As 2022 came to an end, the US Department of Energy announced a breakthrough nuclear fusion ignition. We break down what this means for the future of energy.
What did the scientists achieve exactly?
Let’s clear the basics first: Nuclear fusion, or the merging of atoms (not to be confused with it’s opposite, fission), produces an enormous amount of energy. That’s what powers the Sun and other stars. For more thatn 50 years, scientists at the National Ignition Facility of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have been trying to achieve fusion in which the amount of energy released exceeds the amount of energy needed. Yep, recreating the Sun’s reactions is harder than you’d expect.
With the help of 192 powerful lasers to facilitate the fusion, the experiment turned out to be a success. And while experts are commenting that this needs to be drastically scaled up to power the grid, people are starting to see this as a substitute for fossil fuels.
Let’s slow down and demistify this a bit
First off, the main concern for all fusion experiments is the availability of fuel for a fusion reaction (in this case, tritium). Tritium is not your average hydrogen isotope—it costs $30,000 per gramme (that’s nearly equivalent to the price of a diamond).
The world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, and half of them are due to retire this decade (that is, before scientists will be able to successfully scale-up fusion to the level that we need). So while it’s an encouraging and potential route that we may want to go down, we must continue to invest generously in clean energy while we wait for fusion.
A big pinch of salt
Here’s another critical detail that has been somewhat downplayed: now look, we did say that there was net energy output from the experiment, and they did manage to release energy, but what exactly counts as “energy”? Javier Blas, an energy columnist at Bloomberg, tweeted, “The lasers used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are extremely inefficient, so although the experiment produced net energy, the lasers consume a LOT more before to charge. The experiment released 2.5 MJ vs 2.1 MJ of laser energy. But due to efficiencies, the lasers consume ~330 MJ to charge, with the energy stored in 3,840 high-voltage capacitors for 60 seconds before being released in a 400-microsecond burst.”
Admittedly, there are many significant and practical obstacles. And so how much money and resources are ultimately spent on the nuclear industry should not be the decision of the few elite. Every plant consumes billions of dollars, and for that we need to democratise nuclear development.
FEATURED IMAGE: via Pexels | IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Landscape photo of a nuclear factory, with clouds of smoke escaping from the top of their furnaces.