Recently, electricity generation from fusion has moved from the realm of science fiction to the brink of serious development.
Before the most recent advances in energy technologies, fusion power had been sought for over a hundred years without much success. Due to a series of scientific, technical, business, and political developments, fusion has been yanked out of the labs and onto the front pages.
The aim of fusion research is to replicate the nuclear reaction through which energy is created on the sun. It is a “holy grail” of carbon-free power that scientists have been chasing since before the 1950s.
Nuclear power used today is created by a different process, called fission, which relies on splitting, rather than fusing, atoms. The process creates waste that can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and it’s also potentially hazardous, as was seen in the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Three “turning point” events
While there has been continued progress in fusion science over the past several years, three events stand out because of their significance in reaching practical generation.
The first, in May 2021, took place at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei, China. Researchers at EAST maintained a steady-state fusion reaction for a remarkable 1,056 seconds—almost 20 minutes.
The next event took place only months later. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak , at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA’s) Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire, is the largest fusion tokamak in the world.
The JET has held the record for fusion power since 1997. That record—21.7 megajoules (MJ)—was smashed in late 2021 with a fusion pulse that achieved 59 MJ.
As impressive as the JET achievement was, an even more dramatic event occurred the following year. In December 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California hit a key milestone in the quest to create abundant zero-carbon power through nuclear fusion.
In this case, the fusion reactor in California, which is the size of three football fields and consists of almost 200 lasers, bombarded a tiny spot with high levels of energy to initiate a fusion reaction, producing a net energy gain of 120 percent.
Regulating the nascent fusion industry
Connecting fusion reactors to the electric grid is not going to just happen – again, even assuming all the technological hurdles are overcome. And there are a lot of them.
Interestingly, there hadn’t been any certainty in how the nascent fusion industry was going to be regulated in the United States until very recently.
So, who will regulate fusion? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has asserted its jurisdictional primacy. On April 14, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win.
As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won’t apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down.)
“Up until now, there was real uncertainty about how fusion would be regulated in the United States — this decision makes clear who will regulate fusion-energy facilities, and what developers will have to do to meet those regulations,” Andrew Holland, CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association, told CNBC. “It is extremely important.”
Other differences include looser requirements around foreign ownership of nuclear fusion plants, and the dispensing of mandatory hearings at the federal level during the licensing process, Holland said.
Today, we are rapidly approaching Peak Holy Grail — at least in the world of energy policy. Some say it’s small modular reactors, others say lithium metal batteries, concentrated solar power, or hydrogen. If mastered, fusion power would be the holiest of these grails.
