulative fusion expenditure—with probably a comparable investment abroad—without yet knowing what works.
The White House’s approach to attain success appears based on the idea that enthusiasm and coordination of all diverse stakeholders backed up with enough money can solve a so-far-unsolved scientific problem. Administration spokespersons mention projects that were successfully accelerated in this way, like the 1969 trip to the moon. Sure, this was indeed a hugely successful monumental project at the time, but no one involved doubted it was possible to do. All the necessary component technologies, like rockets and communications, were in hand on a smaller scale. In the case of fusion power reactors, no one is yet sure what they would look like, let alone if they will turn out to be possible and practicable.
The main research track today in fusion energy is “magnetic confinement”—configuring magnetic fields to keep in place a plasma of thermonuclear fuel 10 times hotter than the sun’s core within a donut-shaped magnetic “bottle.” Dozens of such machines—known as “tokamaks,” a Russian-language transliteration for toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field—have been built around the world since the 1950s, but none got close to demonstrating a net energy gain. Controlled fusion, it turns out, is an extremely difficult problem. To solve it, fusion experts have concluded the key is to have a large enough facility.
The world’s largest experimental fusion machine—ITER (initially the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, also meaning “the way” in Latin)—is nearing completion in France. It is a highly complex scientific and engineering project. ITER publicity describes the building housing the reactor as “slightly taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,” and that the building foundation will support some 400,000 metric tons—“more than the weight of New York’s Empire State Building.” Started in 2006, ITER is a 35-country megaproject that was supposed to be completed in 2016 at a cost of $6 billion. The reactor is currently projected to start up in 2025, but even that appears to be an optimistic date, as is the total budget estimate of about $22 billion.
The initial design objective is to produce a fusion plasma with thermal power 10 times greater than the injected thermal power. Even if successful, this net power output would not yet be the fusion equivalent of Fermi’s 1942 experimental nuclear pile, which proved the controlled fission concept. Nor would ITER’s more ambitious subsequent goal of maintaining this plasma for eight minutes. To get to proof of principle would likely take another step or an upgrading of ITER.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s weapons laboratory pursued another approach of “internal confinement,” to create a fusion reaction at its National Ignition Facility (NIF) and claimed it could have power application. NIF uses light pulses from a concentric battery of powerful lasers to heat a small target containing a tiny bead of frozen thermonuclear fuel. This is, in effect, a miniature (secondary) thermonuclear bomb, with the lasers playing the role of the triggering fission reactions (primary). The light heats the container material sufficiently to ablate and swiftly compress the fuel to the point of detonation, which lasts some billionths of a second. The experiment was directed primarily at developing a useful diagnostic tool for weapons research. In power application, you would have to repeat the explosions at an extraordinarily fast rate, which is a tall order.
Despite its lack of promise for civilian use, the Energy Department and the White House have used the Livermore controlled fusion experiment results to boost the effort to harness fusion power for civilian purposes. In December 2022, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced with great fanfare that a laser pulse ignited a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was supplied by the light beams: “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant energy powering our society … a huge step forward to the president’s goal of achieving commercial fusion within a decade.” (Update: In less than nine years from now.)
In her energy balance, however, the energy secretary forgot to account for the energy it took to create the laser beams. This energy input, when added, drastically reverses her conclusion, with the fusion output then amounting to only about one percent of the input. This is not disqualifying from a scientific point of view, but it obviously is in a power generating application. Still, this hasn’t stopped the Energy Department from including Livermore’s fusion ignition experiment in a promotional video on the “7 moments that changed nuclear energy history.” The clip claims “[t]he Lab was the first to produce more energy from a fusion reaction than was used to start the process,” again forgetting the energy it took to power the lasers.
