In recent months, we have been hearing a lot of news on a topic that has been characterized by a long silence for decades, Lars Jaeger writes in an essay on finews.first.
This article is published on finews.first, a forum for authors specialized in economic and financial topics.
On one and the same day (January 26, 2022), almost all press organs carried headlines such as:
- ‹Burning› hydrogen plasma in the world’s largest laser sets fusion records
- Nuclear fusion milestone creates ‹burning plasma› for the first time
- Physicists create self-burning plasma – but is it a step toward sustainable nuclear fusion energy?
- Scientists reach a major milestone in harnessing fusion energy
Progress in nuclear fusion (as opposed to nuclear fission, on which today’s controversial nuclear power generation is based) is of great importance because nuclear fusion offers the possibility of safe and (almost) climate-neutral energy generation.
Yet the history of nuclear fusion research is already more than 80 years old. Since the 1930s, physicists have known that hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium atomic nuclei under very high pressure and temperature – and that it is this mechanism (as well as the fusion of larger atomic nuclei) that enables the sun to generate its enormous amounts of energy.
«In fact, this corresponds to the reactions in the interior of the sun»
Recent headlines have specifically focused on the achievement of scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. Here, a high-power laser was used to create for the first time a «burning plasma», demonstrating for a (very) brief moment how the «fuel», i.e. the combination of deuterium and tritium, can be made to undergo nuclear fusion and thus produce energy.
The energy achieved here was much of the energy required to sustain the nuclear reaction. This corresponds to the reactions in the interior of the sun, whereby here on earth the problem is that for the production of these reactions enormously high energy quantities or densities are necessary at first, in order to set the process in motion, which then maintains itself (on suns of a certain size this is caused automatically by the enormously high gravitational force).
«Here, it is more of a traditional fusion approach»
Just a few months earlier, incidentally, there had been a similar wave of newspaper articles on nuclear fusion. The trigger here was the Boston-based company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a spin-off of MIT, which received more than a billion dollars from investors such as Bill Gates and George Soros, as it communicated. The way these nuclear fusion works is quite different from NIF’s.
Here, it is more of a traditional fusion approach, building a donut-shaped «tokamak» reactor, a «big magnetic bottle», according to CFS’s CEO Bob Mumgaard, in which powerful magnetic fields control spheres in plasma that’s about 100 million degrees hot, which should produce the same fusion of hydrogen isotope nuclei as in the laser-driven reactor.
Mumgaard said they will have a working reactor in six years basing his optimism on CFS’s successful 2021 summer test of new electromagnets made with barium-copper-oxide superconductors.
«Jeff Bezos backs General Fusion»
However, there will almost certainly be room for more than one fusion winner. Other companies include Canada-based General Fusion, backed by Jeff Bezos, which received $130 million from investors in 2021.
And then there is TAE Energy in California, which is arguably the furthest along with commercially successful nuclear fusion, having already experimented with it at a cost of $1 billion over the past twenty years and now, with having successfully raised more money, plans to build the first permanently operational nuclear fusion reactor within the next three years, which they are already calling «Copernicus».
«Otherwise, investors would hardly put so much money into it»
The fact that investors are now willing to put up several billion dollars of private capital for the next round of funding for the development of nuclear fusion energy machines (with a correspondingly high expected return) shows that they expect to see commercially viable nuclear fusion in five or only a little more years. Otherwise, they would hardly put so much money into it. Commercially available fusion technology, if it were actually available to us one day – and perhaps soon – would mean a paradigm shift in society.
If we were actually able to produce energy like the sun and thus gain access to the most efficient, safest and environmentally-friendly form of energy that nature has to offer, this would certainly not only be another major technological advance, but rather a leap forward in a civilization that would be on a par with the invention of the steam engine, which 250 years ago gave us the energy to completely turn our society upside down.
Lars Jaeger is a Swiss-German author and investment manager. He writes on the history and philosophy of science and technology and has in the past been an author on hedge funds, quantitative investing, and risk management. He just recently published his latest book: «Wege aus der Klimakatastrophe».
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