Small Fusion Could Be Huge

Commercial power from nuclear fusion is 30 years away. We know this because the fusion-energy research community has been saying so for 50 years.

If fusion energy ultimately works, its benefit to humankind is virtually impossible to overstate. The nuclear energy release is about four million times greater than the chemical energy released by burning coal, oil, or natural gas, and for that reason it requires very little fuel. Sixty kilograms of fusion fuel—which one strong person could physically carry into the power plant—would power a city of a million for a year. It would take 400,000 metric tons of coal to do the same. On top of that, the fusion reaction produces no carbon emissions, nor any other pollutant.

The reaction works by joining, or fusing, nuclei of hydrogen-2 (or deuterium) and hydrogen-3 (tritium) together to make helium-4 (a harmless and useful gas) plus a neutron, which then interacts with lithium in a way that “breeds” tritium for subsequent fusion reactions. The inputs, deuterium and lithium, are both present in seawater in quantities that would last millions of years at least.

The world’s grandest fusion project to date is an international collaboration called ITER that comprises a massive reactor under construction in France. Once finished, it will be an experimental platform for demonstrating a sustained fusion reaction that generates more power than it consumes, similar to what goes on at the core of the sun. It was originally scheduled to come online this year at a cost of $12 billion, but its director-general recently stated that it would not be finished before 2025—and for no less than $20 billion—producing a net energy gain no earlier than 2035. The U.S. share alone is now expected to grow from $1.1 billion to closer to $5 billion. And that’s just for a fusion experiment—the precursor to an actual power plant.

While ITER is a major step toward proving the feasibility of fusion, many scientists and energy-policy experts believe it is important to work in parallel on other aspects of fusion power. In addition to the U.S. Department of Energy’s earlier commitment to ITER, its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) last year announced nine research grants “to create… new, lower-cost pathways to fusion power and to enable more rapid progress in fusion research and development.” The largest of these grants, awarded jointly to Los Alamos National Laboratory and HyperV Technologies Corp., comes in at about one thousandth the projected cost of the U.S. contribution to ITER.

The project leader, Los Alamos physicist Scott Hsu, explains that their work is one embodiment of an approach called magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), which combines the benefits of two large-scale fusion paradigms, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. ITER, for instance, is a magnetic-confinement device, using ultra-powerful magnetic fields to contain the 150-million-degree plasma undergoing nuclear fusion. (Such high temperatures are necessary for fusion because only at high temperatures can positively charged atomic nuclei slam into each other with sufficient speed to overcome their mutual electrical repulsion and fuse into larger nuclei.) By contrast, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is an inertial-confinement device, using inward-directed lasers to implode a nuclear-fuel pellet.

In an exploratory experiment of Hsu’s approach to MIF, 60 electro­magnetic plasma guns, designed and built by HyperV and mounted all around a spherical vacuum chamber, simultaneously fire supersonic jets of plasma. (A full-scale reactor would employ hundreds of plasma guns.) The jets converge at the center of the chamber for the purpose of compressing another plasma of laser-magnetized nuclear fuel, injected moments earlier.

Such plasma-jet driven MIF builds upon success obtained recently at Sandia National Laboratories. There, researchers obtained conditions suitable for fusion by compressing a solid liner surrounding the hot, magnetized fuel. However, the Sandia experiment was not designed for the repetitive pulsing required for fusion energy, as each compression, or “shot,” severely damages the liner and other components. Hsu’s plasma-jet compression is designed to overcome this by effectively constructing a plasma liner, instead of a solid one, that’s reestablished with each shot.

“We will be able to fire one shot every second, continuously restoring fusion conditions without damaging the hardware,” says Hsu. In theory, that could be sufficient to achieve ignition—the all-important and maddeningly elusive state of getting significantly more power out than what is put in. Initial simulations suggest that, in principle, the fusion energy output could be quite large, possibly reaching up to 30 times the energy supplied to the plasma jets. Of course, actually achieving such a large gain, or really any gain at all, will not be so straightforward.

“Remember, the closer you come to ignition, the more unforeseen problems arise,” says Hsu. “The history of fusion-energy research has shown that time and time again.” With each snag encountered, studied, and overcome along the way, he plans to progressively improve simulations of the system’s performance for ever-more realistic predictions. “But if we do achieve ignition, then our technology should scale well for commercial power applications. In fact, that’s one of the key reasons for taking this approach