In addition to the competition to develop commercial quantum computing, there’s the competition to develop commercial nuclear fusion energy. I have four stories about nuclear fusion, one from Spain, one from Chine, one from the US, and one from Vancouver. There are also a couple of segues into history and the recently (April 2, 2025) announced US tariffs (chaos has since ensued as these have become ‘on again/off again’ tariffs) but the bulk of this posting is focused on the latest (January – early April 2025) in fusion energy.
Fission nuclear energy, where atoms are split, is better known; fusion nuclear energy is released when a star is formed. For anyone unfamiliar with the word tokamak as applied to nuclear fusion (which is mentioned in all the stories), you can find out more in the Tokamak Wikipedia entry.
In a pioneering approach to achieve fusion energy, the SMART device has successfully generated its first tokamak plasma. This step brings the international fusion community closer to achieving sustainable, clean, and virtually limitless energy through controlled fusion reactions.
The SMART tokamak, a state-of-the-art experimental fusion device designed, constructed and operated by the Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Laboratory of the University of Seville, is a worldwide unique spherical tokamak due to its flexible shaping capabilities. SMART has been designed to demonstrate the unique physics and engineering properties of Negative Triangularity shaped plasmas towards compact fusion power plants based on Spherical Tokamaks.
Prof. Manuel García Muñoz, Principal Investigator of the SMART tokamak, stated: “This is an important achievement for the entire team as we are now entering the operational phase of SMART. The SMART approach is a potential game changer with attractive fusion performance and power handling for future compact fusion reactors. We have exciting times ahead! Prof. Eleonora Viezzer, co-PI of the SMART project, adds: “We were all very excited to see the first magnetically confined plasma and are looking forward to exploiting the capabilities of the SMART device together with the international scientific community. SMART has awoken great interest worldwide.
When negative becomes positive and compact
The triangularity describes the shape of the plasma. Most tokamaks operate with positive triangularity, meaning that the plasma shape looks like a D. When the D is mirrored (as shown in the figure on the right), the plasma has negative triangularity.
Negative triangularity plasma shapes feature enhanced performance as it suppresses instabilities that expel particles and energy from the plasma, preventing severe damage to the tokamak wall. Besides offering high fusion performance, negative triangularity also feature attractive power handling solutions, given that it covers a larger divertor area for distributing the heat exhaust. This also facilitates the engineering design for future compact fusion power plants.
Fusion2Grid aimed at developing the foundation for the most compact fusion power plant
SMART is the first step in the Fusion2Grid strategy led by the PSFT team and, in collaboration with the international fusion community, is aimed at the most compact and most efficient magnetically confined fusion power plant based on Negative Triangularity shaped Spherical Tokamaks.
SMART will be the first compact spherical tokamak operating at fusion temperatures with negative triangularity shaped plasmas.
The objective of SMART is to provide the physics and engineering basis for the most compact design of a fusion power plant based on high-field Spherical Tokamaks combined with Negative Triangularity. The solenoid-driven plasma represents a major achievement in the timeline of getting SMART online and advancing towards the most compact fusion device.
The Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Lab of the University of Seville hosts the SMall Aspect Ratio Tokamak (SMART) and leads several worldwide efforts on energetic particles and plasma transport and stability towards the development of magnetically confined fusion energy.
Caption: The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. Credit: Image by HFIPS ( Hefei Institutes of Physical Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences)
China has made a business announcement and there is no academic paper mentioned in their January 21, 2025 press release on EurekAlert (also available on phys.org as a January 21, 2025 news item), Note: A link has been removed,
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China’s “artificial sun,” has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.
The duration of 1,066 seconds is a critical advancement in fusion research. This milestone, achieved by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at Hefei Institutes of Physical Scienece [sic] (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, far surpasses the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.
The ultimate goal of developing an artificial sun is to replicate the nuclear fusion processes that occurr [sci] in the sun, providing humanity with a limitless and clean energy source, and enabling exploration beyond our solar system.
Scientists worldwide have dedicated over 70 years to this ambitious goal. However, generating electricity from a nuclear fusion device involves overcoming key challenges, including reaching temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, maintaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring precise control of the fusion process.
“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” said SONG Yuntao, ASIPP director and also vice president of HFIPS. He said that the recent record is monumental, marking a critical step toward realizing a functional fusion reactor.
According to GONG Xianzu, head of the EAST Physics and Experimental Operations division, several systems of the EAST device have been upgraded since the last round of experiments. For example, the heating system, which previously operated at the equivalent power of nearly 70,000 household microwave ovens, has now doubled its power output while maintaining stability and continuity.
Since its inception in 2006, EAST has served as an open testing platform for both Chinese and international scientists to conduct fusion-related experiments and research.
China officially joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program in 2006 as its seventh member. Under the agreement, China is responsible for approximately 9 percent of the project’s construction and operation, with ASIPP serving as the primary institution for the Chinese mission.
ITER, currently under construction in southern France, is set to become the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor upon completion.
In recent years, EAST has consistently achieved groundbreaking advancements in high-confinement mode, a fundamental operational mode for experimental fusion reactors like ITER and the future China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). These accomplishments provide invaluable insights and references for the global development of fusion reactors.
“We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity,” said SONG.
In Hefei, Anhui Province, China, where EAST is loacated [sic], a new generation of experimental fusion research facilities is currently under construction. These facilities aim to further accelerate the development and application of fusion energy.
I always feel a little less confident about the information when there are mistakes. Three typos in the same press release? Maybe someone forgot to give it a final once over?
Successfully harnessing the power of fusion energy could lead to cleaner and safer energy for all – and contribute substantially to combatting [UK spelling] the climate crisis. Towards this goal, Type One Energy has published a comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis for a practical fusion pilot power plant.
This groundbreaking research is presented in a series of six peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), published by Cambridge University Press.
The articles serve as the foundation for the company’s first fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing with the Tennessee Valley Authority utility in the United States.
Alex Schekochihin, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and Editor of the JPP, spoke with enthusiasm about this development:
“JPP is very proud to provide a platform for rigorous peer review and publication of the papers presenting the physics basis of the Infinity Two stellarator — an innovative and ground-breaking addition to the expanding family of proposed fusion power plant designs.
“Fusion science and technology are experiencing a period of very rapid development, driven by both public and private enthusiasm for fusion power. In this environment of creative and entrepreneurial ferment, it is crucial that new ideas and designs are both publicly shared and thoroughly scrutinised by the scientific community — Type One Energy and JPP are setting the gold standard for how this is done (as we did with Commonwealth Fusion Systems 5 years ago for their SPARC physics basis).”
The new physics design basis for the pilot power plant is a robust effort to consider realistically the complex relationship between challenging, competing requirements that all need to function together for fusion energy to be possible.
This new physics solution also builds on the operating characteristics of high-performing stellarator fusion technology – a stellarator being a machine that uses complex, helical magnetic fields to confine the plasma, thereby enabling scientists to control it and create suitable conditions for fusion. This technology is already being used with success on the world’s largest research stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X, located in Germany, but the challenge embraced by Type One Energy’s new design is how to scale it up to a pilot plant.
Building the future of energy
Functional fusion technology could offer limitless clean energy. As global energy demands increase and energy security is front of mind, too, this new physics design basis comes at an excellent time.
Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy, is cognisant of the landmark nature of his company’s achievement and proud of its strong, real-world foundations.
“The physics basis for our new fusion power plant is grounded in Type One Energy’s expert knowledge about reliable, economic, electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organisation that understands this isn’t only about designing a science project.”
This research was developed collaboratively between Type One Energy and a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. Collaborating organisations included the US Department of Energy, for using their supercomputers, such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to perform its physics simulations.
While commercial fusion energy has yet to move from theory into practice, this new research marks an important and promising milestone. Clean and abundant energy may yet become reality.
This is not directly related to fusion energy, so, you might want to skip this section.
Caption: Type One Energy employees at the Bull Run [emphasis mine] Fossil Plant, soon to be home to the prototype Infinity One. Credit: Type One Energy
I wonder if anyone argued for a change of name given how charged the US history associated with ‘Bull Run’ is, from the the First Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
The First Battle of Bull Run, called the Battle of First Manassas[1] by Confederate forces, was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The battle was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of what is now the city of Manassas and about thirty miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. The Union Army was slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail. Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops. The battle was a Confederate victory and was followed by a disorganized post-battle retreat of the Union forces.
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A Confederate victory the first time and the second time (Second Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry)? For anyone unfamiliar with the history, the US Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between Union and Confederate forces. The Confederate states had seceded from the union (US) and were fighting to retain their slavery-based economy and they lost the war.
Had anyone consulted me I would have advised changing the name from Bull Run to some thing less charged (pun noted) to host your prototype fusion energy pilot plant.
Back to the usual programme.
Type One Energy
Type One Energy issued a March 27, 2025 news release about the special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), Note 1: Some of this redundant; Note 2: Links have been removed,
Type One Energy announced today publication of the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant. This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP). They serve as the foundation for the company’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the U.S.
The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers, for the first time, the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favorable operating characteristics of highly optimized stellarator fusion technology using modular superconducting magnets, as was so successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany.
“Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. “The physics basis for Infinity Two is grounded in the knowledge of what is required for application to, and performance in, the demanding environment of reliable electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organization that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.”
Led by Chris Hegna, widely recognized as a leading theorist in modern stellarators, Type One Energy performed high-fidelity computational plasma physics analyses to substantially reduce the risk of meeting Infinity Two power plant functional and performance requirements. This unique and transformational achievement is the result of a global development program led by the Type One Energy plasma physics and stellarator engineering organization, with significant contributions from a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. The company made use of a spectrum of high-performance computing facilities, including access to the highest-performance U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to perform its stellarator physics simulations.
“We committed to this ambitious fusion commercialization milestone two years ago and today we delivered,” said John Canik, Chief Science and Engineering Officer for Type One Energy. “The team was able to efficiently develop deep plasma physics insights to inform the design of our Infinity Two stellarator, by taking advantage of our access to high performance computing resources. This enabled the Type One Energy team to demonstrate a realistic, integrated stellarator design that moves far beyond conventional thinking and concepts derived from more limited modeling capabilities.”
The consistent and robust physics solution for Infinity Two results in a deuterium-tritium (D-T) fueled, burning plasma stellarator with 800 MW of fusion power and delivers a nominal 350 MWe to the power grid. It is characterized by fusion plasma with resilient and stable behavior across a broad range of operating conditions, very low heat loss due to turbulent transport, as well as tolerable direct energy losses to the stellarator first wall. The Infinity Two stellarator has sufficient room for both adequately sized island divertors to exhaust helium ash and a blanket which provides appropriate shielding and tritium breeding. Type One Energy has high confidence that this essential physics solution provides a good baseline stellarator configuration for the Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant.
“The articles in this issue [of JPP] represent an important step towards a fusion reactor based on the stellarator concept. Thanks to decades of experiments and theoretical research, much of the latter published in JPP, it has become possible to lay out the physics basis for a stellarator power plant in considerable detail,” said Per Helander, head of Stellarator Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. “JPP is very happy to publish this series of papers from Type One Energy, where this has been accomplished in a way that sets new standards for the fidelity and confidence level in this context.”
Important to successful fusion power plant commercialization, this stellarator configuration has enabled Type One Energy to architect a maintenance solution which supports good power plant Capacity Factors (CF) and associated Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). It also supports favorable regulatory requirements for component manufacturing and power plant construction methods essential to achieving a reasonable Over-Night Cost (ONC) for Infinity Two.
About Type One Energy
Type One Energy Group is mission-driven to provide sustainable, affordable fusion power to the world. Established in 2019 and venture-backed in 2023, the company is led by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists with a strong track record of building state-of-the-art stellarator fusion machines, together with veteran business leaders experienced in scaling companies and commercializing energy technologies. Type One Energy applies proven advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its optimized stellarator fusion energy system. Its FusionDirect development program pursues the lowest-risk, shortest-schedule path to a fusion power plant over the coming decade, using a partner-intensive and capital-efficient strategy. Type One Energy is committed to community engagement in the development and deployment of its clean energy technology. For more information, visit www.typeoneenergy.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
While the company is currently headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, it was originally a spinoff company from the University of Wisconsin-Madison according to a March 30, 2023 posting on the university’s College of Engineering website,
Type One Energy, a Middleton, Wisconsin-based fusion energy company with roots in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, recently announced its first round of seed funding, raising $29 million from investors. The company has also onboarded a new, highly experienced CEO [Christofer Mowry].
Type One, founded in 2019 by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists and business leaders, is hoping to commercialize stellarator technology over the next decade. Stellarators are a type of fusion reactor that uses powerful magnets to confine ultra-hot streams of plasma in order to create the conditions for fusion reactions. Energy from fusion promises to be clean, safe, renewable power. The company is using advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its stellarator through an initiative called FusionDirect.
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According to the Type One Energy’s About page, there are four offices with the headquarters in Tennessee,
Madison 316 W Washington Ave. Suite 300 Madison, WI 53703
Boston 299 Washington St. Suites C & E Woburn, MA 01801
Vancouver 1140 West Pender St. Vancouver, BC V6E 4G1
The mention of an office in Vancouver, Canada piqued my curiosity but before getting to that, I’m going to include some informative excerpts about nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) from this August 31, 2023 article written by Tina Tosukhowong on behalf of TDK Ventures, which was posted on Medium,
Fusion power is the key to the energy transformation that humanity needs to drive decarbonization, clean, and baseload energy production that is inherently fail-safe, with no risk of long-lived radioactive waste, while also delivering on ever-growing energy-consumption demands at the global scale. Fusion is hard and requires exceptional conditions for sustained reaction (which is part of what makes it so safe), which has long served as a deterrent for technical maturation and industrial viability. …
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The current reality of our world is monumental fossil-fuel dependence. This, coupled with unprecedented levels of energy demand has resulted in the over 136,700 TWh (that’s 10¹²) of energy consumed via fossil fuels annually [1]. Chief repercussion among the many consequences of this dependence is the now very looming threat of climate catastrophe, which will soon be irreversible if global temperature rise is not abated and held to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. To do so, the nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 emissions generated each year must be steadily reduced and eventually mitigated entirely [2]. A fundamental shift in how power is generated globally is the only way forward. Humanity needs an energy transformation — the right energy transformation.
Alternative energy-generation techniques, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric approaches have all made excellent strides, and indeed in just the United States electricity generated by renewable methods doubled from 10 to 20% of total between 2010 and 2020 [3–4]. These numbers are incredibly encouraging and give significant credence in the journey to net-zero emission energy generation. However, while these standard renewable approaches should be championed, wind and solar are intermittent and require a large amount of land to deploy, while geothermal and hydroelectric are not available in every geography.
By far the most viable candidates for continuous clean energy generation to replace coal-fired power plants are nuclear-driven technologies, i.e. nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission has been a proven effective method ever since it was first demonstrated almost 80 years ago underneath the University of Chicago football Stadium by Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi [5]. Heavier atomic elements, in most cases Uranium-235, are exposed to and bombarded by neutrons. This causes the Uranium to split resulting in two slightly less-heavy elements (like Barium and Krypton). This in turn causes energy to be released and more neutrons to be ejected and bombard other nearby Uranium-235, at which point the process cascades into a chain reaction. The released energy (heat) is utilized in the same way coal is burned in a traditional power plant, being subsequently used to generate electricity usually via the creation of steam to drive a turbine [6]. While already having reached viable commercial maturity, fission carries inherent and nontrivial safety concerns. An unhampered chain reaction can quickly lead to meltdown with disastrous consequences, and, even when properly managed, the end reaction does generate radioactive waste whose half-life can last hundreds of thousands of years.
Figure 1. Breakdown of a nuclear fission reaction [6]. Incident neutron bombards a fissile heavy element, splitting it and release energy and more nuclei setting off a chain reaction.
Especially given modernization efforts and meteoric gains in safety (thanks to advents in material science like ceramic coatings), fission will continue to be a critical piece to better, greener energy transformation. However, in extending our vision to an even brighter future with no such concerns — carbon emissions or safety — nuclear fusion is humanity’s silver bullet. Instead of breaking down atoms leading to a chain reaction, fusion is the combining of atoms (usually isotopes of Hydrogen) into heavier elements which also results in energy release / heat generation [7]. Like fission, fusion can be designed to be a continuous energy source that can serve as a permanent backbone to the power grid. It is extremely energy dense, with 1 kg of fusion fuel producing the same amount of energy as 1,000,000 kg of coal, and it is inherently fail-safe with no long-term radioactive waste.
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As a concept, if fusion is a silver bullet to answer humanity’s energy transformation needs, then why haven’t we done so already? The appeal seems so obvious, what’s the hold up? Simply put, nuclear fusion is hard for the very same reason the process is inherently safe. Atoms in the process must have enough energy to overcome electrostatic repulsive forces between the two positive charges of their nuclei to fuse. The key figure of merit to evaluate fusion is the so-called “Lawson Triple Product.” Essentially, this means in order to generate energy by fusion more than the rate of energy oss to the environment, the nuclei must be very close together (as represented by n — the plasma density), kept at a high enough temperature (as represented by T — temperature), and for long enough time to sustain fusion (as represented by τ — the confinement time). The triple product required to achieve fusion “ignition” (the state where the rate of energy production is higher than the rate of loss) depends on the fuel type and occurs within a plasma state. A deuterium and tritium (D-T) system has the lowest Lawson Triple product requirement, where fusion can achieve a viable threshold for ignition when the density of the fuel atoms, n, multiplied by the fuel temperature, T, multiplied by the confinement time, τ, is greater than 5×10²¹ (nTτ > 5×10²¹ keV-s/m³) [8–9]. For context, the temperature alone in this scenario must be higher than 100-million degrees Celsius.
Figure 2. (Left) Conceptual illustration of a fusion reaction with Deuterium (²H) and Tritium (³H) forming an Alpha particle (⁴He) and free neutron along with energy released as heat (Right). To initiate fusion, repelling electrostatic charge must be overcome via conditions meeting the minimum Lawson Triple Product threshold
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Tosukhowong’s August 31, 2023 article provides a good overview keeping in mind that it is slanted to justify TDK’s investment in Type One Energy.
