It was December 8, 2022, when the email from her colleagues arrived.
Tammy Ma, a leading plasma physicist at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was in the San Francisco Airport waiting for a flight to the east coast. It took only a glance at the data from her team to tell her that something extraordinary had happened and she visibly jumped for joy.
Three days earlier, after decades of research and engineering, NIF had lived up to its promise to become the first laboratory to reach the nuclear fusion milestone known as ignition.
Ma’s team had used an array of lasers to implode a pellet of frozen hydrogen (specifically the isotopes with one and two neutrons known as deuterium and tritium), producing nuclear fusion events and releasing so much energy that additional fusion events continued to occur – a fusion chain reaction that released more energy than the laser energy needed to initiate the process.
Noting the significance of the event during a keynote speech at a recent meeting of LLNL’s Asian Pacific American Council (APAC) employee resource group, Ma noted the public interest in their achievement. “With the recent ignition result, it’s really exhilarating that people care about science,” she enthused. “We’re trying to take advantage of that to get the message out about ignition [and] where we want to push the field. It’s an opportunity.”
Fusion’s impact
Ma was speaking of an opportunity to spread the word about NIF’s goals, but we want to address a more significant opportunity that the ignition event highlights.
For years, nuclear fusion technology has been the butt of a joke that went something like this: “Fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.” The second clause of that statement is no longer true. A convergence of technological breakthroughs in superconductivity, magnetic materials, lasers and computing has changed that calculus.
As we write in the preface of our book Fusion’s Promise, those advances “have dramatically changed the trajectory of fusion power; and the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas production has provided a strong incentive to fund necessary fusion R&D. Fusion’s promise of a low-cost, low-pollution, and abundant energy source is, at last, on track to being realized.”
This represents a great opportunity for both private and public investment. Yet we are concerned that the US government is missing its opportunity to respond with necessary research dollars. This is bad not only for the US, but also for the worldwide effort to realize fusion, in which the US has played a leading role.
True, many challenges remain before nuclear fusion can take its place in the commercial electric power sector. Our book recounts many good ideas that researchers are keen to push forward.
Private investment is beginning to flow into that work, but insufficient government support for basic science is slowing progress. This was evident in July of this year when US House and Senate appropriators failed to support President Joe Biden’s call for US$1 billion to support fusion research, an increase of more than 30% over current levels. Instead, both chambers stuck to the status quo.
Despite December’s research breakthrough, in July House and Senate appropriators failed to support President Joe Biden’s call for $1 billion to support fusion research, an increase of more than 30%. Both chambers stuck to the status quo, allowing the US to fall behind.
By failing to increase fusion funding, Congress in our view is allowing the US to fall behind in an international technological race, ignoring a massive economic opportunity, hurting national security and surrendering a moral position on fighting climate change – all for a savings that’s minuscule in comparison with the global energy budget.
The world spends about $10 trillion each year on energy, with 80% of that money wrapped up in fossils fuels. For more than two centuries, human civilization has been built on this energy system. Fossil fuels are currently embedded in our legal, economic, cultural and physical systems.
This has to change. Beyond environmental concerns, reliance on fossil fuels is wreaking havoc on our planet, warping geopolitics and anchoring military strategy. Yet the ultimate truth is that those fuels will eventually run out, and most nations have not prepared for this inevitability.
Fusion power would be a critical tool in humanity’s tool kit to address this, but we have not yet collectively realized that it is a solution we need.
Becoming a fusion leader
Of all the countries in the world, the United Kingdom is most aggressively pursuing fusion power. Much of this can be traced to the leadership provided by Ian Chapman, who became the chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in 2016.
A highly qualified plasma physicist, Chapman was selected for this role because of the leadership qualities he demonstrated in such roles as head of tokamak science for the UK fusion effort and task force leader for the record-breaking Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor at Culham.
The UK now has several private companies working on fusion power, including Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion, which have raised more than $80 million in private investment. The British have also signed an agreement with Canadian startup General Fusion to build their $400 million demonstration plant in England.
Chapman has created a supportive landscape for all of these companies. In 2022, the UKAEA established the Fusion Cluster, which is an inter-organizational body that establishes lines of communication, physically co-locates resources, organizes conferences and lays the legal foundation for collaboration between the UKAEA and the private sector.
The agency has also built several centers of excellence to train people and advance its technology. These include the world’s largest tritium handling facility, a user facility to do superconducting magnetic testing and a center to research robotic maintenance on fusion power plants.
In 2022, the UKAEA began sponsoring an internship program that funnels university students into the fusion industry. Students can intern inside a fusion startup and part of their salary is covered by UKAEA. On top of this, the British government has committed 220 million pounds to building a large spherical tokamak.
All this work has made the United Kingdom the technical leader in the race to fusion power. The British hold the world record in Q: the measurement of how close a fusion device is to net power. This record was set on December 30, 2021, when the Joint European Torus generated 59 megajoules of fusion energy. This achievement puts the machine a third of the way to net power.
The British example demonstrates what is possible when government gets behind fusion energy. The Biden administration’s proposed increase in fusion research funding would have covered similar programs in the United States, which is why we consider Congress’s rejection of the additional funds an opportunity lost.
America has the resources, talent, funding, and technologies to achieve fusion power. So, why has Congress not yet pressed forward on this mission?
The reason is partially political messaging: The general public has not yet grasped how fast fusion technology has advanced, how close we are to net power and what the implications of fusion power are for the energy industry, national security, climate change and moral standing of the United States.
Our hope is that monumental technical breakthroughs like the ignition shot, coupled with aggressive moves by private sector investors and continued technical advancements in fusion, will move the needle of public opinion and spur Congress to act. Climate change will not wait for nations to get their acts together.
Matthew Moynihan PhD, a staff scientist at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and science writer Alfred B Bortz PhD are the co-authors of Fusion’s Promise: How Technological Breakthroughs in Nuclear Fusion Can Conquer Climate Change on Earth (And Carry Humans To Mars, Too), published by Springer Nature earlier this year.