The holy grail was located near San Francisco.
California-based scientists studying fusion energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have successfully recreated the sun. Sort of.
To call it a breakthrough would be to materially understate the case. It’s a potentially world-saving scientific development, and it comes not a moment too soon. Actually, it might’ve come several moments too late.
Russia’s misadventures in Ukraine, and humanity’s increasingly harrowing bouts with Mother Nature, have laid bare the urgency of the energy transition. “UK Turns To Coal As Sub-Zero Temperatures Send Power Prices Surging To Records,” one unfortunate headline read Monday.
The wind isn’t blowing fast enough in northwest Europe and it’s going to be cold, leading to sharp price increases for contracts tied to power in the UK (figure below), Germany and France.
The UK queued up a pair of coal units, but later canceled the request. “Two units owned by Drax Group Plc had been on hand to plug a supply gap [but] the grid operator later indicated the units would no longer be needed [as] forecasts for wind generation in the evening rose Monday, with the grid also procuring more of its power through imports from the continent,” Rachel Morison and Todd Gillespie wrote.
If ever there were a time when the world could use “limitless, zero-carbon power” — as the Financial Times described the promise of fusion while documenting the first-ever “net energy gain” from the process — it’s now. Alas, scientists “are still a long way off from creating a commercial technology,” as David Fickling put it, in a bummer of an Op-Ed titled “Don’t Wait Up for Fusion.”
According to every account published Sunday and Monday, commercial use is at least a decade away, and probably longer than that. As The Washington Post explained,
Creating the net energy gain required engagement of one of the largest lasers in the world, and the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense. More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid.
Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process.
And then there is the question of whether the technology could be perfected in time to make a dent in climate change.
Suffice to say there are hurdles. Of course, the breakthrough itself was a hurdle, and a high one at that, so there’s cause for optimism.
The US will be proud to declare the advance “Made In America,” however dubious such claims might be. I can only assume this “holy grail” moment (as it was described) owes at least something to intellectual contributions from abroad. Scientists all over the world have spent billions in government funding attempting to achieve what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will apparently announce on Tuesday.
“If this is true, and both the climate and energy crises can be solved, does this mean we solve all other problems simultaneously?” Rabobank’s Michael Every wondered. “Hardly! It just shakes the box in all kinds of new ways,” he said, on the way to posing a series of questions:
Would the new technology require new, scarce inputs, in the same way electric vehicles do? Would Russia, suddenly without any geopolitical fossil fuel energy muscle, just disappear quietly with its nuclear arsenal? Would the Saudis and other oil and gas producers, many apparently keen to ‘dump the dollar,’ do the same as they face economic ruin? Would the US share its amazing new technology with Europe and China, or retain it for its own advantage? Would there be a military angle, as there was with nuclear fission?
He knows the answers. So do I. In order: Yes. No. The Sunni monarchies have plenty of time and plenty of money — survival over the next several decades comes down to competent monarchical management, and that assessment isn’t just confined to the energy discussion. Yes to Europe, hard no to China. Yes, there’s always a military angle.
Coming back to the breakthrough itself, a senior fusion scientist familiar with the work told WaPo that, “To most of us, this was only a matter of time.”
Unfortunately for a sometimes freezing, sometimes burning world, scaling this up is also a matter of time — a long, long time.
Still, if it takes 30 years for humans to commercialize it, that’ll be quicker than it took us to prove we could make it work. Scientists have been trying since the 50s.
Surviving as a species until 2050 should be doable. But we’re trying every day to fail.
“commercial use is at least a decade away…Still a long way off from creating a commercial technology” yet I was pleasantly surprised at the rapidity of Covid-19 vaccination development. Perhaps “we” respond best under catastrophic threats?
Fusion is a candidate for the most important story of the 21st century. Appreciate if Heisenberg will be covering it (slow to unfold as it may be).
Story time!
I was at a vegan barbecue (vegan hotdogs are disgusting, fyi) in Oakland in 2011 when I met one of the hosts’ friends, a guy named David. I bet it’s weird answering the question, “So what do you do?” with, “I’m a quantum physicist researching nuclear fusion at the National Ignition Facility over at Lawrence Livermore.” He was a fascinating guy, and we became friendly. We went to yoga together. My wife tried to hook him up with her single friends. I hooked him up with some abandoned ancient computers (a Tandy and a Commodore 128) from the basement of the apartment complex where I was the property manager. We were once on a team at a charity trivia contest where we absolutely crushed and destroyed. I mean it was ridiculous. We had the smallest team with only 4 people, but between the 4 of us were at least 11 degrees (9 if you exclude the soft-sciences (i.e. me)). Anyhoo…
He did an incredible job of making the case for why nuclear (fission) power was a vastly superior alternative than anything else that exists. His pitch was impressive for its ability to change minds amongst the sort of crowd you would expect at a vegan barbecue in Oakland, California. It’s more environmentally friendly even than renewables when you include everything that goes into manufacturing wind and solar power generators, and it’s orders of magnitude better for the environment that burning fossil feuls, all with a superior safety profile. I asked him, did he think nuclear fusion would be a viable energy source?