Why a Vancouver, Canada office?
As for Type One Energy’s Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) connection, I was reminded of General Fusion, a local fusion energy company while speculating about the connection. First speculative question: could Type One Energy’s presence in Canada allow it to access Canadian government funds for its research? Second speculative question: do they want to have access to people who might hesitate to move to the US or might want to move out of the US but would move to Canada?
The US is currently in an unstable state as suggested in this April 3, 2025 opinion piece by Les Leyne for vancouverisawsome.com
Les Leyne: Trump’s incoherence makes responding to tariff wall tricky
Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details
B.C. officials were guarded Wednesday [April 2, 2025] about the impact on Canada of the tariff wall U.S. President Donald Trump erected around the U.S., but it appears it could have been worse.
Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details. So cabinet ministers begged for more time to check the impacts.
“It’s still very uncertain,” said Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon, who chairs the “war room” committee responsible for countering tariff threats. “It’s hard to make sense from President Trump’s speech.” [emphasis mine]
Kahlon said the challenge is that tariff policies change hour by hour, “and anything can happen.”
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On April 2, 2025 US President Donald Trump announced tariffs (then paused some of the tariffs on April 9, 2025) and some of the targets seemed a bit odd, from an April 2, 2025 article by Alex Galbraith for salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,
“Trade war with penguins”: Trump places 10% tariff on uninhabited Antarctic islands
Planned tariffs shared by the White House included a 10% duty on imports from the barren Heard and McDonald Islands
For once in his life, Donald Trump underpromised and over-delivered.
The president announced a 10% duty on all imports on Wednesday [April 2, 2025], along with a raft of reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners. An extensive graphic released by the White House showed how far Trump was willing to take his tit-for-tat trade war, including a shocking levy of 10% on all imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.
If you haven’t heard of this powerhouse of global trade and territory of Australia, you aren’t alone. Few have outside of Antarctic researchers and seals. These extremely remote islands about 1,000 miles north of Antarctica consist mostly of barren tundra. They’re also entirely uninhabited.
The news that we were starting a trade war with penguins spread quickly after Trump’s announcement. …
U.S. stock futures crumbled following the news of Trump’s widespread tariffs. Dow futures fell by nearly 1,000 points while NASDAQ and S&P futures fell by 3 to 4%. American companies’ stock values rapidly tumbled after the announcement, with large retail importers seeing significant losses. …
No word from the penguins about the ‘pause’. I’m assuming Donald Trump’s next book will be titled, “The art of negotiating trade deals with penguins.” Can’t wait to read it.
(Perhaps someone should tell him there are no penguins in the Arctic so he can’t bypass Canadians or Greenlanders to make a deal.)
Now for the local story.
General Fusion
There’ve been two recent developments at General Fusion. Most recently, an April 2, 2025 General Fusion news release announces a new hire, Note: Links have been removed,
Bob Smith is joining General Fusion as a strategic advisor. Smith brings more than 35 years of experience developing, scaling, and launching world-changing technologies, including spearheading new products and innovation in the aerospace industry at United Space Alliance, Sandia Labs, and Honeywell before serving as CEO of Blue Origin. He joins General Fusion as the company’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) fusion demonstration begins operations and progresses toward transformative technical milestones on the path to commercialization.
“I’ve been watching the fusion energy industry closely for my entire career. Fusion is the last energy source humanity will ever need, and I believe its impact as a zero-carbon energy source will transform the global energy supply at the time needed to fight the worst consequences of climate change,” said Smith. “I am thrilled to work with General Fusion. Their novel approach has inherent and distinctive benefits for the generation of commercially competitive fusion power. It’s exciting to join at a time when the team is about to demonstrate the fundamental physics behind their system and move to scaling up to a pilot plant.”
The LM26 program marks a significant step towards commercialization, as the company’s unique Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies—because it practically addresses barriers to fusion commercialization, such as neutron material degradation, sustainable fuel production, and efficient energy extraction. As a strategic advisor, Smith will leverage his experience advancing game-changing technologies to help guide General Fusion’s technology development and strategic growth.
“Bob’s insights and experience will be invaluable as we execute the LM26 program and look beyond it to propel our practical technology to powering the grid by the mid-2030s,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “We are grateful for his commitment of his in-demand time and expertise to our mission and look forward to working together to make fusion power a reality!”
About Bob Smith:
Bob is an experienced business leader in the aerospace and defense industry with extensive technical and operational expertise across the sector. He worked at and managed federal labs, led developments at a large government contractor, grew businesses at a Fortune 100 multinational, and scaled up a launch and space systems startup. Bob also has extensive international experience and has worked with suppliers and OEMs in all the major aerospace regions, including establishing new sites and factories in Europe, India, China, and Puerto Rico.
Bob’s prior leadership roles include Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Blue Origin, President of Mechanical Systems & Components at Honeywell Aerospace, Chief Technology Officer at Honeywell Aerospace, Chairman of NTESS (Sandia Labs), and Executive Director of Space Shuttle Upgrades at United Space Alliance.
Bob holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M, a Master of Science degree in engineering/applied mathematics from Brown University, a doctorate from the University of Texas in aerospace engineering, and a business degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Bob is also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an Academician in the International Academy of Astronautics.
Quick Facts:
Fusion energy is the ultimate clean energy solution—it is the energy source that powers the sun and stars. Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei merge to form a heavier one, producing a massive amount of energy.
General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology is designed to scale for cost-efficient power plants. It uses mechanical compression to create fusion conditions in short pulses, eliminating the need for expensive lasers or superconducting magnets. An MTF power plant is designed to produce its own fuel and inherently includes a method to extract the energy and put it to work.
Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) is a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration. Launched, designed, and assembled in just 16 months, the machine is now forming magnetized plasmas regularly at 50 per cent commercial scale. It is advancing towards a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way: 10 million degrees Celsius (1 keV), 100 million degrees Celsius (10 keV), and scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson).
About General Fusion General Fusion is pursuing a fast and practical approach to commercial fusion energy and is headquartered in Richmond, Canada. The company was established in 2002 and is funded by a global syndicate of leading energy venture capital firms, industry leaders, and technology pioneers. Learn more at www.generalfusion.com.
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Bob Smith and Blue Origin: things did not go well
Sometimes you end up in a job and things do not work out well and that seems to have been the case at Blue Origin according to a September 25, 2023 article by Eric Berger for Ars Tecnica,
After six years of running Blue Origin, Bob Smith announced in a company-wide email on Monday that he will be “stepping aside” as chief executive of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos.
“It has been my privilege to be part of this great team, and I am confident that Blue Origin’s greatest achievements are still ahead of us,” Smith wrote in an email. “We’ve rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a large, prominent space business.”
Shortly after Smith’s email, a Blue Origin spokesperson said the company’s new chief executive will be Dave Limp, who stepped down as Amazon’s vice president of devices and services last month.
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To put things politely, Smith has had a rocky tenure as Blue Origin’s chief executive. After being personally vetted and hired by Bezos, Smith took over from Rob Meyerson in 2017. The Honeywell engineer was given a mandate to transform Blue Origin into a large and profitable space business.
He did succeed in growing Blue Origin. The company had about 1,500 employees when Smith arrived, and the company now employs nearly 11,000 people. But he has been significantly late on a number of key programs, including the BE-4 rocket engine and the New Glenn rocket.
As a space reporter, I have spoken with dozens of current and former Blue Origin employees, and virtually none of them have had anything positive to say about Smith’s tenure as chief executive. I asked one current employee about the hiring of Limp on Monday afternoon, and their response was, “Anything is better than Bob.”
Although it is very far from an exact barometer, Smith has received consistently low ratings on Glassdoor for his performance as chief executive of Blue Origin. And two years ago, a group of current and former Blue Origin employees wrote a blistering letter about the company under Smith. “In our experience, Blue Origin’s culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs,” the essay authors wrote.
With any corporate culture, there will be growing pains, of course. But Smith brought a traditional aerospace mindset into a company that had hitherto been guided by a new space vision, leading to a high turnover rate. And Blue Origin remains significantly underwater, financially. It is likely that Bezos is still providing about $2 billion a year to support the company’s cash needs.
Crucially, as Blue Origin meandered under Smith’s tenure, SpaceX soared, launching hundreds of rockets and thousands of satellites. Smith, clearly, was not the leader Blue Origin needed to make the company more competitive with SpaceX in launch and other spaceflight activities. It became something of a parlor game in the space industry to guess when Bezos would finally get around to firing Smith.
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On the technical front, a March 27, 2025 General Fusion news release announces “Peer-reviewed publication confirms General Fusion achieved plasma energy confinement time required for its LM26 large-scale fusion machine,” Note: Links have been removed,
New results published in Nuclear Fusionconfirm General Fusion successfully created magnetized plasmas that achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds. The published energy confinement time results were achieved on General Fusion’s PI3 plasma injector — the world’s largest and most powerful plasma injector of its kind. Commissioned in 2017, PI3 formed approximately 20,000 plasmas in a machine of 50 per cent commercial scale. The plasma injector is now integrated into General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) — a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration tracking toward game-changing technical milestones that will advance the company’s ultimate mission: generating zero-carbon fusion energy for the grid in the next decade.
The 10-millisecond energy confinement time is the duration required to compress plasmas in LM26 to achieve key temperature thresholds of 1 keV, 10 keV, and, ultimately, scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson). These results were imperative to de-risking LM26. The demonstration machine is now forming plasmas regularly, and the company is optimizing its plasma performance in preparation for compressing plasmas to create fusion and heating from compression.
Key Findings:
The plasma injector now integrated into General Fusion’s LM26 achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds, the pre-compression confinement time required for LM26’s targeted technical milestones. These results were achieved without requiring active magnetic stabilization or auxiliary heating. This means the results were achieved without superconducting magnets, demonstrating the company’s cost-effective approach.
The plasma’s energy confinement time improved when the plasma injector vessel was coated with natural lithium. A key differentiator in General Fusion’s commercial approach is its use of a liquid lithium wall to compress plasmas during compression. In addition to the confinement time advantages shown in this paper, the liquid lithium wall will also protect a commercial MTF machine from neutron damage, enable the machine to breed its own fuel, and provide an efficient method for extracting energy from the machine.
The maximum energy confinement time achieved by PI3 was approximately 12 milliseconds. The machine’s maximum plasma density was approximately 6×1019 m-3, and maximum plasma temperatures exceeded 400 eV. These strong pre-compression results support LM26’s transformative targets.
Quotes:
“LM26 is designed to achieve a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way. Following LM26’s results, our unique approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies because we have front-loaded the work to address the barriers to commercialization.”
Dr. Michel Laberge Founder and Chief Science Officer
“For over 16 years, I have worked hand in hand with Michel to advance General Fusion’s practical technology. This company is entrepreneurial at its core. We pride ourselves on building real machines that get results that matter, and I’m thrilled to have the achievements recognized in Nuclear Fusion.”
Mike Donaldson Senior Vice President, Technology Development
For anyone curious about General Fusion, I have a brief overview and history of the company and their particular approach to fusion energy in my February 6, 2024 posting (scroll down to ‘The Canadians’).
Kintsugi is the Japanese word for a type of repair that is also art. “Golden joinery” is the literal meaning of the word, from the Traditional Kyoto. Culture_Kintsugi webpage,
Caption: An example of kintsugi repair by David Pike. (Photo courtesy of David Pike) [downloaded from https://traditionalkyoto.com/culture/kintsugi/]
A March 5, 2024 news item on phys.org links the art of kintsugi to fusion energy, specifically, managing plasma, Note: Links have been removed,
In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, an artist takes the broken shards of a bowl and fuses them back together with gold to make a final product more beautiful than the original.
That idea is inspiring a new approach to managing plasma, the super-hot state of matter, for use as a power source. Scientists are using the imperfections in magnetic fields that confine a reaction to improve and enhance the plasma in an approach outlined in a paper in the journal Nature Communications.
“This approach allows you to maintain a high-performance plasma, controlling instabilities in the core and the edge of the plasma simultaneously. That simultaneous control is particularly important and difficult to do. That’s what makes this work special,” said Joseph Snipes of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He is PPPL’s deputy head of the Tokamak Experimental Science Department and was a co-author of the paper.
PPPL Physicist Seong-Moo Yang led the research team, which spans various institutions in the U.S. and South Korea. Yang says this is the first time any research team has validated a systematic approach to tailoring magnetic field imperfections to make the plasma suitable for use as a power source. These magnetic field imperfections are known as error fields.
“Our novel method identifies optimal error field corrections, enhancing plasma stability,” Yang said. “This method was proven to enhance plasma stability under different plasma conditions, for example, when the plasma was under conditions of high and low magnetic confinement.”
Errors that are hard to correct
Error fields are typically caused by minuscule defects in the magnetic coils of the device that holds the plasma, which is called a tokamak. Until now, error fields were only seen as a nuisance because even a very small error field could cause a plasma disruption that halts fusion reactions and can damage the walls of a fusion vessel. Consequently, fusion researchers have spent considerable time and effort meticulously finding ways to correct error fields.
“It’s quite difficult to eliminate existing error fields, so instead of fixing these coil irregularities, we can apply additional magnetic fields surrounding the fusion vessel in a process known as error field correction,” Yang said.
In the past, this approach would have also hurt the plasma’s core, making the plasma unsuitable for fusion power generation. This time, the researchers were able to eliminate instabilities at the edge of the plasma and maintain the stability of the core. The research is a prime example of how PPPL researchers are bridging the gap between today’s fusion technology and what will be needed to bring fusion power to the electrical grid.
“This is actually a very effective way of breaking the symmetry of the system, so humans can intentionally degrade the confinement. It’s like making a very tiny hole in a balloon so that it will not explode,” said SangKyeun Kim, a staff research scientist at PPPL and paper co-author. Just as air would leak out of a small hole in a balloon, a tiny quantity of plasma leaks out of the error field, which helps to maintain its overall stability.
Managing the core and the edge of the plasma simultaneously
One of the toughest parts of managing a fusion reaction is getting both the core and the edge of the plasma to behave at the same time. There are ideal zones for the temperature and density of the plasma in both regions, and hitting those targets while eliminating instabilities is tough.
This study demonstrates that adjusting the error fields can simultaneously stabilize both the core and the edge of the plasma. By carefully controlling the magnetic fields produced by the tokamak’s coils, the researchers could suppress edge instabilities, also known as edge localized modes (ELMs), without causing disruptions or a substantial loss of confinement.
“We are trying to protect the device,” said PPPL Staff Research Physicist Qiming Hu, an author of the paper.
Extending the research beyond KSTAR
The research was conducted using the KSTAR tokamak in South Korea, which stands out for its ability to adjust its magnetic error field configuration with great flexibility. This capability is crucial for experimenting with different error field configurations to find the most effective ones for stabilizing the plasma.
The researchers say their approach has significant implications for the design of future tokamak fusion pilot plants, potentially making them more efficient and reliable. They are currently working on an artificial intelligence (AI) version of their control system to make it more efficient.
“These models are fairly complex; they take a bit of time to calculate. But when you want to do something in a real-time control system, you can only afford a few milliseconds to do a calculation,” said Snipes. “Using AI, you can basically teach the system what to expect and be able to use that artificial intelligence to predict ahead of time what will be necessary to control the plasma and how to implement it in real-time.”
While their new paper highlights work done using KSTAR’s internal magnetic coils, Hu suggests future research with magnetic coils outside of the fusion vessel would be valuable because the fusion community is moving away from the idea of housing such coils inside the vacuum-sealed vessel due to the potential destruction of such components from the extreme heat of the plasma.
Researchers from the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), Columbia University, and Seoul National University were also integral to the project.
The research was supported by: the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-09CH11466; the Ministry of Science and ICT under the KFE R&D Program “KSTAR Experimental Collaboration and Fusion Plasma Research (KFE-EN2401-15)”; the National Research Foundation (NRF) grant No. RS-2023-00281272 funded through the Korean Ministry of Science, Information and Communication Technology and the New Faculty Startup Fund from Seoul National University; the NRF under grants No. 2019R1F1A1057545 and No. 2022R1F1A1073863; the National R&D Program through the NRF funded by the Ministry of Science & ICT (NRF-2019R1A2C1010757).
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Tailoring tokamak error fields to control plasma instabilities and transport by SeongMoo Yang, Jong-Kyu Park, YoungMu Jeon, Nikolas C. Logan, Jaehyun Lee, Qiming Hu, JongHa Lee, SangKyeun Kim, Jaewook Kim, Hyungho Lee, Yong-Su Na, Taik Soo Hahm, Gyungjin Choi, Joseph A. Snipes, Gunyoung Park & Won-Ha Ko. Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 1275 (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45454-1 Published: 10 February 2024
Andrew Paul’s December 4, 2023 article for Popular Science attempts to give readers a sense of the scale and this is one of those times when words are better than pictures, Note: Links have been removed,
Japan and the European Union have officially inaugurated testing at the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion plant. Located roughly 85 miles north of Tokyo, the six-story, JT-60SA “tokamak” facility heats plasma to 200 million degrees Celsius (around 360 million Fahrenheit) within its circular, magnetically insulated reactor. Although JT-60SA first powered up during a test run back in October [2023], the partner governments’ December 1 announcement marks the official start of operations at the world’s biggest fusion center, reaffirming a “long-standing cooperation in the field of fusion energy.”
The tokamak—an acronym of the Russian-language designation of “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”—has led researchers’ push towards achieving the “Holy Grail” of sustainable green energy production for decades. …
Speaking at the inauguration event, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson referred to the JT-60SA as “the most advanced tokamak in the world,” representing “a milestone for fusion history.”
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But even if such a revolutionary milestone is crossed, it likely won’t be at JT-60SA. Along with its still-in-construction sibling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Europe, the projects are intended solely to demonstrate scalable fusion’s feasibility. Current hopes estimate ITER’s operational start for sometime in 2025, although the undertaking has been fraught with financial, logistical, and construction issues since its groundbreaking back in 2011.
