When Will Fusion Energy Light Our Homes?
One question for Thomas Nicholas, a computational plasma physicist and former fusion researcher who now studies climate science at Columbia University.
One question for Thomas Nicholas, a computational plasma physicist and former fusion researcher who now studies climate science at Columbia University. He was the lead author of the 2021 paper, “Re-examining the role of nuclear fusion in a renewables-based energy mix.”
I was pleased to see recently that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Lab had achieved the goal of fusion ignition. But I felt that the reaction was somewhat disproportionate. A piece of context that a lot of people missed is that the multi-billion dollar National Ignition Facility was designed to achieve that point from the start—that’s why “ignition” is in the name of it. All these breathless headlines about whether this accelerates the timeline to fusion seem ironic in the context of it actually being a decade behind what was promised when the thing was built in 2009. When fusion energy might light our homes depends on whether you mean: timeline to first power-producing device, or to significant deployment in the world. Those are two very different things.
In the case of fusion—because it’s a large infrastructure project with big capital costs, and you would be building parts that have a long lifetime—its scale-up rate would be very slow in a reasonable economic projection of how you would try to make it profitable. It’s the opposite of solar panels and wind turbines, and so on, where you can build them quickly. They have a short half-life—they stop working relatively quickly compared to big concrete nuclear reactors. But that means their replacement rate is very high. The replacement rate sets how quickly you can scale up in the first place. If you want to finance building factories for nuclear power stations effectively, then you are only going to finance the number that can meet your eventual replacement rate once you’ve hit market saturation.
