MESSAGE
| DATE | 2022-12-12 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Fusion
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U.S. to Announce Nuclear-Fusion Energy Breakthrough
Jennifer Hiller, Eric Niiler and Aylin Woodward
6–7 minutes
Energy Department expected to reveal major advance in effort to harness
energy source that powers sun
Updated Dec. 12, 2022 6:46 pm ET
The U.S. Department of Energy said it would announce on Tuesday a
breakthrough in ongoing research on nuclear fusion, long heralded for
its potential as a source of clean, essentially limitless energy.
The announcement is scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern time at the
department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
A spokeswoman for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the
research was conducted, declined to comment on details of the research.
She said the experimental data was still being analyzed.
The lab’s National Ignition Facility uses nearly 200 lasers to heat
hydrogen atoms to temperatures of more than 180 million degrees
Fahrenheit and pressures more than 100 billion times Earth’s atmosphere.
The extreme conditions create a state of matter known as plasma, in
which hydrogen atoms fuse and then release vast amounts of energy. The
same process powers the sun and other stars.
The Financial Times earlier reported that the DOE’s announcement related
to fusion.
Nuclear fusion is of great interest to investors and dozens of firms
globally because of its promise as a source of energy that is more
environmentally sustainable than sources based on fossil fuels or on
nuclear fission, in which atoms are split rather than combined to
release energy.
Current nuclear power plants create energy through nuclear fission,
which produces about 10% of the world’s electricity and is carbon free
but generates radioactive waste that can last thousands of years.
Fusion produces neither that long-lived waste nor the carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases that are generated by the burning of fossil
fuels. It has the potential to create nearly limitless energy using
common elements, such as hydrogen, and generating energy by melding atoms.
“It’s basically the biggest prize there is,” said Phil Larochelle,
partner at the Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which
has $2 billion under management and invests in companies that can impact
climate change.
More than $5 billion in funding has poured into private fusion firms in
recent years, according to investments tracked by the Fusion Industry
Association. Companies are pursuing different designs for fusion
reactors, but most rely on fusion that takes place in plasma, a hot
charged gas.
Mr. Gates and other deep-pocketed investors, including Jeff Bezos and
Peter Thiel, are hoping to commercialize fusion amid a boom in
clean-tech investing. Breakthrough has invested in two fusion ventures,
Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC and Zap Energy Inc.
Mr. Thiel’s Mithril Capital has backed fusion startup Helion Energy
Inc., which uses a technology called pulsed non-ignition fusion.
Sovereign-wealth funds have also plowed money into fusion startups,
including those of Malaysia and Singapore, which have invested in
General Fusion, a Canadian company that also counts Mr. Bezos as an
investor. General Fusion is developing a power plant using magnetized
target fusion technology.
While tech founders were the initial investors into fusion firms,
funding has started to come from more traditional sources, said Greg
Twinney, chief executive of General Fusion, which last year said it had
raised $130 million. “As we evolve the technology and prove out major
technology milestones, we’re seeing that some of these larger
institutions are able to step into this.”
More than $5 billion in funding has poured into private fusion firms in
recent years, according to investments tracked by the Fusion Industry
Association. Companies are pursuing different designs for fusion
reactors, but most rely on fusion that takes place in plasma, a hot
charged gas.
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But fusion has a way to go before it can provide energy to the grid. One
of the biggest obstacles to commercializing fusion has been its
inability thus far to make so-called net energy gain, in which more
fusion energy is output than input by the laser beams used to heat the
atoms.
Even if scientists successfully demonstrate a net energy gain from the
reaction, there remains a long way to go for fusion to create enough
energy to supply electricity to the grid. For example, generating the
laser light used by the Lawrence Livermore laboratory consumes energy
and the fusion reaction would have to produce enough power to compensate
for that to be commercially viable.
“Everyone working on fusion has been trying to demonstrate for over 70
years that it’s possible to generate more energy from fusion than you
put in,” said Jeremy Chittenden, professor of Plasma Physics at Imperial
College London.
Until someone proves it, fusion won’t shake its reputation as a
technology that is always around the corner.
Dennis Whyte, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and a
founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has raised more than $1.8
billion in the largest private investment for nuclear fusion, said there
is fresh urgency for the industry to overcome fusion’s reputation as a
technology that is “always going to take forever.”
“Climate change and now energy security are major drivers, particularly
what we’re seeing in Europe after the Ukraine invasion,” Mr. Whyte said.
Private investment will speed up fusion’s development time frame, he added.
The world’s largest fusion project is ITER, a $22 billion multinational
government-funded project in France. The project has experienced delays
but aims to create superheated plasma by the end of 2025. Full fusion
would come a decade later.
Write to Eric Niiler at eric.niiler-at-wsj.com, Aylin Woodward at
aylin.woodward-at-wsj.com and Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller-at-wsj.com
--
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