Why We Should Be Talking More About Nuclear Fusion
The coming battle over lightning in a bottle
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This Week: The race between the China and the West to launch nuclear fusion reactors.
TLDR: A break-through dating to the 1950’s, Fusion has long promised to unleash unlimited clean energy, except it hasn’t. Yet recent breakthroughs by a host of different private and public startups have launched a race to commercial reactor viability. The stakes are high and China aims to win.
Tags: Energy, Nuclear Fusion, Industrial Policy, Geopolitics, China, US
This Nature article (above) is worth your time (and paywall). The quotes will raise an eyebrow.
It is about Nuclear Fusion, and it’s closer than you think. The implications are substantial. Long the domain of “geniuses, villains, and victims” the joke is fusion power is the energy source of the future…and always will be.
Yet recent breakthroughs by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, TAE Technologies, Inc and a smaller cohort (General Fusion, Tokamak Energy) of other startups have put the prospect of viable commercial reactors in play.
A few of these companies say they will come to market by 2030; I would put an under $.50 “yes” bet on Polymarket that fusion energy is sold commercially by 2050. Still dauting odds, but not zero! 2030? 2050? It’s exciting to be talking about “when” and not “if”.
To be within 25 years of today means the investment and social implications of fusion are getting real (and I pray for a bubble). The payoffs will be substantial.
Yet despite this burgeoning commercial success in the West, the Nature article is troubling as it makes it painfully clear that, right now, China is on pace to claim fusion supremacy.
Supremacy? Maybe that’s a bit much given that major scientific gains are open source and therefore will be shared by all.
Though what is really up from grabs here is not the shared knowledge from pushing fusion science forward – That is the near $0 marginal cost of electricity breakthrough that was settled in the 1950s.
The supremacy comes from the protected, ingrained know-how derived from relentlessly honing (and winning) the manufacturing capabilities to deliver an actual reactor that works, both on time and an order of magnitude cheaper than any available renewable energy source. That’s a public/private game in which the Chinese excel.
For example, the general sentiment towards Chinese EVs just five years ago was that the industry was nothing more than “golf carts” and would always be behind. Reconcile it today with a domestic Chinese auto market that has flipped to native EVs being the majority of primary auto sales - now both “cheaper and light years ahead” of the foreign competition.
China has also shockingly unlocked the global auto market with exponential growth in EV exports. This happened in less than a decade.
Also consider that recent Chinese EV success is not from breakthroughs in battery science, though those may be coming as well. It is from balancing massive protection, transfer and subsidization programs to create an environment of sustained intense competition that rapidly drove down Lithium Iron Phosphate battery costs 50% below the global average – the key driver of the EV price.
I know, I know, the price of materials fell as well; but still, creating a brutal 50%+ overbuilt capacity base had more to do with it – and that came from the government and the economic culture it fosters.
Closer afield to primary energy, Utility Solar has gone from $350 MWh on a Levelized Cost of Energy Basis (all-in cost) in 2009 to under $50 before the pandemic. Again, much of these gains coming from the flood of Chinese silicon PV capacity in the mid-2000s. There are probably more to come if Perovskite Solar comes forward, which I am sure the Chinese will embrace in similar fashion. (check back for another post on this one)
With all this mind, these quotes from the Nature article should get your attention:
“To develop CFETR, ASIPP has started building a sprawling 40-hectare workshop (about the size of 60 football fields) a short drive from EAST. Scheduled for completion next year, the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT) is a massive hub where researchers will develop and manufacture materials, components and prototypes for CFETR and subsequent fusion power plants.”
ASIPP is the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Plasma Physics and CFETR is the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor.
EAST is the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, running plasma shots on breakneck schedule since 2006 that “has since racked up world records for sustaining plasma lasting minutes, instead of seconds.” It is now the design workshop for ITER (instead of being the other way around) – the multinational and collaborative fusion effort woefully behind schedule and wildly above budget being currently constructed in France.
The net result is this: “China has built itself up from being a non-player [in fusion] 25 years ago to having world-class capabilities,” says Dennis Whyte, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.”
Where is the US?
“In the United States, a similar facility to develop key fusion technologies has been flagged as a priority for years, but plans have failed to materialize owing to limited funding and other issues, says Whyte. “It has been frustrating,” he says. “There are positive signs of change, but we lost our lead.”
According to the representative from the US DOE quoted in the article, the US will spend less than half of the $1.5b that China is spending per year on its fusion ecosystem.
While there is much to cheer about renewable sources getting cheaper, they are still flawed – intermittent, location dependent, etc.
More importantly: Small scale tokamak nuclear fusion is baseload, location flexible, standardized and puts sub $20 per MWh electricity (and lower) within the realm of possibility using capital costs in the hundreds of millions not billions. It’s a massive prize to be won and exploited. We are in competition with the Chinese on this front. This article is a wake-up call.
What are implications for our society 30 years in the future if our energy use per capita cannot jump 5x to get back on the Adams Curve and is almost perfectly, positively correlated with per capita GDP? How quickly will any country with a competitive advantage in primary energy production that will further drive downstream gains AI, quantum, low-carbon manufacturing and exports give it away versus using exclusively to their advantage?
Not to end this post on a dour note, I remain optimistic that our priorities can and will change on this issue. But that requires at least a recognition that energy in general and fusion specifically need increased awareness. The stakes are high. We should be more engaged. It also begs questions about government regulation in general but that is for another day. I don’t have answers here, I am looking for them from you!
I do challenge anyone reading this (if you made it this far!) to at least make an energy policy that includes fusion part of your professional conversations. Ideas spread. You can talk about fusion with a straight face. This is an important one. Start here: Fusion Industry Association
-Bill
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