Most people in the field still pin their hopes on the international ITER project for advancing the possibility of fusion power. One thing we know already is that, if a magnetic confinement fusion power reactor ever works, it will be huge and expensive. This contrasts with current thinking in energy policy that inclines to a more decentralized electrical system powered by more affordable and flexible generators. With fusion power being so difficult to demonstrate—even in principle—it will likely suffer a much longer time between proof of principle, if we ever get there, and significant commercial application. So, forget the Energy Department’s parallel processing path promise.
A recent White House announcement on fusion had a link to an Atlantic Council discussion on fusion. In it, former Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, a physicist, said he drew confidence about the prospects of fusion power from knowing that $5 billion of private capital has been invested. This showed him that “somebody must think this has got a good chance of working.” At the same time, if true, the funders who committed the $5 billion were surely drawing confidence from the fusion physicists’ enthusiastic claims. This circular reasoning does make one wonder.
It’s not surprising that the fusion research community at the Energy Department is gushing with enthusiasm for commercialization of fusion and the near-term prospect of building pilot plants and revolutionizing electricity generation. But as with any big-bet investment, some perspective about the possibilities and risks involved is in order. Where is the US government agency that will provide such a perspective?
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What about all the privately funded efforts? Perhaps their roadmap claims feel over-optimistic, but many were started via government investment - are they not worthy of mention? In simply focusing on the two biggest publicly-funded fusion bids, this piece feels poorly researched and rather incomplete, and therefore rather a weak argument.
Victor got it wrong in his story about energy output versus energy in. You both need to review the articles better, as the scientific breakthrough was the measurement of output to the amount of energy to start it, not the energy to create the laser beam.
Your views are flawed and not of the actual event but poor attempts at misdirection of information and again call into question your qualifications and understanding of your sciences if you do not understand the simple basis of an experiment.
You are just trying to pour cold water on an amazing achievement again
you both show "Illusory superiority" behaviour signs and bias.
Then again you can write a peer reviewable article on the claims you both make on the experiment as the experiment has of itself.
No John C, Victor was correct that neglecting the energy input to the lasers was(, in my own words now, dishonest). When the goal is to produce commercial energy, not accounting for the energy input required is misleading, to say the least. I followed the episode carefully, and the hype around the laser zapped pellets was over the top. Granholm’s speech seemed like a funding exercise, preying on the ignorance of those in office. The whole scheme of zapping pellets is a failure at the start. The apparatus and capacitor recharge time is many hours. How can any meaningful CONTINUOUS energy output be made? We need an Oppenheimer not a lawyer/politician like Granholm to run the energy department.
Gilinsky is correct about the feverish promotion of fusion energy being over-the-top and unjustified. In fact I made a similar protest in a brief essay published in the December 2023 issue of ANS Nuclear News, on p. 6.
As Gilinsky notes correctly, magnetic confinement fusion research is far from achieving scientific feasibility, and is stagnating.
But inertial confinement is a different story. Here Gilinsky is absolutely wrong about there being no fusion equivalent of Fermi’s Stagg Field experiment in 1942. in fact the demonstration of thermonuclear ignition at Livermore’s laser-driven NIF, plus the shots leading up to that demonstration and its subsequent replication are very much the equivalent of Stagg Field.
The daunting obstacle to realizing fusion power, as I indicated in my Nuclear News essay, is that no reactor technologies exist to exploit the scientific achievement of the NIF— not even a practical laser driver. It will take half a century of innovation (not a mere decade!) to invent and develop the technologies that could transform the NIF-like technique into a viable power generator.
Of course the upper echelons of the DOE have no idea what they’re talking about. Is that new? For 70 years the directorates of the fusion labs have been only too happy to humor government agencies and even to mislead them in order to keep the dollars flowing. But relax— Fusion Fever has risen and fallen periodically over those seven decades, and the present delirium is likely to dissipate by 2030.
—DL Jas.
dljenterp@aol.com
Trying to contain a sustained energy gain reaction seems impossible unless you have something like the SUN, with it's large mass to compress the hydrogen. How much energy does the magnetic field generation use? I will bet it does no better then the laser ignition system of -99% yield. Then there is the question of where to get the heavy hydrogen and tritium necessary for these systems which may not exists at all in levels necessary for industrial applications.