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See what I mean about a picture not really conveying the scale,
Until ITER turns on, Japan’s JT-60SA fusion reactor will be the largest in the world.National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology
Dennis Normile’s October 31, 2023 article for Science magazine describes the facility’s (Japan’s JT-60SA fusion reactor) test run and future implications for the EU’s ITER project,
The long trek toward practical fusion energy passed a milestone last week when the world’s newest and largest fusion reactor fired up. Japan’s JT-60SA uses magnetic fields from superconducting coils to contain a blazingly hot cloud of ionized gas, or plasma, within a doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel, in hope of coaxing hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release energy. The four-story-high machine is designed to hold a plasma heated to 200 million degrees Celsius for about 100 seconds, far longer than previous large tokamaks.
Last week’s achievement “proves to the world that the machine fulfills its basic function,” says Sam Davis, a project manager at Fusion for Energy, an EU organization working with Japan’s National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) on JT-60SA and related programs. It will take another 2 years before JT-60SA produces the long-lasting plasmas needed for meaningful physics experiments, says Hiroshi Shirai, leader of the project for QST.
JT-60SA will also help ITER, the mammoth international fusion reactor under construction in France that’s intended to demonstrate how fusion can generate more energy than goes into producing it. ITER will rely on technologies and operating know-how that JT-60SA will test.
Japan got to host JT-60SA and two other small fusion research facilities as a consolation prize for agreeing to let ITER go to France. …
As Normile notes, the ITER project has had a long and rocky road so far.
The Canadians
As it turns out, there’s a company in British Columbia, Canada that is also on the road to fusion energy. Not so imaginatively, it’s called General Fusion but it has a different approach to developing this ‘clean energy’. (See my October 28, 2022 posting, “Overview of fusion energy scene,” which includes information about the international scene and some of the approaches, including General Fusion’s, to developing the technology and my October 11, 2023 posting offers an update to the General Fusion situation.) Since my October 2023 posting, there have been a few developments at General Fusion.
This December 4, 2023 General Fusion news release celebrates a new infusion of cash from the Canadian government and take special note of the first item in the ‘Quick Facts’ of the advantage this technology offers,
Today [December 4, 2023], General Fusion announced that Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) has awarded CA$5 million to support research and development to advance the company’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) demonstration at its Richmond headquarters. Called LM26, this ground-breaking machine will progress major technical milestones required to commercialize zero-carbon fusion power by the early to mid-2030s. The funds are an addition to the existing contribution agreement with SIF, to support the development of General Fusion’s transformational technology.
Fusion energy is the ultimate clean energy solution. It is what powers the sun and stars. It’s the process by which two light nuclei merge to form a heavier one, emitting a massive amount of energy. By 2100, the production and export of the Canadian industry’s fusion energy technology could provide up to $1.26 trillion in economic benefits to Canada. Additionally, fusion could completely offset 600 MT CO2-e emissions, the equivalent of over 160 coal-fired power plants for a single year. When commercialized, a single General Fusion power plant will be designed to provide zero-carbon power to approximately 150,000 Canadian homes, with the ability to be placed close to energy demand at a cost competitive with other energy sources such as coal and natural gas.1
Quotes:
“For more than 20 years, General Fusion has advanced its uniquely practical Magnetized Target Fusion technology and IP at its Canadian headquarters. LM26 will significantly de-risk our commercialization program and puts us on track to bring our game-changing, zero-emissions energy solution to Canada, and the world, in the next decade,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion.
“Fusion technology has the potential to completely revolutionize the energy sector by giving us access to an affordable unlimited renewable power source. Since General Fusion is at the forefront of this technology, our decision to keep supporting the company will give us the tools we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reach our climate goals. Our government is proud to invest in this innovative project to drive the creation of hundreds of middle-class jobs and position Canada as a world leader in fusion energy technology,” said The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.
“British Columbia has a thriving innovation economy. In August, the B.C. Government announced CA$5 million in provincial support for General Fusion’s homegrown technology, and we’re pleased to see the Federal government has now provided funds to support General Fusion. These investments will help General Fusion as they continue to develop their core technology right here in B.C.,” said Brenda Bailey, B.C. Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation.
Quick Facts:
*Magnetized Target Fusion uniquely sidesteps challenges to commercialization that other technologies face. The game-changer is a proprietary liquid metal liner in the commercial fusion machine that is mechanically compressed by high-powered pistons. This enables fusion conditions to be created in short pulses rather than creating a sustained reaction. General Fusion’s design does not require large superconducting magnets or an expensive array of lasers.
*LM26 aims to achieve two of the most significant technical milestones required to commercialize fusion energy, targeting fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius by 2025, and progressing toward scientific breakeven equivalent by 2026.
*LM26’s plasmas will be approximately 50 per cent scale of a commercial fusion machine. It aims to achieve deuterium-tritium breakeven equivalent using deuterium fuel.
*The Canadian government is investing an additional CA$5 million for a total of CA$54.3 million to support the development of General Fusion’s energy technology through the Strategic Innovation Fund program.
*As a result of the government’s ongoing support, General Fusion has advanced its technology, building more than 24 plasma prototypes, filing over 170 patents, and conducting more than 200,000 experiments at its Canadian labs.
General Fusion has published new, peer-reviewed scientific results that validate the company has achieved the smooth, rapid, and symmetric compression of a liquid cavity that is key to the design of a commercial Magnetized Target Fusion power plant. The results, published in one of the foremost scientific journals in fusion, Fusion Engineering and Design [open access paper], validate the performance of General Fusion’s proprietary liquid compression technology for Magnetized Target Fusion and are scalable to a commercial machine.
General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion technology uses mechanical compression of a plasma to achieve fusion conditions. High-speed drivers rapidly power a precisely shaped, symmetrical collapse of a liquid metal cavity that envelopes the plasma. In three years, General Fusion commissioned a prototype of its liquid compression system and completed over 1,000 shots, validating the compression technology. In addition, this scale model of General Fusion’s commercial compression system verified the company’s open-source computational fluid dynamics simulation. The paper confirms General Fusion’s concept for the compression system of a commercial machine.
“General Fusion has proven success scaling individual technologies, creating the pathway to integrate, deploy, and commercialize practical fusion energy,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “The publication of these results demonstrates General Fusion has the science and engineering capabilities to progress the design of our proprietary liquid compression system to commercialization.”
General Fusion’s approach to compressing plasma to create fusion energy is unique. Its Magnetized Target Fusion technology is designed to address the barriers to commercialization that other fusion technologies still face. The game-changer is the proprietary liquid metal liner in the fusion vessel that is mechanically compressed by high-powered pistons. This allows General Fusion to create fusion conditions in short pulses, rather than creating a sustained reaction, while protecting the machine’s vessel, extracting heat, and re-breeding fuel.
Today [January 11, 2024] at its Canadian labs, General Fusion is building a ground-breaking Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26). Designed to reach fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius by 2025 and progress towards scientific breakeven equivalent by 2026, LM26 fast-tracks General Fusion’s technical progress to provide commercial fusion energy to the grid by the early to mid-2030s.
Exciting times for us all and I wish good luck to all of the clean energy efforts wherever they are being pursued.
Nice to learn of this news, which is on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news online website. From a December 13, 2022 news item provided by Associated Press (Note: the news item was updated to include general description and some Canadian content at about 12 pm PT) ,
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Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, [emphasis mine] something called net energy gain, the Energy Department said.
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Peter Behr’s December 13, 2022 article on Politico.com about the US Department of Energy’s big announcement also breaks the news,
The Department of Energy announced Tuesday [December 12, 2022] that its scientists have produced the first ever fusion reaction that yielded more energy than the reaction required, an essential step in the long path toward commercial fusion power, officials said.
The experiment Dec. 5 [2022], at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, took a few billionths of second. But laboratory leaders said today that it demonstrated for the first time that sustained fusion power is possible.
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Behr explains what nuclear fusion is but first he touches on why scientists are so interested in the process, from his December 13, 2022 article,
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In theory, nuclear fusion could produce massive amounts of energy without producing lost-lasting radioactive waste, or posing the risk of meltdowns. That’s unlike nuclear fission, which powers today’s reactors.
Fission results when radioactive atoms — most commonly uranium — are split by neutrons in controlled chain reactions, creating lighter atoms and large amounts of radiation and energy to produce electric power.
Fusion is the opposite process. In the most common approach, swirling hydrogen isotopes are forced together under tremendous heat to create helium and energy for power generation. This is the same process that powers the sun and other stars. But scientists have been trying since the mid-20th century to find a way to use it to generate power on Earth.
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There are two main approaches to making fusion happen and I found a description for them in an October 2022 article about local company, General Fusion, by Nelson Bennett for Business in Vancouver magazine (paper version),
Most fusion companies are pursuing one of two approaches: Magnet [sic] or inertial confinement. General fusion is one of the few that is taking a more hybrid approach ¬ magnetic confinement with pulse compression.
Fusion occurs when smaller nuclei are fused together under tremendous force into larger nuclei, with a release of energy occurring in the form of neutrons. It’s what happens to stars when gravitational force creates extreme heat that turns on the fusion engine.
