Is This the Fusion Breakthrough We’ve Been Waiting For?

Y esterday, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory confirmed that they had discovered a pathway to the first potentially viable nuclear-fusion power. In a press conference earlier today, the U.S. Department of Energy officially announced the breakthrough. But is it too good to be true?

The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California, which uses a process called inertial-confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, “had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks,” anonymous sources “with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment” told the Financial Times. In a press conference, Department of Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm elaborated on this “major scientific breakthrough.”

“Scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition, that is creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process,” Secretary Granholm said at the press conference. “It’s the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory, anywhere in the world. Simply put, this is one of these most impressive scientific feats of the 21^st century. Or, as the president might say, I do think he probably did say, this is a BFD.”

Granholm is right to be excited. “The scientists at NIF are to be congratulated on achieving a breakthrough milestone of energy equivalence,” Dr. Jeff Terry, energy-research professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, told National Review. “They have finally reached the point where the laser energy input was even slightly exceeded by the fusion energy produced. This is a great accomplishment.”

Even though producing more energy from nuclear fusion than needed to sustain the reaction is momentous, and fulfills what has been a key goal of nuclear physics since at least the 1950s, the amount of net electricity generated is currently modest. The fusion reaction produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, just a tad more than the energy needed to sustain the reaction. The program cost American taxpayers $350 million in 2022. Granholm stated the Biden administration intended to achieve “commercial fusion in a decade,” even though the current experiment lasted a fraction of a second. Such a timeline is exceedingly optimistic; commercial fusion is, realistically, 50 years away because of technical obstacles.

“It’s about what it takes to boil 10 kettles of water,” Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London, told CNN. “In order to turn that into a power station, we need to make a larger gain in energy – we need it to be substantially more . . . this result is miles away from actual energy gain required for the production of electricity. Therefore, we can say [it] is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.”

Scientists are clear, however, that this is just the first step in the process. “The NIF team has accomplished a great first step in the process of unlocking fusion energy,” Dr. Terry said. “Now onto the next steps for them.”

Nuclear fusion is essentially the opposite of the fission process used by current nuclear-power plants. Fusion joins two or more lighter atoms together to create massive amounts of energy, while fission produces power by splitting a larger atom into smaller ones.

Fusion is the same process that powers the sun. Reactors can simulate the conditions of ultra-hot miniature “stars” of plasma contained within a magnetic field. Fusion could produce nearly unlimited supplies of clean and safe power free of carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions. Companies and governments have been trying to create fusion reactors for decades, since such power would be “too cheap to meter” and would provide so much inexpensive power that it could drive other sources of electricity out of business.

For example, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory previously announced a similar breakthrough in 2016 which allegedly would require far less “start-up” energy than other methods, but little seems to have come from it. And Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works research group claimed in late 2014 that it would deploy a compact fusion reactor small enough to fit in a truck, which could generate enough electricity to power 80,000 homes, within ten years. Lockheed filed a patent in 2018 for the “plasma confinement system” of a fusion reactor intended to power military aircraft. So far, nothing has come of this.

Despite their promise, fusion reactors in America and around the world have been plagued by cost overruns and technical problems. So there’s reason for skepticism.

America’s flagship experimental fusion reactor at Princeton University in New Jersey broke down in 2016 just after a taxpayer-financed $94 million upgrade. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) fusion reactor in France was originally estimated to cost approximately $5.7 billion in total, but the construction bill alone will likely end up at around $65 billion, according U.S. Department of Energy officials.

There’s a lengthy history of researchers prematurely announcing fusion-power breakthroughs only for the science not to stand up to mild scrutiny. In 1989, two then-prominent chemists at the University of Utah claimed to have invented “cold fusion” on a budget of roughly $100,000 of their own money. They claimed to have developed a “breakthrough process” capable of generating “an inexhaustible source of energy,” and, after receiving widespread media attention, asked for $25 million of government funding to continue their research. They were even scheduled to meet with representatives of then-President George H. W. Bush.

Numerous independent scientists were unable to replicate the results, and the researchers essentially went into exile in France to continue their experiments privately, spending an estimated $40 million with no results. Attempts by the same researchers to prove their results while working in Japan spent an estimated $20 million to generate nothing. In 2019, a Google-funded attempt to replicate the results spent an estimated $10 million only to find there was “no evidence whatsoever” that it was possible.

Will this latest development prove similarly disappointing, or is this at long last the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for? Time will tell.