We would be better off going for new design fission plants until an all renewable energy sources can be produced to eliminate greenhouse gases. I believe the
chances of a fusion plant design has near zero chance of ever working.
A careful study of the SUN fusion physics reveals necessary pressures and temperatures far beyond any technology on the horizon. The only use for the laser ignitions system is to make "ALL FUSION" nuclear weapons since you could make arbitrary yields by adding more hydrogen. This of course requires high efficiency lasers which are not possible either. The laws of physics just make commercial fusion impossible.
Thanks, Victor, for this excellent reminder of the difference between hype and fact. But you were (characteristically) overly generous. Except for a few aneutronic reactions with extraordinarily high ignition temperatures, fusion reactors would be free not of “radioactive nuclear waste” but only of fission products and transuranics. Instead, they’d produce awkward amounts of radioactive activation products from structural and containment materials. Fusion’s copious fast-neutron fluxes would also raise serious issues of nuclear weapons proliferation—a threat you have rightly emphasized throughout your distinguished public service.
And then there’s the unmentioned fatal flaw: economics. A fusion reactor that works, yields abundant energy, and is durable and maintainable would still be far from investable in the actual competitive landscape, where anything with steam-cycle-like costs is grossly uneconomic compared with modern renewables and with efficient and timely use. (Those win by even more when grid integration costs are symmetrically included.) Thermal power is the wrong competitor—even more so with PV module prices falling by a further half just in 2023, when the world added more than 500 GW of renewables. Game over.
Moreover, carbon-free operation isn’t good enough if the new technology can’t displace at least as much carbon per dollar and per year as efficiency and renewables can and do. Indeed, diverting time, talent, and treasure into costlier and slower options makes climate change worse. This opportunity cost too seems to have escaped DOE’s understanding of fusion, as it long has for fission.
Amory, thanks for your corrections and useful additions. Hope all is well.
Thanks for a great article Victor. Past episodes of hype can be explained in the staging of funding rounds. But the present binge seems to transcend this. And you don't fully answer: why now?
A factor I think is key in this timing is the persistence of military interests in concentrated power production for naval propulsion and directed energy in the same present juncture as run-away collapse in the case for new fission power. This is eroding the longstanding de facto subsidy from civil new-build to the military industrial base.
A similar hype is occurring (on a shorter timeframe) around 'small modular reactors'. With the economics also very poor in this case, the interest of private investors can be explained in the same way as for fusion. If government commitment is clear, then it matters little that the technology is uneconomic - or even unfeasible.
The real drivers of both fission and fusion are military. This is why each is so locked in to design spin-off from military purposes (LWRs and high power density, GGRs and Pu production and IC fusion and weapons testing). As with the military industrial complex more widely, it is the gravy train itself that offers a means to make money.
Victor Gilinsky asks an excellent and important question. I believe the answer encompasses two former pillars: 1) The exaggeration about promised net energy and 2) The exaggeration of inexpensive, unlimited, universally available fuel supplies. I have investigated these matters extensively and have written more than 150 news articles about them since 2016. [1]
Gilinsky's article touched lightly on the first pillar when he noticed that U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm "forgot" to account for the energy consumed by the laser beams when she discussed the energy balance of the National Ignition Facility fusion experiments. This has been the practice of fusion advocates for decades although Granholm almost certainly relied on the information she received from fusion experts. The confusion began with JET, the Joint European Torus, about which its promoters consistently said and wrote that 24 MW going into that device produced 16 MW of thermal power from fusion. That 24 MW input was only the injected thermal power. JET's protagonists never explained that crucial detail in their public communications. And the advocates almost never explained in their public communications that the JET device required 700 MW of electricity to operate.
Based on a) the JET input power confusion, b) ITER's superconducting magnets, and c) ITER's larger size, people easily believed that ITER would finally yield that elusive demonstration of net energy from a reactor: 50 MW in and 500 MW out.
