Nuclear fusion power is a great hope but it won’t help with global warming now

Developments in recent years have raised hopes of limitless cheap and clean energy from nuclear fusion but the technology is still highly experimental and costly – and global warming is a pressing problem
It would be better to accelerate efforts on proven technologies like solar and wind energy – to buy time for a future where fusion might be reality

David Dodwell

Published: 10:00pm, 6 Aug 2023

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When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) convened its first Fusion Energy Conference in Salzburg, Austria, in 1961, the world had already witnessed the catastrophic power of the atomic bomb in 1945 and the commissioning of the first ever full-scale nuclear power station in 1956 at Calder Hall in Britain, both of which relied on nuclear fission.

But nuclear fusion technology was every scientist’s holy grail. Here was the power of the sun, harnessed by humankind to supply limitless, cheap energy. In smashing two hydrogen molecules together and producing helium, nuclear fusion had none of the troublesome long-lived radioactive waste that came with nuclear fission, nor would it contribute to global warming.

Also unlike nuclear fission power plants which rely on a chain reaction, production of energy through nuclear fusion was intrinsically safe: any hiccup and the fusion reactor instantly stalled.

In the wake of that optimistic Salzburg conference, many scientists believed commercial-scale fusion power was only a decade or so away. By 1980, it was seen as 20 years away, and it has tantalisingly remained about 20 years away ever since. Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, noted recently in the Scientific American: “The scientific and technical challenges of harnessing fusion on Earth were simply overwhelming.”

This faltering progress towards commercial nuclear fusion power has become a pressing concern as accelerating climate change raises urgent questions about whether fusion power can help with the imperative to get rid of fossil fuels, not least in power generation.

Fusion optimists insist we should press ahead. But a growing community of experts are asking whether the billions spent in pursuit of fusion power might be better spent on proven technologies like solar and wind power. Are we throwing good money after bad? Will it not arrive too late to save us from global warming?

Optimists got a boost at the end of last year, when US scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, succeeded for a few seconds in getting more energy out than they were putting in. The Energy Monitor website’s review of the breakthrough was headlined “Nuclear fusion ‘could be plugged into the grid in 10 years’”.

NIF’s “inertial confinement” technology uses lasers to heat hi-tech pellets. Each pellet costs more than US$100,000, and their facility needs to burn 10 pellets per second to sustain fusion. A commercially viable plant would need the pellets to cost US$1 apiece.

Most scientific effort worldwide has been focused on a different technology: “magnetic confinement”, which heats and squeezes plasma in a huge doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak.

The stupendous heat involved means no material on Earth can survive contact with the plasma, so it must be suspended in the tokamak using colossal magnets. Scientists have struggled for decades with instability issues.

Technicians work on the bioshield inside the Tokamak Building of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, southeastern France, on July 28, 2020. Photo: AFP

Most hopes of using the tokamak technology are focused on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in France. The project has cost about US$20 billion so far, and involves collaboration between seven members: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. Construction began in 2007, and the latest forecast is for it to become operational around 2035. Even then, as ITER’s name makes clear, it will only be experimental.

For scientific optimists involved in ITER, progress at the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei in China’s Anhui province has attracted attention. In 2021, its scientific team managed to sustain plasma in its tokamak at close to 70 million degrees Celsius for more than 17 minutes.

Their success inspired confidence that we will ultimately generate fusion power. But when, and at what cost? Science writer Philip Ball noted in Scientific American that ITER is “strictly an experimental machine intended to resolve engineering problems and prepare the way for viable power plants”.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Hefei, in eastern China’s Anhui province, in an undated handout photo.

A growing community of sceptics insist that fusion power will play a marginal role in helping us prevent climate change from jeopardising our lives. As sustainability consultant Matt Orsagh said earlier this year: “Now, we know it can be done – but will it ever be practical for us as an energy source? That is still an open question.”

Ball, writing in The Guardian, raised the question of whether fusion power will “arrive in time to stop the planet from frying” and concluded “the answer is no: fusion won’t come to our rescue”. He says that upbeat releases suggesting any early breakthrough towards commercialisation are “a message for investors, not a realistic promise”.

Even the IAEA, the umbrella for fusion research worldwide, acknowledges the stupendous technological challenges: “It has become evident that a better understanding of fundamental phenomena is needed before the goal of energy extraction from nuclear fusion can be reached.”

Mark Ruskell, Green member of the Scottish Parliament is more blunt, saying that “we don’t have time to waste pouring billions of pounds of public money into unproven technology”. He added: “Fusion may have a role in the future, but there is a long way to go before we will know if it is safe or viable.”

As Harvard’s Oreskes concludes: “Fusion is a long game that may or may not pay off. It is not an answer to the climate crisis.” For that, we need to accelerate efforts to develop renewables like wind and solar power. Renewables may not be as exciting as “power from the stars”, but they may at least buy us the decades we need to make fusion power a reality.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades.