I've said it before and I'll say it again: Every major advance in human technology, in human standard of living, has come with increases in energy density. From wood to charcoal to coal to oil to natural gas to fission power, the arc of progress in energy has always been toward greater, not lower, energy density. That is until the green energy types came along with their insistence on low-density sources like solar and wind.
So, with nuclear fission reactors providing the highest energy density available today, the question arises, "Where do we go from here?" What energy source can provide greater energy density than fission power?
The answer is fusion power. But the problem is that it's a few decades away, and has been since the '50s:
While fusion development to many still sounds like science fiction – plasma temperatures reaching temperatures hotter than the sun’s core (as much as 10 times hotter) – it is, according to The Engineer, fast becoming the wave of the future thanks to worldwide collaborations and bold powerplant programs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan (China has its own fusion program, as well).
“The world needs fusion,” says the magazine, “and fusion needs teams around the world working together on solving big challenges.” Recent breakthroughs, they believe, show that fusion energy is no longer science fiction but could begin contributing to national energy grids by the 2030s.
If that happens, that would be world-changing. Nuclear fusion power would be a quantum leap toward even cheaper energy, and cleaner energy to boot, with no long-lasting radioactive waste. Fusion power would literally launch humanity into the future.
But what about that "always forty years away" problem?
Up in Seattle, Zap Energy co-founder and University of Washington adjunct professor of applied mathematics Uri Shumiak has raised more than $330 million from investors and has a 150-person team working to deliver fusion energy to civilization.
The Zap Energy team is experimenting with its fusion reactor (called FuZE-Q) to try to produce a positive fusion energy output – the fundamental challenge fusion scientists everywhere are trying to achieve. The company’s claim to fame is its new prototype Century device, which relies on a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch rather than magnets, cryogenics, or lasers to achieve fusion.
Zap isn't the only company working to solve this problem:
Down in Georgia, Tokamak Energy has revealed the first design details of its high-field spherical tokamak, a fusion energy pilot plant that is a key participant in the Department of Energy’s milestone-based fusion development program. This competitive program seeks to encourage private companies to advance fusion technology towards practical commercial use.
Tokamak provided an early look at its operation at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics in Atlanta in October. The Tokamak pilot plant has a goal of generating 800 megawatts of fusion power and delivering 85 MW of net (carbon-free) electricity to more than 70,000 homes.
Neither the two companies mentioned here nor any other lab or operation working on this problem anywhere else have come close to a practical, grid-scale fusion reactor. We are, after 100 years of theory, after at least 60 years of experimentation, still decades away from a functional prototype – and we may be for decades to come. I think that fusion power will one day become practical, but it may be a century today.
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Still, the proponents of fusion power sure all sound optimistic. So what happens if they succeed?
Fusion power would largely shut down the climate scolds. Fusion power doesn't produce long-lasting radioactive waste, so that argument against nuclear power is gone. If the reactor suffers a failure, it just stops; there is no radioactive fuel to melt down and leak radioactivity. Fusion meets the magical requirements of the green energy types – truly safe and emissions-free and has the highest energy density known to date.
Fusion power, scaled up to grid-scale and placed into mass production, could provide clean, safe, cheap energy to the world. Granted, the development process may take another century, but a problem that takes the greatest minds in the world to solve, once solved, becomes a matter of engineering – and mass production.
The only higher energy-density energy source would be a hypothetical matter-antimatter reactor, and that would be millennia, not decades, away.
The advent of fusion power would be earth-shattering. It would literally change everything. But at this point, it's still a long way off, and we have a clean, safe, high-energy-density power source now, and that is fission power. We should be building reactors, especially the safe, versatile small modular reactors. We should have started building them years ago. We should be building them now. This is something the incoming Trump administration needs to prioritize.