Replicating that in a machine requires some form of confinement to squeeze plasma ¬ a kind of super-hot fog of unbound positive and negative particles ¬ to the point where nuclei fuse.
One approach is inertial confinement, in which lasers are focused on a small capsule of heavy hydrogen fuel (deuterium and tritium) to create ignition. This takes a tremendous amount of energy, and the challenge for all fusion efforts is to get a sustained ignition that produces more energy than it takes to get ignition ¬ called net energy gain.
The other main approach is magnetic confinement, using powerful magnets in a machine called a tokomak to contain and squeeze plasma into a donut-shaped form called a torus.
General Fusion uses magnets to confine the plasma, but to get ignition it uses pistons arrayed around a spherical chamber to fire synchronously to essentially collapse the plasma on itself and spark ignition.
General Fusion’s machine uses liquid metal spinning inside a chamber that acts as a protective barrier between the hot plasma and the machine ¬ basically a sphere of plasma contained within a sphere of liquid metal. This protects the machine from damage.
The temperatures generated in fusion ¬ up to to 150 million degrees Celsius ¬ are five to six times hotter than the core of the sun, and can destroy machines that produce them. This makes durability a big challenge in any machine.
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The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) issued a December 13, 2022 news release, which provides more detail about their pioneering work, Note: I have changed the order of the paragraphs but all of this is from the news release,
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Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei combine to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy. In the 1960s, a group of pioneering scientists at LLNL hypothesized that lasers could be used to induce fusion in a laboratory setting. Led by physicist John Nuckolls, who later served as LLNL director from 1988 to 1994, this revolutionary idea became inertial confinement fusion, kicking off more than 60 years of research and development in lasers, optics, diagnostics, target fabrication, computer modeling and simulation and experimental design.
To pursue this concept, LLNL built a series of increasingly powerful laser systems, leading to the creation of NIF [National Ignition Facility], the world’s largest and most energetic laser system. NIF — located at LLNL in Livermore, California — is the size of a sports stadium and uses powerful laser beams to create temperatures and pressures like those in the cores of stars and giant planets, and inside exploding nuclear weapons.
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LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.
If you want to see some really excited comments from scientists just read the LLNL’s December 13, 2022 news release. Even the news release’s banner is exuberant,
Fearful that China might wind up dominating fusion energy in the second half of this century, Congress in 2020 told DOE [Department of Energy] to begin funding development of a utility-scale fusion pilot plant that could deliver at least 50 megawatts of power to the U.S. grid.
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In September [2022], DOE invited private companies to apply for an initial $50 million in research grants to help fund development of detailed pilot plant plans.
“We’re seeking strong partnerships between DOE and the private sector,” a senior DOE official told POLITICO’s E&E News recently. The official was not willing to speak on the record, saying the grant process is ongoing and confidential.
As the competition proceeds, DOE will set technical milestones or requirements, challenging the teams to show how critical engineering challenges will be overcome. DOE’s goal is “hopefully to enable a fusion pilot to operate in the early 2030s,” the official added.
At least 15 U.S. and foreign fusion companies have submitted requests for an initial total of $50 million in pilot plant grants, and some of them are pursuing the laser-ignition fusion process that Lawrence Livermore has pioneered, said Holland. He did not name the companies because the competition is confidential.
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I wonder if General Fusion whose CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Greg Twinney declared, “Commercializing fusion energy is within reach, and General Fusion is ready to deliver it to the grid by the 2030s …” (in a December 12, 2022 company press release) is part of the US competition.
I noticed that General Fusion lists this at the end of the press release,
… Founded in 2002, we are headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with additional centers co-located with internationally recognized fusion research laboratories near London, U.K., and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), like the LLNL, is a US Department of Energy research facility.
As for General Fusion’s London connection, I have more about that in my October 28, 2022 posting “Overview of fusion energy scene,” which includes General Fusion’s then latest news about a commercialization agreement with the UKAEA (UK Atomic Energy Authority) and a ‘fusion’ video by rapper Baba Brinkman along with the overview.
It’s funny how you think you know something and then realize you don’t. I’ve been hearing about cold fusion/fusion energy for years but never really understood what the term meant. So, this post includes an explanation, as well as, an overview, and a Cold Fusion Rap to ‘wrap’ it all up. (Sometimes I cannot resist a pun.)
Fusion energy explanation (1)
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a Climate Portal where fusion energy is explained,
Fusion energy is the source of energy at the center of stars, including our own sun. Stars, like most of the universe, are made up of hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, created during the big bang. The center of a star is so hot and so dense that the immense pressure forces hydrogen atoms together. These atoms are forced together so strongly that they create new atoms entirely—helium atoms—and release a staggering amount of energy in the process. This energy is called fusion energy.
More energy than chemical energy
Fusion energy, like fossil fuels, is a form of stored energy. But fusion can create 20 to 100 million times more energy than the chemical reaction of a fossil fuel. Most of the mass of an atom, 99.9 percent, is contained at an atom’s center—inside of its nucleus. The ratio of this matter to the empty space in an atom is almost exactly the same ratio of how much energy you release when you manipulate the nucleus. In contrast, a chemical reaction, such as burning coal, rearranges the atoms through heat, but doesn’t alter the atoms themselves, so we don’t get as much energy.
Making fusion energy
For scientists, making fusion energy means recreating the conditions of stars, starting with plasma. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, after solids, liquids and gases. Ice is an example of a solid. When heated up, it becomes a liquid. Place that liquid in a pot on the stove, and it becomes a gas (steam). If you take that gas and continue to make it hotter, at around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (~6,000 Kelvin), it will change from a gas to the next phase of matter: plasma. Ninety-nine percent of the mass in the universe is in the plasma state, since almost the entire mass of the universe is in super hot stars that exist as plasma.
To make fusion energy, scientists must first build a steel chamber and create a vacuum, like in outer space. The next step is to add hydrogen gas. The gas particles are charged to produce an electric current and then surrounded and contained with an electromagnetic force; the hydrogen is now a plasma. This plasma is then heated to about 100 million degrees and fusion energy is released.
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Fusion energy explanation (2)
A Vancouver-based company, General Fusion, offers an explanation of how they have approached making fusion energy a reality,
Today [October 17, 2022], General Fusion and the UKAEA kick off projects to advance the commercialization of magnetized target fusion energy as part of an important collaborative agreement. With these unique projects, General Fusion will benefit from the vast experience of the UKAEA’s team. The results will hone the design of General Fusion’s demonstration machine being built at the Culham Campus, part of the thriving UK fusion cluster. Ultimately, the company expects the projects will support its efforts to provide low-cost and low-carbon energy to the electricity grid.
General Fusion’s approach to fusion maximizes the reapplication of existing industrialized technologies, bypassing the need for expensive superconducting magnets, significant new materials, or high-power lasers. The demonstration machine will create fusion conditions in a power-plant-relevant environment, confirming the performance and economics of the company’s technology.
“The leading-edge fusion researchers at UKAEA have proven experience building, commissioning, and successfully operating large fusion machines,” said Greg Twinney, Chief Executive Officer, General Fusion. “Partnering with UKAEA’s incredible team will fast-track work to advance our technology and achieve our mission of delivering affordable commercial fusion power to the world.”
“Fusion energy is one of the greatest scientific and engineering quests of our time,” said Ian Chapman, UKAEA CEO. “This collaboration will enable General Fusion to benefit from the ground-breaking research being done in the UK and supports our shared aims of making fusion part of the world’s future energy mix for generations to come.”
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I last wrote about General Fusion in a November 3, 2021 posting about the company’s move (?) to Sea Island, Richmond,
I first wrote about General Fusion in a December 2, 2011 posting titled: Burnaby-based company (Canada) challenges fossil fuel consumption with nuclear fusion. (For those unfamiliar with the Vancouver area, there’s the city of Vancouver and there’s Vancouver Metro, which includes the city of Vancouver and others in the region. Burnaby is part of Metro Vancouver; General Fusion is moving to Sea Island (near Vancouver Airport), in Richmond, which is also in Metro Vancouver.) Kenneth Chan’s October 20, 2021 article for the Daily Hive gives more detail about General Fusion’s new facilities (Note: A link has been removed),
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The new facility will span two buildings at 6020 and 6082 Russ Baker Way, near YVR’s [Vancouver Airport] South Terminal. This includes a larger building previously used for aircraft engine maintenance and repair.
The relocation process could start before the end of 2021, allowing the company to more than quadruple its workforce over the coming years. Currently, it employs about 140 people.
The Sea Island [in Richmond] facility will house its corporate offices, primary fusion technology development division, and many of its engineering laboratories. This new facility provides General Fusion with the ability to build a new demonstration prototype to support the commercialization of its magnetized target fusion technology.
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As of the date of this posting, I have not been able to confirm the move. The company’s Contact webpage lists an address in Burnaby, BC for its headquarters.
With energy prices on the rise, along with demands for energy independence and an urgent need for carbon-free power, plans to walk away from nuclear energy are now being revised in Japan, South Korea, and even Germany. Last month, Europe announced green bonds for nuclear, and the U.S., thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, will soon devote millions to new nuclear designs, incentives for nuclear production and domestic uranium mining, and, after years of paucity in funding, cash for fusion.
