Kerry’s announcement followed the news of Britain and the US signing a cooperation agreement on fusion in November 2023. By using reinforcement learning, scientists were able to predict plasma tearing in the tokamak reactor DIII-D at the National Fusion Facility in San Diego, which would disrupt the reaction. Artificial intelligence could help solve a problem faced by the biggest magnetic fusion facility in the US, according to research published in February 2024 in the journal Nature. A gallon of seawater (3.8 litres) could produce as much energy as 300 gallons (1,136 litres) of petrol.

The Joint European Torus site, to give it its full name, was a collaboration of European nuclear scientists. These companies are building on the earlier work of pioneering researchers, including those at the JET fusion lab. Private-sector investment in the nascent technology has surged in the past 20 years, according to McKinsey. Back in January 2023 at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, nuclear scientist and Director of the lab, Kim Budil, spoke on a panel, a month after her team made the original breakthrough. Australia, Germany and Japan are also pursuing fusion, according to Reuters.

Not a drop to drink: water

The good news is that the world’s first commercial fusion power plant – a 400 MW machine we call ‘ARC’ – will break ground in the next few years. While it may not happen exactly as we’ve just described, the first fusion power plant will almost certainly begin operations shortly after President-elect Trump’s second term expires. Fusion is the future of the global energy sector — the near future. This reaction will produce 400 megawatts (MW) of clean, firm electricity, enough for a small city. As AI accelerates the path to commercialization, fusion energy is shifting from an ambitious science project to one of the most consequential markets of the century. CFS is racing against Helion, another US fusion startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which plans to bring a fusion power plant online by 2028 and has signed Microsoft as its first off-take partner.

Different types of advanced nuclear technologies

• Under the fusion-powered grow lights, hydroponically grown strawberries or lettuce or other crops can be grown to maturity without the use of pesticides and other harsh chemicals.
• Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and stars, merges two atomic nuclei into a larger one.
• The magnetic fusion approach uses strong magnetic fields to pressurize and trap the hot plasma fuel.
• Last month, CFS, Dominion Energy and the Governor of Virginia made an historic announcement to site the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says that over 80 SMR designs are in development worldwide, targeting electricity, heating, water desalination and industrial steam. Unlike traditional nuclear power (fission), which splits atoms, fusion joins smaller atoms to make heavier ones. According to the World Nuclear Association, fusion offers a nearly endless energy source with close to zero emissions. Surging power demand from AI and other applications for carbon-free energy sources that operate 24/7 are steeply increasing levels of interest in nuclear energy.

• General Fusion in Canada, Helion Energy in the United States and others are investigating new approaches to fusion energy.
• These are just a few of the ways affordable commercial fusion energy could reshape life on Earth as we know it, which is why it’s worth pursuing.
• Since the 1980s, 33 nations and thousands of engineers and scientists have collaborated to build and operate a “tokamak” – a magnetic fusion device – as part of the ITER project, the world’s largest fusion experiment.
• But bringing them to market will require new policies and regulations, and the nuclear industry must win public trust by addressing concerns over cost, safety, and waste.
• Nuclear fusion gets a lot of public attention due to its fantastic potential.

Challenges for nuclear fusion researchers

It offers the prospect of an “almost inexhaustible source fusion markets review of energy”, according to the World Nuclear Association. There is a “significant gap” between political announcements around renewable energy and the actual plans and policies countries have in place, according to a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Countries have different starting points for the green transition. Fusion fuel – different isotopes of hydrogen – must be heated to extreme temperatures of around 50 million degrees Celsius, kept stable under intense pressure, and dense enough and confined for long enough to allow the nuclei to fuse. At Davos in 2023, Kim Budil, the lab’s director, explained the experiment involved beaming 192 lasers on a tiny target and heating it to create a self-sustaining reaction.

According to the US Department of Energy, fusion reactions are hard to sustain due to the extreme heat and pressure needed to fuse atoms. Currently, however, the main hurdle is making fusion produce more energy than it consumes. Nuclear fusion gets a lot of public attention due to its fantastic potential. Advanced nuclear technologies can help address some of the concerns around safety and cost.

