My Opinion on Nuclear Fusion and the Energy Abundance Dream

My article on Nuclear Fusion was printed in the Reno Gazette Journal on September 6, 2024; it is copied below.

Nuclear fusion energy is possible —the sun and the H-bomb prove it— but the engineering part for achieving commercial energy production is complicated. Proof of concept models are very expensive, but several exist by entities such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, First Light, Helion Energy, National Ignition Facility, Tokamak Energy and several others.

Earlier this year the Joint European Torus tokamak reactor near Oxford, England produced enough fusion energy to power about 12,000 houses; but it was a five second spurt using a tiny amount of fuel. The primary fuel, deuterium, can be readily harvested from the oceans, and the radioactive waste of nuclear fusion plants has a life of 50 to 100 years, compared to thousands of years for the waste from our current nuclear fission reactors.

Can nuclear fusion power be sustained and scaled for mass, affordable production of electricity? Government and private funded initiatives in China, Europe, India and the US may bear fruit soon. Fusion private industry employed 4,000 people in 2023, a threefold increase from 2021!

As typical with prototype infrastructure, the first few fusion power plants will require a long time and a big budget to come to fruition. Some are optimistic that the first utility scale power plant will break ground around 2035. Unlike the intermittent power from solar and wind farms, and the drought problems of hydroelectric power, fusion power plants will be like the existing nuclear fission power plants: They’ll produce steady, base-load power reliably and require a small amount of fuel.

If fusion power plants are able to provide power at competitive prices, then there will be big gains and changes for users and industries that can use a lot more electric power, such as:

1) Large data centers for AI applications and web services. Currently these are the fastest growing consumers of electric power.

2) Household heating, cooling and cooking. Abundant, clean power will reduce natural gas use.

3) Heavy industry such as steel, aluminum and cement manufacturing, most of it exported to third world countries due to pollution limitations, will return to first world countries.

4) Electric vehicles, both light and heavy duty. This is a market that its demand seems to have tapered off in the US. Abundant base-load power will promote the development of vehicle charging along the road with in-pavement conduits, which in turn, will enable long-distance travel for cars and trucks, and reduce the need for chargers as well as large, heavy and expensive batteries.

Besides cost, complexity and uncertainty, does nuclear fusion have a negative side to it? The most direct negative impacts will be the vast amounts of materials and energy needed to develop and install nuclear fusion power plants, and that the beneficiaries will be mostly first world countries. A whole lot of pollution will be generated up front, and then pollution reductions will be realized gradually, once fusion power plants replace fossil plants and fossil fuel users. The concern of environmentalists is that abundant nuclear fusion energy will come too late to help with the climate crisis, and the construction of fusion power plants will generate more pollution before any reductions are realized.