The new investment comes as fusion—long considered a pipe dream—has attracted real money from big venture capital and big companies, who are increasingly betting that abundant, cheap, clean nuclear will be a multi-trillion dollar industry. Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. That money has certainly supercharged the nuclear sector: The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.
… What’s not a joke is that we have about zero years to stop powering our civilization with earth-warming energy. The challenge with fusion is to achieve net energy gain, where the energy produced by a fusion reaction exceeds the energy used to make it. One milestone came quietly this month, when a team of researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California announced that an experiment last year had yielded over 1.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy, setting a new world record for energy yield for a nuclear fusion experiment. The experiment also achieved scientific ignition for the first time in history: after applying enough heat using an arsenal of lasers, the plasma became self-heating. (Researchers have since been trying to replicate the result, so far without success.)
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On a growing campus an hour outside of Boston, the MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. “You’ll push a button,” CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, “and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That’s about 200 million degrees—you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them—and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go.” With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few—they raised $1.8 billion last year alone—CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025.
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Like the three-decade-old ITER project in France, set for operation in 2025, Commonwealth and many other companies will try to reach net energy gain using a machine called a tokamak, a bagel-shaped device filled with super-hot plasma, heated to about 150 million degrees, within which hydrogen atoms can fuse and release energy. To control that hot plasma, you need to build a very powerful magnetic field. Commonwealth’s breakthrough was tape—specifically, a high-temperature-superconducting steel tape coated with a compound called yttrium-barium-copper oxide. When a prototype was first made commercially available in 2009, Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, ordered as much as he could. With Mumgaard and a team of students, his lab used coils of the stuff to build a new kind of superconducting magnet, and a prototype reactor named ARC, after Tony Stark’s energy source. Commonwealth was born in 2015.
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Southern California-based TAE Technologies has raised a whopping $1.2 billion since it was founded in 1998, and $250 million in its latest round. The round, announced in July, was led by Chevron’s venture arm, Google, and Sumitomo, a Tokyo-based holding company that aims to deploy fusion power in the Asia-Pacific market. TAE’s approach, which involves creating a fusion reaction at incredibly high heat, has a key advantage. Whereas ITER uses the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, an extremely rare element that must be specially created from lithium—and that produces as a byproduct radioactive-free neutrons—TAE’s linear reactor is completely non-radioactive, because it relies on hydrogen and boron, two abundant, naturally-occurring elements that react to produce only helium.
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General Atomics, of San Diego, California, has the largest tokamak in the U.S. Its powerful magnetic chamber, called the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, or just “D-three-D,” now features a Toroidal Field Reversing Switch, which allows for the redirection of 120,000 amps of the current that power the primary magnetic field. It’s the only tokamak in the world that allows researchers to switch directions of the magnetic fields in minutes rather than hours. Another new upgrade, a traveling-wave antenna, allows physicists to inject high-powered “helicon” radio waves into DIII-D plasmas so fusion reactions occur much more powerfully and efficiently.
“We’ve got new tools for flexibility and new tools to help us figure out how to make that fusion plasma just keep going,” Richard Buttery, director of the project, told the San Diego Union-Tribune in January. The company is also behind eight of the magnet modules at the heart of the ITER facility, including its wild Central Solenoid — the world’s most powerful magnet — in a kind of scaled up version of the California machine.
But like an awful lot in fusion, ITER has been hampered by cost overruns and delays, with “first plasma” not expected to occur in 2025 as previously expected due to global pandemic-related disruptions. Some have complained that the money going to ITER has distracted from other more practical energy projects—the latest price tag is $22 billion—and others doubt if the project can ever produce net energy gain.
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Based in Canada, General Fusion is backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy and explored by Russian scientists for potential use in weapons. Inside the machine, molten metal is spun to create a cavity, and pumped with pistons that push the metal inward to form a sphere. Hydrogen, heated to super-hot temperatures and held in place by a magnetic field, fills the sphere to create the reaction. Heat transferred to the metal can be turned into steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity. As former CEO Christofer Mowry told Fast Company last year, “to re-create a piece of the sun on Earth, as you can imagine, is very, very challenging.” Like many fusion companies, GF depends on modern supercomputers and advanced modeling and computational techniques to understand the science of plasma physics, as well as modern manufacturing technologies and materials.
“That’s really opened the door not just to being able to make fusion work but to make it work in a practical way,” Mowry said. This has been difficult to make work, but with a demonstration center it announced last year in Culham, England, GF isn’t aiming to generate electricity but to gather the data needed to later build a commercial pilot plant that could—and to generate more interest in fusion.
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Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, or MIFTI, of Tustin, Calif., founded by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, is developing a reactor that uses what’s known as a Staged Z-Pinch approach. A Z-Pinch design heats, confines, and compresses plasma using an intense, pulsed electrical current to generate a magnetic field that could reduce instabilities in the plasma, allowing fusion to persist for longer periods of time. But only recently have MIFTI’s scientists been able to overcome the instability problems, the company says, thanks to software made available to them at UC-Irvine by the U.S. Air Force. …
Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, is a small business focused on developing small, clean fusion reactors for both terrestrial and space applications. A spinoff of Princeton Satellite Systems, which specializes in spacecraft control, the company’s Princeton FRC reactor is built upon 15 years of research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, funded primarily by the U.S. DOE and NASA, and is designed to eventually provide between 1 and 10 megawatts of power in off-grid locations and in modular power plants, “from remote industrial applications to emergency power after natural disasters to off-world bases on the moon or Mars.” The concept uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generates and sustain a plasma formation called a Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) inside a strong magnetic bottle. …
Tokamak Energy, a U.K.-based company named after the popular fusion device, announced in July that its ST-40 tokamak reactor had reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion. The achievement was made possible by a proprietary design built on a spherical, rather than donut, shape. This means that the magnets are closer to the plasma stream, allowing for smaller and cheaper magnets to create even stronger magnetic fields. …
Based in Pasadena, California, Helicity Space is developing a propulsion and power technology based on a specialized magneto inertial fusion concept. The system, a spin on what fellow fusion engineer, Seattle-based Helion is doing, appears to use twisted compression coils, like a braided rope, to achieve a known phenomenon called the Magnetic Helicity. … According to ZoomInfo and Linkedin, Helicity has over $4 million in funding and up to 10 employees, all aimed, the company says, at “enabling humanity’s access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment.”
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin and mentioned in Pasternak’s article, dates its history with *fusion back to about 1978 when cold fusion was the ‘hot’ topic*. (You can read more here in the ITER Wikipedia entry.)
For more about the various approaches to fusion energy, read Pasternack’s August 17, 2022 article (The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power) provides details. I wish there had been a little more about efforts in Japan and South Korea and other parts of the world. Pasternak’s singular focus on the US with a little of Canada and the UK seemingly thrown into the mix to provide an international flavour seems a little myopic.
Fusion rap
In an August 30, 2022 Baba Brinkman announcement (received via email) which gave an extensive update of Brinkman’s activities, there was this,
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And the other new topic, which was surprisingly fun to explore, is cold fusion also known as “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions” which you may or may not have a strong opinion about, but if you do I imagine you probably think the technology is either bunk or destined to save the world.
That makes for an interesting topic to explore in rap songs! And fortunately last month I had the pleasure of performing for the cream of the LENR crop at the 24th International Conference on Cold Fusion, including rap ups and two new songs about the field, one very celebratory (for the insiders), and one cautiously optimistic (as an outreach tool).
You can watch “Cold Fusion Renaissance” and “You Must LENR” [L ow E nergy N uclear R eactions or sometimes L attice E nabled N anoscale R eactions or Cold Fusion or CANR (C hemically A ssisted N uclear R eactions)] for yourself to determine which video is which, and also enjoy this article in Infinite Energy Magazine which chronicles my whole cold fusion rap saga.
Here’s one of the rap videos mentioned in Brinkman’s email,
Enjoy!
*December 13, 2022: Sentence changed from “ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin and mentioned in Pasternak’s article, dates its history with fusion back to about 1978 when cold fusion was the ‘hot’ topic.” to “ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin and mentioned in Pasternak’s article, dates its history with fusion back to about 1978 when cold fusion was the ‘hot’ topic.”
** ‘Pasternak’ corrected to ‘Pasternack” and ‘in Fast Company’ added on December 29, 2022
Over 30 years in the dreaming, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is now said to be 1/2 way to completing construction. A December 6, 2017 ITER press release (received via email) makes the joyful announcement,
WORLD’S MOST COMPLEX MACHINE IS 50 PERCENT COMPLETED
ITER is proving that fusion is the future source of clean, abundant, safe and economic energy_
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a project to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale and is sustainable, is now 50 percent built to initial operation. Fusion is the same energy source from the Sun that gives the Earth its light and warmth.
ITER will use hydrogen fusion, controlled by superconducting magnets, to produce massive heat energy. In the commercial machines that will follow, this heat will drive turbines to produce electricity with these positive benefits:
* Fusion energy is carbon-free and environmentally sustainable, yet much more powerful than fossil fuels. A pineapple-sized amount of hydrogen offers as much fusion energy as 10,000 tons of coal.