From one power plant to civilization’s primary energy source

Nuclear energy produces about 10% of the world’s electricity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). In the US — where the heating oil used to fuel furnaces in the northeast is in short supply, and the closure of nuclear plants across the country is leading to skyrocketing electric bills — many are in the midst of a cold and expensive winter. Commercial fusion power generation is expected by some to roll out in the 2030s — which could give the world a seismic final push to meet the UN’s 2050 climate goals, if implemented broadly and quickly. Pioneering inventors, including TAE Technologies in Southern California, are racing to bring this natural process that fuels the sun down to Earth, with terrestrial fusion power plants. While the growth in renewables over the past decade has been promising, nuclear fusion is only beginning to gain the recognition and support required to push it toward commercial use. As people seek out cheap ways to keep warm this winter, it is clear that we need long-term investment in cost-competitive, stable and clean energy.

Heat pumps are already gathering momentum

Nuclear fusion reactors around the world are being built to find the best way to control and capture the energy of such reactions. Digital power system transformation ‘essential’ – and more top energy stories How AI can accelerate the energy transition, rather than compete with it Almost half of the region’s electricity comes from water sources. Nuclear fission meanwhile – which splits a ‘heavy’ element to create energy, rather doing so by fusing two ‘light’ elements as with fusion – is having a moment.

It helps increase public confidence in advanced energy solutions, technology readiness, demand and business cases while enabling collaborations and informing policy. Platforms like the Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community can help speed up this cooperation and accelerate the deployment of new technologies from decades to years, such as clean fuels and hydrogen, advanced nuclear, storage and carbon removal. At the same time, the Forum is also working to support a more integrated approach to energy solutions, including advanced nuclear, clean fuels, hydrogen and carbon removal. It is a cross-industry platform building new coalitions and delivering insights required for a sustainable, secure and just energy future. The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities. On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick.

Tech and Innovation

Here too, fusion can supply the solution, potentially allowing for a vast reduction in the land-use footprint of agriculture and shortening the supply chain for fruits and vegetables by growing them in indoor farms much closer to urban centres, if not within city limits. Factories could, for example, be located closer to the raw materials they rely on — or to the retail markets that goods are destined for — cutting down on transportation costs and carbon emissions. We could plant vast forests where there is today only scrub, using desalinated water to power these living factories for capturing carbon.

How can these technologies advance the energy transition?

But she said the timescale to generating power could be “two or three decades away” and urged great collaboration to build a fusion “ecosystem”. Globally, government labs and companies are racing to generate power from fusion – including at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Thanks to its success in advancing fusion technology, it operated for 40 years before entering decommissioning in October 2023. “If we want to take this forward, public-private partnerships are going to be essential,” she said.

According to The Global Fusion Industry in 2022 report, 93% of companies believe that fusion electricity will be on the grid in the 2030s or before (up from 83% in 2021). The difficulties in designing current-carrying coils to produce the magnetic fields required for confining plasmas to create fusion energy have been critical since the beginning of research into magnetically-confined plasmas in the 1950s. The jump from fossil fuels to fusion energy will inevitably be more profound than the jump from burning wood to burning fossil fuels. From there, fusion will naturally expand to markets where consumers need constant power and lack affordable clean alternatives — or where leaders have made ambitious climate commitments. Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation.

The same resurgence can be seen with the origins of fusion research in the stellarator, replaced with the tokamak due to seemingly insurmountable difficulties at the time. The resurgence of the electric vehicle could prove similar to another source of innovation, this time in fusion science. Fusion also is the critical driver for enabling exciting artificial intelligence applications powered by energy-hungry data centres. MIT found that incorporating fusion into New England’s grid would cut annual energy costs by $36 billion — or 7% — by 2050. One way to understand fusion’s potential global economic impact is to look at a single market. The 10 countries that score the highest in terms of readiness account for only 2.6% of global annual emissions.

Pioneering nuclear fusion

Unlocking Latin America and the Caribbean’s clean energy future “SMRs are compact, reliable, versatile, require minimal land and have potential for standardized mass-manufacture production that can achieve the scale of deployment required to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centres and transport.” Emissions-free nuclear fusion technology could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change, if it can be scaled up. The buzz around fusion energy as a way to reduce emissions keeps building.

As the electric vehicle’s story shows, a technological resurgence can take time and may need to demonstrate breakthroughs in adjacent fields – e.g. the electric car brought advances in high-capacity batteries and low-losses electrical engines. But recent advancements in manufacturing technologies, particularly additive manufacturing, address this problem very well. This challenge was especially true for stellarators with more complicated coil configurations than tokamaks. Meanwhile, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which made a long-awaited breakthrough in fusion late last year, suffered a setback as five similar shots have since failed. In February 2023, it reached a milestone by achieving an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules, with the discharge lasting a record eight minutes.