Fusion, for so long imagined as the pot of gold at the end of the nuclear energy rainbow, has remained tantalizingly out of reach, promising a near-limitless source of clean energy while repeatedly defying scientists’ efforts to make it practical.
Over the last 70 years or so, governments across the world have funded it generously, and yet the goal has been tantalizing, always just out of reach.
Sometimes the quest has seemed tragicomical. Keeve Milton “Kip” Siegel, president of KMS Fusion, the nation’s first private sector fusion energy company, believed he could achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion energy production through use of available laser technology, if only he could raise enough funding. He died of a heart attack in 1975, testifying before Congress while seeking federal support.
Another enthusiast was Bob Guccione, publisher of the skin magazine, Penthouse, and the science and technology magazine, OMNI. In the 1980s he partnered closely with Mike McCormack, a former Washington state congressman, on an unconventional, miniature fusion device called the “Riggatron.”
McCormack represented a constituency east of the Cascade Mountains, which included the sprawling Hanford nuclear complex. Reportedly, Guccione invested some $17 million to $20 million of his own fortune on the Riggatron project.
Fusion seeks to produce on earth what happens in the sun and the stars. Unlike fission, which splits an atom, fusion combines two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, at extreme temperatures and pressures to form helium and a high-energy neutron, releasing a massive amount of energy.
There are two ways of doing this. The most advanced is magnetic confinement, using a circular chamber called a “tokamak” or “torus.” Here a plasma is heated to more than 1.5 million degrees centigrade and is confined by ultra-strong magnetic fields.
The second method is inertial fusion. Here a pellet of deuterium and tritium is struck by a beam from a laser or a particle accelerator, forcing the fusion.
In both cases, the goal is a sustained reaction in which the amount of energy taken from the device is greater than the energy used to create the reaction. This is the all-important “gain.”
For decades, the smart money and the majority of international effort has been on magnetic confinement, beginning with a reactor in Oxfordshire, England, the Joint European Torus (JET), and the 34-nation-supported International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is being built in southern France and will become operational next year. After 40 years of experiments, JET has been retired. Many are looking to ITER for the next breakthrough.
But the private sector in the United States isn’t waiting for governments to get there first.
A half-dozen startups are hard at it, investing a combined $10 billion. Foremost of these is Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) of Devens, Massachusetts. The Devens campus houses the facilities needed to build and test SPARC, a compact, magnetically confined tokamak fusion device designed to achieve net energy. CFS is building a 400-megawatt plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, designed to start producing power for the grid in the early 2030s. The company is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff and has attracted support from Google.
To tour the large plant in Devens, where the CFS magnets are manufactured and wound, one finds no doubt, just enthusiasm: a sense of being on the threshold of something very, very big.
But there is great skepticism from those who know from lifelong experience in fission that when it comes to nuclear power, there is always something that can go wrong and wreck everything.
With fusion, the question is: Will the materials hold up to the neutron bombardment?
A former utility executive, who has watched fusion for 40 years, told me that fusion’s challenges are formidable and unmet as yet. Also unproven is the basic challenge that the machine will achieve gain.
Now a powerful voice of doubt has joined the skeptics. It belongs to John P. Holdren, who served as science advisor to President Barack Obama and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a fusion supporter, but in a just-released paper, he has expressed concern about the hectic rush to commercialization.
Holdren, a graduate of MIT and Stanford, writes of himself, “I have been a fusion enthusiast since doing my master’s and PhD dissertation on fusion science in the 1960s. I still very much hope for fusion’s eventual success as an engineered energy source for society.”
While fusion is a proven possibility, because of the fusion which takes place in the sun and the stars, “sustaining fusion reactions on earth in the controlled and nearly continuous wave required of a practical source of electrical power is hard — much harder than fission,” he writes.
Holdren goes on, “The essence of the difference is that, while efficient chain reaction in uranium or plutonium can be started at room temperature the ‘easiest’ fusion reaction to master under controlled conditions on earth — the reaction of tritium with deuterium — only generates more energy than required to ignite it when the reactants are heated to 100 million degrees centigrade.
“The challenges of achieving such temperatures and preventing the reactants from escaping before sufficient energy has been generated to repay the energy input are immense. After 7 decades of research worldwide, with the expenditure of perhaps $200 billion in current dollars, no fusion device anywhere has yet reached true energy breakeven in a system sense.”
Nonetheless, the history of science has been about taking chances and expanding frontiers. Today’s fusion companies are at the barricades, led by CFS.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS.
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