* ITER uses two forms of hydrogen fuel: deuterium, which is easily extracted from seawater; and tritium, which is bred from lithium inside the fusion reactor. The supply of fusion fuel for industry and megacities is abundant, enough for millions of years.
* When the fusion reaction is disrupted, the reactor simply shuts down-safely and without external assistance. Tiny amounts of fuel are used, about 2-3 grams at a time; so there is no physical possibility of a meltdown accident.
* Building and operating a fusion power plant is targeted to be comparable to the cost of a fossil fuel or nuclear fission plant. But unlike today’s nuclear plants, a fusion plant will not have the costs of high-level radioactive waste disposal. And unlike fossil fuel plants,
fusion will not have the environmental cost of releasing CO2 and other pollutants.
ITER is the most complex science project in human history. The hydrogen plasma will be heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times hotter than the core of the Sun, to enable the fusion reaction. The process happens in a donut-shaped reactor, called a tokamak(*), which is surrounded by giant magnets that confine and circulate the superheated, ionized plasma, away from the metal walls. The superconducting magnets must be cooled to minus 269°C, as cold as interstellar space.
The ITER facility is being built in Southern France by a scientific partnership of 35 countries. ITER’s specialized components, roughly 10 million parts in total, are being manufactured in industrial facilities all over the world. They are subsequently shipped to the ITER worksite, where they must be assembled, piece-by-piece, into the final machine.
Each of the seven ITER members-the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States-is fabricating a significant portion of the machine. This adds to ITER’s complexity.
In a message dispatched on December 1 [2017] to top-level officials in ITER member governments, the ITER project reported that it had completed 50 percent of the “total construction work scope through First Plasma” (**). First Plasma, scheduled for December 2025, will be the first stage of operation for ITER as a functional machine.
“The stakes are very high for ITER,” writes Bernard Bigot, Ph.D., Director-General of ITER. “When we prove that fusion is a viable energy source, it will eventually replace burning fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and non-sustainable. Fusion will be complementary with wind, solar, and other renewable energies.
“ITER’s success has demanded extraordinary project management, systems engineering, and almost perfect integration of our work.
“Our design has taken advantage of the best expertise of every member’s scientific and industrial base. No country could do this alone. We are all learning from each other, for the world’s mutual benefit.”
The ITER 50 percent milestone is getting significant attention.
“We are fortunate that ITER and fusion has had the support of world leaders, historically and currently,” says Director-General Bigot. “The concept of the ITER project was conceived at the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. When the ITER Agreement was signed in 2006, it was strongly supported by leaders such as French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. President George W. Bush, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
“More recently, President Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump exchanged letters about ITER after their meeting this past July. One month earlier, President Xi Jinping of China hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders in a showcase featuring ITER and fusion power at the World EXPO in Astana, Kazakhstan.
“We know that other leaders have been similarly involved behind the scenes. It is clear that each ITER member understands the value and importance of this project.”
Why use this complex manufacturing arrangement?
More than 80 percent of the cost of ITER, about $22 billion or EUR18 billion, is contributed in the form of components manufactured by the partners. Many of these massive components of the ITER machine must be precisely fitted-for example, 17-meter-high magnets with less than a millimeter of tolerance. Each component must be ready on time to fit into the Master Schedule for machine assembly.
Members asked for this deal for three reasons. First, it means that most of the ITER costs paid by any member are actually paid to that member’s companies; the funding stays in-country. Second, the companies working on ITER build new industrial expertise in major fields-such as electromagnetics, cryogenics, robotics, and materials science. Third, this new expertise leads to innovation and spin-offs in other fields.
For example, expertise gained working on ITER’s superconducting magnets is now being used to map the human brain more precisely than ever before.
The European Union is paying 45 percent of the cost; China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States each contribute 9 percent equally. All members share in ITER’s technology; they receive equal access to the intellectual property and innovation that comes from building ITER.
When will commercial fusion plants be ready?
ITER scientists predict that fusion plants will start to come on line as soon as 2040. The exact timing, according to fusion experts, will depend on the level of public urgency and political will that translates to financial investment.
How much power will they provide?
The ITER tokamak will produce 500 megawatts of thermal power. This size is suitable for studying a “burning” or largely self-heating plasma, a state of matter that has never been produced in a controlled environment on Earth. In a burning plasma, most of the plasma heating comes from the fusion reaction itself. Studying the fusion science and technology at ITER’s scale will enable optimization of the plants that follow.
A commercial fusion plant will be designed with a slightly larger plasma chamber, for 10-15 times more electrical power. A 2,000-megawatt fusion electricity plant, for example, would supply 2 million homes.
How much would a fusion plant cost and how many will be needed?
The initial capital cost of a 2,000-megawatt fusion plant will be in the range of $10 billion. These capital costs will be offset by extremely low operating costs, negligible fuel costs, and infrequent component replacement costs over the 60-year-plus life of the plant. Capital costs will decrease with large-scale deployment of fusion plants.
At current electricity usage rates, one fusion plant would be more than enough to power a city the size of Washington, D.C. The entire D.C. metropolitan area could be powered with four fusion plants, with zero carbon emissions.
“If fusion power becomes universal, the use of electricity could be expanded greatly, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, buildings and industry,” predicts Dr. Bigot. “Providing clean, abundant, safe, economic energy will be a miracle for our planet.”
* * *
FOOTNOTES:
* “Tokamak” is a word of Russian origin meaning a toroidal or donut-shaped magnetic chamber. Tokamaks have been built and operated for the past six decades. They are today’s most advanced fusion device design.
** “Total construction work scope,” as used in ITER’s project performance metrics, includes design, component manufacturing, building construction, shipping and delivery, assembly, and installation.
It is an extraordinary project on many levels as Henry Fountain notes in a March 27, 2017 article for the New York Times (Note: Links have been removed),
At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge.
It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, and enormously complex and costly, physics experiment. But if it succeeds, it could determine the power plants of the future and make an invaluable contribution to reducing planet-warming emissions.
ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (and pronounced EAT-er), is being built to test a long-held dream: that nuclear fusion, the atomic reaction that takes place in the sun and in hydrogen bombs, can be controlled to generate power.
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ITER will produce heat, not electricity. But if it works — if it produces more energy than it consumes, which smaller fusion experiments so far have not been able to do — it could lead to plants that generate electricity without the climate-affecting carbon emissions of fossil-fuel plants or most of the hazards of existing nuclear reactors that split atoms rather than join them.
Success, however, has always seemed just a few decades away for ITER. The project has progressed in fits and starts for years, plagued by design and management problems that have led to long delays and ballooning costs.
ITER is moving ahead now, with a director-general, Bernard Bigot, who took over two years ago after an independent analysis that was highly critical of the project. Dr. Bigot, who previously ran France’s atomic energy agency, has earned high marks for resolving management problems and developing a realistic schedule based more on physics and engineering and less on politics.
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The site here is now studded with tower cranes as crews work on the concrete structures that will support and surround the heart of the experiment, a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak. This is where the fusion reactions will take place, within a plasma, a roiling cloud of ionized atoms so hot that it can be contained only by extremely strong magnetic fields.
Here’s a rendering of the proposed reactor,
Source: ITER Organization
It seems the folks at the New York Times decided to remove the notes which help make sense of this image. However, it does get the idea across.
If I read the article rightly, the official cost in March 2017 was around 22 B Euros and more will likely be needed. You can read Fountain’s article for more information about fusion and ITER or go to the ITER website.
I could have sworn a local (Vancouver area) company called General Fusion was involved in the ITER project but I can’t track down any sources for confirmation. The sole connection I could find is in a documentary about fusion technology,
A new documentary featuring General Fusion has captured the exciting progress in fusion across the public and private sectors.
Let There Be Light made its international premiere at the South By Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival in March [2017] to critical acclaim. The film was quickly purchased by Amazon Video, where it will be available for more than 70 million users to stream.
Let There Be Light follows scientists at General Fusion, ITER and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in their pursuit of a clean, safe and abundant source of energy to power the world.
The feature length documentary has screened internationally across Europe and North America. Most recently it was shown at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where General Fusion founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Michel Laberge joined fellow fusion physicist Dr. Mark Henderson from ITER at a series of Q&A panels with the filmmakers.
Laberge and Henderson were also interviewed by the popular CBC radio science show Quirks and Quarks, discussing different approaches to fusion, its potential benefits, and the challenges it faces.
It is yet to be confirmed when the film will be release for streaming, check Amazon Video for details.
ITER is a breathtaking effort but if you’ve read about other large scale projects such as building a railway across the Canadian Rocky Mountains, establishing telecommunications in an astonishing number of countries around the world, getting someone to the moon, eliminating small pox, building the pyramids, etc., it seems standard operating procedure both for the successes I’ve described and for the failures we’ve forgotten. Where ITER will finally rest on the continuum between success and failure is yet to be determined but the problems experienced so far are not necessarily a predictor.
I wish the engineers, scientists, visionaries, and others great success with finding better ways to produce energy.
