What Is the Future of Fusion Energy

 

International Conference on Nuclear Physics




Last December physicists working on fusion claimed a breakthrough. A team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California announced it had extracted more energy from a controlled nuclear fusion reaction than had been used to trigger it. It was a global first and a significant step for physics—but very far from enabling practical exploitation of fusion as an energy source. The high-profile announcement elicited a familiar pattern of responses to fusion research: acclaim from boosters of the technology and dismissals from skeptics, who complain that scientists continually promise that fusion is just 20 years away (or 30 or 50, take your pick).






These fervent reactions reflect the high stakes for fusion. The world is increasingly desperate for an abundant source of clean energy that can mitigate the climate crisis created by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion—the merging of light atomic nuclei—has the potential to produce energy with near-zero carbon emissions, without creating the dangerous radioactive waste associated with today's nuclear fission reactors, which split the very heavy nuclei of radioactive elements. Physicists have been studying fusion power since the 1950s, but turning it into a practical energy source has remained frustratingly elusive. Will it ever be a significant source of power for our energy-hungry planet—and if so, will it arrive in time to save Earth from meltdown?

The latter question is one of the few in this field to which there is a clear answer. Most experts agree that we're unlikely to be able to generate large-scale energy from nuclear fusion before around 2050 (the cautious might add on another decade). Given that the global temperature rise over the current century may be largely determined by what we do—or fail to do—about carbon emissions before then, fusion can be no savior. (Observatory columnist Naomi Oreskes also makes this point here.) “I do think fusion looks a lot more plausible now than it did 10 years ago as a future energy source,” says Omar Hurricane, a program leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the NIF is housed. “But it's not going to be viable in the next 10 to 20 years, so we need other solutions.”

Decarbonizing by mid-century will therefore depend on other technologies: renewables such as solar and wind; nuclear fission; and perhaps carbon-capture techniques. As we look further out, though, there are good reasons to think fusion will be a key part of the energy economy in the second half of the century, when more developing countries will start requiring Western-size energy budgets. And solving the problem of climate change is not a one-time affair. If we can navigate the bottleneck of the next few decades without transforming the climate too radically, the road beyond may be smoother.
The consequences of such intense neutron bombardment aren't well understood, because fusion has never been sustained for the long periods that would be required


in a working reactor. “We don't know and won't know about materials degradation and lifetime until we've operated a power plant,” says Ian Chapman, CEO of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), the British government's nuclear energy organization. Nevertheless, important insights into these degradation problems might be gleaned from a simple experiment that generates intense neutron beams that can be used to test materials. Such a facility—a particle-accelerator-based project called the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility–Demo Oriented Neutron Source—should begin operating in Granada, Spain, in the early 2030s. A similar U.S. facility called the Fusion Prototypic Neutron Source has been proposed but doesn't yet have approval.

There is still no guarantee that these material issues can be solved. If they prove insurmountable, one alternative is to make the reactor walls from liquid metal, which can't be damaged by melting and recrystallization. But that, Cowley says, brings in a whole suite of other technical concerns

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#FusionReactors#EnergyInnovation#FusionResearch#PlasmaPhysics#NuclearScience
#FusionTechnology#FusionDevelopment#EnergeticFusion

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