I uncovered this misunderstanding in 2014 and first reported it in my 2016 book Fusion Fiasco. In the summer of 2017, three qualified experts informed me that the reactor input value was not 50 MW but in the 300 MW electric range. Later, I found evidence to pin that value closer to 440 MW electric. [2]
I have traced the ITER power confusion back at least two decades. It shows up in a Jan. 30, 2003, press release from the White House: "If successful, ITER would create the first fusion device capable of producing thermal energy comparable to the output of a power plant, making commercially viable fusion power available as soon as 2050."
A May 13, 2003, European Commission Report says that "ITER, based on the tokamak” concept, will be the first fusion device to produce 500 MW of thermal power, similar to the level of a commercial power station."
Nearly all journalists who wrote about ITER unknowingly spread the confusion. For example, Philip Ball, on Oct. 27, 2019, wrote in The Guardian, "In 1997 JET set a world record for the highest ratio of energy out to energy in. But that was still just two-thirds of the break-even point where the reactor isn’t consuming energy overall. ... [ITER] hopes to conduct its first experimental runs in 2025, and eventually to produce 500 megawatts (MW) of power – 10 times as much as is needed to operate it."
After I reported the correct planned input power rate for ITER, I contacted the heads of fusion organizations worldwide and pointed out their incorrect public statements. Eventually, most of them made the necessary corrections. [3]
I also told most members of the English-language news media that had been unknowingly communicating exaggerated power values for ITER. But rather than admit to their audiences that they had been confused by the fusion promoters, they used new squishy language to describe the planned ITER power values.
For example, Ball wrote in Nature on Nov. 17, 2021 that ITER "has the ultimate goal of continuously extracting 500 MW of power — comparable to the output of a modest coal-fired power plant — while putting 50 MW into the reactor. (These numbers refer only to the energy put directly into and drawn out of the plasma; they don’t factor in other processes such as maintenance needs or the inefficiencies of converting the fusion heat output into electricity)."
It's important to make clear how some journalists, like Ball, perpetuated the confusion. Rather than inform his readers that the 50 MW value didn't factor in the power required to operate ITER, he told them it didn't factor in "maintenance needs."
To illustrate how pervasive the 50 MW input-power confusion was, when I met Neil Calder, the first spokesman for the ITER organization, he said that he had been told by multiple people in the organization that ITER would take 50 MW of input electrical power and turn it into 500 MW of thermal power. When I spoke to Michel Claessens, the next spokesman for the organization, he too was under that impression.
Once the ITER publicity machine kicked into high gear and construction on ITER broke ground, investors and private fusion companies began ramping up their activities. On their Web sites years ago, many of them used the ITER 50/500 confusion as a foundation for their own promised success.
And if you look carefully, you'll see that many of them applied the same exaggerations, conflating the planned injected thermal input power with the planned reactor input power. For example, Robert Mumgaard, the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, spoke with Nature magazine about its first planned reactor, SPARC, a joint project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what Nature reported: "MIT and CFS together are preparing to build what Mumgaard calls 'the first fusion machine that makes net energy' — producing more energy than goes into it. Named SPARC, it is being constructed in Devens, Massachusetts. Mumgaard says it will be running by the end of 2025 and will be 'commercially relevant' because it will generate around 100 MW of power."
A paragraph in an MIT press release made promises about the power SPARC would demonstrate: "SPARC is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat … . It will produce … as much power as is used by a small city. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion."
The SPARC reactor couldn’t possibly power a small city because the planned 100 MW heat output was only the planned plasma power output. That 100 MW value didn’t account for any of the electrical input power. A full accounting of power in and power out wouldn’t leave enough for one light bulb. I sent my power calculations to MIT fusion professors Dennis Whyte and Martin Greenwald and asked them to identify any errors, but they did not respond.
