Commercial Deployment of Nuclear Fusion Before 2030? Proponents See Hope

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Written by Paul Wiseman for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--For the sector's proponents, the dreams for nuclear fusion are huge.

"You're going to see power at like ten cents a kilowatt, and you're going to see every nation on earth able to deploy as much electricity as they want, and you're going to see a doubling of global GDP [gross domestic product]," said Jim McNiel, chief growth officer of TAE Technologies (Foothill Ranch, California).

"Fusion is not just the next energy stage, it is the final one," said Rick Needham, chief commercial officer for Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Devens, Massachusetts).

After all, they argue, we know fusion works--it's what makes the sun hot and the stars shine. And a catch-phrase for the industry is "bottling the sun." The four participants of Reuter's July 24 webinar, "The Future of Fusion: Driving Commercial Success," were quick to verify the technical challenges, the investment cost and deployment obstacles.

Said moderator Andrew Holland, "Fusion is hard. Fusion is hard. Fusion is hard." But they were universal in their hope of bringing fusion to market, on a small scale, by 2027 or 2028.

At those dates producing electricity may still just be possible, but not yet economically viable or scalable. "We're very focused on getting these first deployments, and then scaling from there," said Jackie Siebens, director of public affairs for Helion Energy (Everett, Washington).

Andrew Holland, of the nonprofit Fusion Industry Association (FIA) (Washington, D.C.), said that "'When do you expect to see fusion commercialized? When will the first fusion plant deliver electricity to the grid?" are questions the FIA recently asked its members. A significant number of companies "are preparing and expect to see fusion energy on the grid in the 2030s or before."

That will require up-front funding, and the poll asked how much. While numbers ranged from what Holland called an impossibly low $10 million to $12 billion, the average was around $700 million per year. Even that number, he acknowledged, is major. "To be able to get to your next to power plants on the grid, raising $700 million per year per company is a significant amount of money, of course."

Each company on the panel represented a different technology, and each was equally convinced theirs was the best option. McNiel began by pointing out fusion's advantages in general. "Fusion...means something that's zero carbon, minimal to zero radioactive waste, and something that you can deploy anywhere in the world at scale."

TAE uses deuterium and tritium because, he said, it reaches "Q greater than one" (where the power released is greater than that required for the reaction) at the lowest temperature, 150 million degrees.

"We have built a proprietary device called the field reverse configuration device. It's a bit like a big thermos with electro magnets around it and particle beams," he said.

Needham's company, Commonwealth, which spun off from some Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion research in 2018, is also convinced it has "the absolute fastest path to get to a commercial fusion power plant."

That architecture involves a tokamak, which he described as "basically a big magnetic doughnut" and ultra-high temperature that heat hydrogen isotopes to where they fuse and release great amounts of power. He noted that about 160 of these have been built in recent years, with some of them "getting very close" to a Q greater than one.

Commonwealth's recent advancement involves reducing the size of the plant by using "much, much stronger magnets based off of the new material high temperature superconductors," Needham explained.

Helion, said Siebers, uses something similar to the tokamak, but operates with short bursts. "We do fusion in short, rapid bursts, firing again and again. Kind of like a heartbeat. And each pulse creates a fusion reaction using a fuel mix of deuterium, which is just an isotope of hydrogen found in water."

Helion, with an agreement from Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, Washington) in Washington state, plans to deploy in 2028. Its unit will be "roughly the size of a shipping container, and the entire building it operates in is about the size of a high school football field," she said.

Helion's Polaris machine, completed in 2024, has a goal of creating electricity from fusion for the first time "over the coming months."

In a second installment, we will discuss funding, from investors, from Google Incorporated (Mountain View, California), Microsoft and others--and some surprising side projects in cancer treatment and elsewhere that have emerged from fusion research.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of industrial market intelligence. Since 1983, IIR has provided comprehensive research, news and analysis on the industrial process, manufacturing and energy related industries. IIR's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) platform helps companies identify and pursue trends across multiple markets with access to real, qualified and validated plant and project opportunities. Across the world, IIR is tracking more than 200,000 current and future projects worth $17.8 trillion (USD).