“No, never.” And this is what he did/does for a living.
A couple years ago, I touched base with him via Facebook. He still works at NIF. I didn’t get an update on whether he thinks fusion will ever be a viable energy source. That said, I reached out to him again after the recent news detailed above. I’ll report back if I ever get an answer (he only checks Facebook about once every couple years though, so don’t hold your breath).
This article feels prescient given this extraordinary development. The author has unpacked how we can leverage something like Warp Speed to speed up the deployment of new technology to the masses.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/science-technology-vaccine-invention-history/672227/
I visited the Tokomack at Princeton in the early 70’s. We were assured that commercialization was 10 years away.
I’m glad for the progress, but until the promise is realized we should be fabricationg snd installing Small Modular Reactors to supplant coal and natural gas furnaces at existing power plants.
This is affirmation of man’s unique abilities to problem solve and invent. A life changing discovery for mankind which, thankfully, occurred in the US and not in China. I have been excitedly reading about this all weekend.
And H- thanks for covering this- it is great to finally get something so “optimistic” from you!:)
if fusion was ever actually invented, i hope the price of gasoline would be so cheap that i’d be blasting away in my v12 lambo in style while rest of the suckers drive their shitty teslas
I’m a retired laser engineer. I have a friend who is a laser physicist working on NIF. You cannot imagine the amount of people required to keep this extremely complex, warehouse sized, high energy laser working. Getting more energy out than you put in is the primary technical yardstick everyone looks at. If you look at the sheer amount of money/people/technology/material required to keep this type of laser operating, It would be surprising if it would ever be economical. Perhaps someday in the far away future.
If the metric for “power in” were power input to the lasers, rather than power output by the lasers to the plasma, then I wonder if the headline could still be written.
Perhaps if we (humans) stopped spending trillions each year on new and better ways to kill each other, we’d have more resources (and people) available to keep big lasers operating.
I certainly applaud any forward step in fusion, but it’s important to recognize that the mix of public/private approaches to fusion has made it harder than ever to forecast fusion’s future. There are now several candidate technology approaches to fusion being pursued by a variety of private companies. You can roughly associate private equity’s assessed odds of success for any of these by noting how much capital they’ve attracted. Every one of them is iterating their technology faster than any of the public (ITER, NIF) approaches. NIF’s laser approach to inertial confinement fusion likely won’t be the path that moves to commercial fusion, but it’s still moderately valuable because their data on confinement may help others pursuing alternative (more practical) strategies in target confinement fusion.
The public approaches are certainly advancing the science, but there’s been so much technological advancement in every associated engineering nook and cranny, over the last few decades, that it’s likely one of the private startups will break through to a commercial plant first. And that’s good news – moving from NIF’s current state to a commercial plant using laser ignition would likely take decades and be too large to ever transition to the private sector (ITER’s an even more dire example of this). I’m hopeful that one of the startups (my money’s on either Helion or Commonwealth Fusion) will show net positive in a couple years with an approach that is vastly simpler to scale and deploy in much less than 30 years. Fingers crossed.
We’ve been trying to create a workable fusion reaction for over 50 years. The thing that has always bothered me is that we have settled on a method for doing the problem that is incredibly complex and expensive. It just feels wrong. Why aren’t we looking at other options? Based on the principle of Occam’s Razor there should be an answer that is simpler and cheaper that we haven’t figured out yet. Somehow this has always seemed like a fool’s errand and while it would be lovely to find this technology, by all rights if we get the engine started it should run by itself and eradicate the earth before we figure out how much to charge for it.
Its great clickbait, but the joke is that fusion power is always 10 years away. Sorry folks, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal yet.
Predicting earthquakes has also been a decade away for the past 7 or so decades. Yet I still hold hope for both.
If nothing else, it’s a great jobs program for the over-educated and a financial stimulus for tech industries. Hope Ralphie doesn’t “shoot his eye out”.
H-Man, this is a big deal. I have worked with the water to hydrogen complex and the problem was always the same, sure we could make hydrogen from water but the energy input always exceeded the energy output. Spending $10 of electricity to make $5 of hydrogen made no sense. If fusion changes that equation to energy in = ++ energy, now you have something of value.
400MJ into the lasers for 2.5MJ of fusion energy. It is indeed an impressive scientific achievement but an equally impressive public relations achievement to convince the press and public that we are anywhere close to producing positive net power from controlled fusion. A practical fusion power plant will remain “a decade away” for the foreseeable future.