The statement from the MIT fusion scientists employed new confusing language: "positive net energy from fusion." If pressed, they know that they can use this phrase to defend that what they really mean is "net energy from a fusion reaction," in other words, what fusion scientists understand as "scientific breakeven."
But no investor or member of the public cares about "net energy from a fusion reaction." The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has already accomplished that, injecting 2 megajoules of energy into a target and releasing 3 megajoules and consuming 400 megajoules by the lasers. NIF achieved "positive net energy from fusion," yet the overall device lost at least 99.7 percent of the energy it used.
Then there is the matter of the "inexpensive, unlimited, universally available fuel" for deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. In the summer of 2021, I received a news tip that led me to learn the following facts: a) the tritium fuel does not exist as a natural resource anywhere, at any price, on Earth, b) the lithium-6 isotope that fusion promoters hope to use to breed tritium cannot be directly mined or harvested from nature; it must be enriched, c) inventories of the required quantities of enriched lithium-6 do not exist, d) there is no known process to safely enrich lithium-6 in the quantities needed, e) there is no known process to breed tritium from lithium-6 in a fusion reactor at the required rate. To put it simply: The fuel does not exist. [4]
Given the weight of these two exaggerations, the hype cannot possibly continue. I give the fusion bubble a decade to collapse. That's my decadal vision.
Steven B. Krivit
New Energy Times
1. https://news.newenergytimes.net/iter-timeline-of-news-reports-corrections-and-retractions/
2. https://news.newenergytimes.net/iter-fusion-reactor-technical-references/
3. https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/09/26/correction-log-of-false-misleading-iter-claims/
4. https://news.newenergytimes.net/fusion-fuel/
Although Mr. Gilinsky mentions that “tokamak” is a Russian-language transliteration for the toroidal chamber with an axial magnetic field, he forgets to add that Tokamak was first developed by Russian scientists Oleg Lavrentiev, Andrei Sakharov, and Igor Tamm from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in the late 1960s, and then adopted around the world. ITER does mention this on their site, but Mr. Gilinsky doesn't.
Tokomak abbreviation comes from ТОк (Current), КАмера (Chamber), МАгнитная Катушка (Magnetic coil)..
Besides the excellent comments below and Gilinsky's excellent piece covering the historical perspective, members of this community also have to realize that the AI community has a huge investor in smaller forms of hot fusion, namely Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) is a huge investor in Helion Energy. That has also brought a lot of visibility to the field of fusion energy in the VC community of silicon valley.
Much of Gilinsky’s article pertains to the subject of Fusion Frenzy- A Recurring Pandemic.
That is the title of an article I published in 2021 in the Newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics & Society, Vol. 50, October 2021, pp. 5-9.
Here are some paraphrased excerpts of Fusion Frenzy:
“Fusion energy fever is a pandemic that once recurred every decade soon followed by disenchantment….. During each pandemic the fever is sustained by self-delusion of the practitioners and by mass psychology—propagandizing the public with the messianic aura of the energy source that powers the sun and stars.”
The last great fusion delirium began just before 1980, predicated on the inexplicable belief that fusion energy would somehow obviate future oil supply crises such as those of the 1970’s. The 1980's decade began with the passage by the US Congress of the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, and ended with the “cold fusion” debacle in 1989.
“Analogous to their exploitation of the oil supply crisis of the 1970’s, fusion promoters have lately taken advantage of the world’s crusade to develop non-carbon energy sources. Insisting that only they can save the planet, promoters and propagandists of fusion enterprises (both private and publicly supported) have worked themselves and each other into a mania of grand projections and promises, in order to sell their programs to investors and government funding agencies.”
————————————
The White House meeting in early 2022 proclaiming the “bold decadal vision” is this decade’s functional equivalent of the 1980 Fusion Energy Act. There is no vaccine to prevent fusion fever, so the affliction spreads rapidly, but it has always abated on its own. While the causes of the present outbreak are clear enough, it’s too early to predict the precise events that will hasten its suppression, likely by 2030.
--DL Jas.
dljenterp@aol.com