Scott L. Montgomery opines that back when I studied geology in graduate school, the long-term future of energy had a single name: nuclear fusion. It was the 1970s. The physicists I studied with predicted that tapping this clean new source of electric power by forcing two nuclei of hydrogen to combine and release massive amounts of energy, might be 50 years off. Four decades later, after I’d left my career of research and writing in the energy industry and begun a second career as an author and a professor, I found myself making this same forecast with my own students and readers. In what had become an ironic cliché, fusion, it seemed, would forever haunt a distant horizon.
However, all that seems to be changing, finally. Thanks to advances in physics research, materials science and supercomputing, scientists are building and testing multiple fusion reactor designs. About a dozen fusion startups with innovative ideas have the private investment they need to see what they can achieve. Still, it’s too early to break out the champagne, and not only for technical reasons. One problem is that a breakthrough in the lab doesn’t guarantee innovation or success in the marketplace because energy is very price sensitive. Also, fusion illustrates how few things can erode faith in a new technology like an imminent “breakthrough” that fails to materialize.
First, there was the cold fusion debacle in 1989, when two scientists went to the media with the unverifiable claim they had achieved room-temperature fusion and were ostracized by the scientific community, sullying the image of this energy source as a real option. Then, scientists hit a milestone in 1994 when the test fusion reactor at Princeton set a new record for peak power of 10.7 megawatts, which The New York Times said at the time was “enough to power 2,000 to 3,000 homes momentarily, meaning roughly a microsecond. Scientifically, that event had great importance, though it was topped in 1997. Yet it hardly promised a power reactor just around the corner.
Along the way, the tendency of scientists and journalists to hype real progress toward fusion, whether it’s to attract funding or readers, has undercut public support in the long run. Today, in fact, various media reports continue to suggest a rash of fusion breakthroughs. Has there truly been some progress? To an impressive degree, yes. But mostly in terms of scientific and engineering research. If there is yet again another claim announcing that the world is now finally closing in on the solution to all energy problems, then myth is being sold in the place of truth. Many scientists are drawn to both fission, the power source in today’s nuclear reactors, and fusion, because of the spectacular amount of energy they offer. The main fuel for fission, Uranium-235, has 2 million times the energy per pound that oil does. Fusion may deliver up to seven times that or more.
The fuel used for fission is extremely abundant. The same goes for fusion, but without any long-lived dangerous waste. For fusion, the fuel is two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, the first of which can be extracted from seawater and the second from lithium, whose resources are large and growing. Hence, the failure to pursue these colossal non-carbon sources might well appear to be colossally self-defeating.
Fusion is hard to harness, though. In stars, which are made of plasma, a high-energy state of matter in which negatively charged electrons are completely separated from positively charged nuclei, fusion takes place because of immense gravitational forces and extreme temperatures. Trying to create similar conditions here on Earth has required fundamental advances in a number of fields, from quantum physics to materials science. Scientists and engineers have made enough progress over the past half century, especially since the 1990s, to make so that building a fusion reactor able to generate more power than it takes to operate seems viable within two decades, not five. Supercomputing has helped enormously, allowing researchers to precisely model the behavior of plasma under different conditions.
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