The fusion race heats up

Nobody is saying it, but the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning may be springboarding the increased intensity of the competition for nuclear fusion – which many are now saying is far less than “30 years away.” The burning question among the few who are fully aware of the stakes in this race is “Who will get there first?” coupled with “Does first matter more than best?”

The greatest obstacle to fusion supplying the world with limitless electricity is learning how to maintain a balance between magnetic confinement and the severe heat (100 million degrees Celsius). Fusion produces cleaner energy than fission (its only byproducts are helium and other greenhouse gases – not radiation), and its fuels – deuterium and tritium – can easily be sourced from seawater and lithium. Scientists today are trying multiple ways to skin this cat.

Serious consideration of nuclear fusion began in the 1930s with the discovery of tritium by a research team led by experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford, who had earlier collaborated with Niels Bohr in the discovery of the neutron. In 1938, University of Michigan scientist Arthur Ruhlig proposed that deuterium-tritium fusion occurs with a very high probability when the two are brought into close proximity – but then World War II put fusion research into the freezer.

The most celebrated event in the revival of fusion research came at the Geneva Superpower Summit in November 1985, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a collaborative international project to develop fusion energy for peaceful purposes. A year later the European Union (as Euratom), the U.S., Japan, and the Soviet Union agreed to jointly pursue the design for a large international fusion facility they called ITER (the way).

Fast forward to 2001. After 13 years of conceptual design work and detailed engineering design work, the final design for ITER was approved. Two years later the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea joined the project, with India coming on board in 2005, the year that ITER members agreed to site the gigantic project near Aix-en-Provence in France. A year later, the members formally created the ITER Organization with the goal of building the ITER Tokamak, the world’s most advanced magnetic confinement fusion experiment.

Last November, the ITER Organization updated its baseline proposal to prioritize a “robust start” to scientific exploitation with a more complete machine than initially planned – with a divertor, blanket shield blocks, and other key components and systems. These are to be in place in time for the first operational phase for the tokamak, Start of Research Operation.

This first phase features hydrogen and deuterium-deuterium plasmas that culminate in operating the machine in long pulses at full magnetic energy and plasma current. The goal is to achieve full magnetic energy by 2036 and the start of the deuterium-tritium operation phase in 2039 (rather than 2033 and 2035, as originally planned).

Meanwhile, both public and private (and public-private) entities have not sat around waiting for ITER to generate limitless energy in southern France. Instead, there is a growing race among nations and corporations to find quicker ways to turn straw into gold – or rather hydrogen into electricity and more. Western nations, already left in the dust on lithium-ion battery and other technologies and supply chains by the Chinese, now fear that China may win this race too.

Just last month China announced that its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) – its artificial sun — had broken its own record by confining plasma for nearly 18 minutes, longest in the world to date. That might sound like a small step toward the mandatory requirement that a fusion device maintain stable operation at high efficiency without interruption to continuously generate electric power.

That is one reason that a recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology warned that “The U.S. and other Western countries will have to build strong supply chains across a range of technologies in addition to creating the fundamental technology behind practical fusion power plants” to stay in the race at all. One of China’s overall strengths, and the West’s weaknesses, has revolved around investment in supply chains and scaling up complex production processes.

Until recently, the MIT Report says, the U.S. and Europe were the dominant public funders of fusion energy research and home to many of the world’s pioneering private sector fusion projects. But in the past five years, China has upped its support for fusion energy to the point it threatens to dominate the industry.

To compete, the U.S. and its allies and partners must invest more heavily not only in fusion itself—which is already happening—but also in those adjacent technologies that are critical to the fusion industrial base. The MIT Report says that China already has leadership in three of the six key industries needed for constructing tokamaks — thin-film processing, large metal-alloy structures, and power electronics. The West has little time to cash in on its opportunity to lead in cryo-plants, fuel processing, and blankets — the medium used to absorb energy from the fusion reaction and to breed tritium.

China is the world leader in thin-film, high-volume manufacturing for solar panels and flat-panel displays, with the associated expert workforce, tooling sector, infrastructure, and upstream materials supply chain needed to manufacture rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductors – the highest performing materials for use in fusion magnets. China’s high-speed rail industry, renewable microgrids, and arc furnaces give it an edge as well in large-scale power electronics, and Chinas’ manufacturing capacity and metallurgical research efforts position it well to outcompete the world in specialty metal allows machined for fusion tokamaks.

But are the Europeans and Americans sufficiently focused – and willing to commit – to staying in the race and playing to win? As Euractiv reported this week, Christophe Grudler, an influential member of the European Parliament’s industry committee, is hardly sanguine.

Grudler stated before a gathering of politicians and stakeholders at a Fusion for Energy event that “There is a lack of political leadership [at the European Commission] when it comes to nuclear energy in Europe…. Only 2% of the global amount of fusion investment is currently going to Europe, while 75% is going to the U.S.”

Seconding his concern, Massimo Garribba, deputy chief of the Commission’s energy department, said the intent is there for fusion but there needs to be a larger strategic focus that goes beyond financing. There is plenty of money and enough wonderful people, but “you don’t have an ecosystem of facilities which actually drives toward having a functioning system at the end of the day.”

As for the U.S., the Department of Energy last November released its DOE Fusion Energy Strategy 2024, the second step in its comprehensive effort to work with the private sector to accelerate “the feasibility of commercial fusion energy.” The DOE’s own plan tacitly admits that the U.S. is playing in catch-up mode.

Several U.S.-based private sector projects are under way, including those reliant on stellarators rather than tokamaks, but none have confined plasma for anything near 18 minutes, and there are huge questions about the supply chain needed to support a fusion industry. Regulatory reforms on the way may help – but what happens if today’s protesters turn on the nuclear industry?

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.