Startups will soon be ready to demonstrate how they make nuclear fusion work, but a lot of obstacles are in their way.
Could the end of the energy crisis be in sight?
"Creating a working star on Earth might sound flat-out impossible, had scientists not already gone so far toward doing it," The New York Times reported as multiple startups are looking to get fusion out of laboratories.
Fusion is the thermonuclear reaction that occurs in the core of stars, including the sun. But why all the hype around it?
As the International Atomic Energy Agency explains it, "if nuclear fusion can be replicated on Earth at an industrial scale, it could provide virtually limitless clean, safe, and affordable energy to meet the world's demand." Yes, just that.
In December 2022, the U.S. government announced a breakthrough scientific fusion experiment that generated more energy than it used to create the reaction for a very brief moment. But the process has a cost: millions of degrees Celsius.
Though fusion happens in the sun's core at 15 million degrees Celsius (more than 27 million degrees Fahrenheit), temperatures on Earth must exceed that by several orders of magnitude to make up for lower atmospheric pressure, according to the U.S. Fusion Energy.
"First you need to heat a puff of gas to unimaginable temperatures, over 100 million degrees Celsius," the Times wrote. "This makes the gas so hot that the electrons are ripped free from their atoms. So hot that the gas transcends gas and enters another state of matter: plasma.
"With enough heat, the atoms start to fuse. … Make your plasma hold onto this heat for long enough, and at high enough pressure, and more energy comes out than you put in to heat it up."
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The user manual for fusion does not look one bit like Ikea's instructions to build your next shelving unit. For a net power gain to be recorded on Earth, there are lots of precautions to take, particularly when it comes to the plasma, which is very fragile.
"You could snuff it out by blowing on it," the Times explained, hence the need for super-powerful magnets or lasers.
With global energy consumption expected to increase to meet the needs of a growing population and extreme weather events becoming more frequent as the burning of dirty fuels creates heat-trapping gases, pushing the global temperature higher, fusion could be a viable option to produce green energy.
Not in everyone's view, though. For energy analyst Ross McCracken, for example, fusion's deployment timeline ("still decades away") does not match the urgency of the climate crisis, its costs are incredibly high and often misunderstood, and long-lived radioactive waste is not to be excluded from consideration. The IAEA and other entities note that fusion doesn't create the most dangerous, "long-lived" radioactive waste that plagues today's nuclear fission reactors; McCracken suggests that advanced materials still need to be developed to avoid this problem entirely.
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos may have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in fusion energy, but "until you actually do it for real … it's just an idea," Columbia professor of plasma physics Gerald Navratil told the Times.
The machines that can handle the process, known as tokamaks, are hard to build and maintain, expensive, and might require new technology, if not new materials, as the Times detailed. While engineers are working on it, the private sector is betting on other types of machines.
Per the Times, American companies Type One Energy and Thea Energy have chosen devices called stellarators; Zap Energy is looking at using filaments of plasma zapped with electricity; across the border, Canada's General Fusion is trying to squish plasma together with pistons.
"It's kind of the wild west right now," Richard Magee, vice president of physics research at fusion firm TAE Technologies, told the Times. "It's going to be really interesting to see who's still standing in 10 years."
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