The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed media company covering European start-ups
There are two good reasons to be very excited about the latest breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology announced this week. Not only does the generation of net positive energy in a fusion reaction represent an outstanding scientific achievement, it also opens up the tantalising possibility of cheap, green and abundant energy that might put the environmentally ruinous fossil fuel industry out of business.
But there are also two good reasons not to be overly excited by the news. Even with a favourable wind, it will take at least 20 years of development and massive injections of capital before fusion energy can ever become commercially viable at scale. Unfortunately, that means it is not likely to arrive quickly enough to solve the imminent threat of the climate emergency. If so, the question arises: is the technology worth backing at all if alternative clean energy sources, such as solar, wind and next-generation nuclear fission, are already proven and available?
There was no shortage of excitement on Tuesday when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, confirmed the experimental breakthrough, first reported in the FT. For the first time in history, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had succeeded in generating more energy in a fusion reaction than was consumed by the laser beams that triggered it. “Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” Granholm said.
A few days earlier, 192 huge lasers in the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility had blasted a capsule, the size of a peppercorn, with 2.05 megajoules of energy, heating it to 100mn degrees Celsius, hotter than the centre of the Sun. The resulting ignition, fusing together hydrogen nuclei, resulted in an outflow of 3.15 megajoules of energy, a 1.5 times gain. For over a century, scientists have understood how fusion works in stars, observing that it is the most prevalent source of energy in the universe. But it has taken researchers at Livermore more than 60 years to “bottle the Sun” down here on Earth.
Although rejoicing in their success, Livermore’s scientists were quick to qualify their achievement. The targeted laser beams may have only used 2.05 megajoules of energy, but the ignition facility overall had to draw down 300 megajoules from the grid to generate the laser pulse. Moreover, researchers had produced “a one shot every two weeks type machine”, whereas they would need to generate 100 times more energy 10 times a second to have a meaningful impact. “Job well done, but there is a lot of work to do,” Andrew MacKinnon, one of the scientists, told the BBC.
The greatest significance of the breakthrough therefore may be to move nuclear fusion out of the theoretical possibility box into the colossal engineering challenge one. Many sceptics have questioned whether fusion can ever make business sense given the complexities and costs. As Sir Walter Marshall, the former chair of the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority, used to say in the 1980s: “There will come a time when we get as much energy from a fusion reactor as we put in. Then there will come a time when we get more energy out than we put in. However, there will never come a time when we get as much money out as we have put in.”
Yet there are plenty of entrepreneurs and investors determined to prove that argument wrong. In its latest annual report, the Washington-based Fusion Industry Association found that 33 private fusion companies had raised a total of $4.9bn of funding, including $117mn in government grants. Much of that has gone into building experimental tokamak reactors, which heat a magnetically-suspended plasma to extreme temperatures in an attempt to fuse hydrogen atoms. Naturally, one would expect those who have built their careers in the sector to be bullish about its prospects. Still, it is striking that 93 per cent of industry respondents thought that the first fusion electricity would be delivered to the grid in the 2030s, if not before.
This latest experimental breakthrough may have come at a good time in the investment cycle. Venture capital investors have been rapidly warming to climate tech and western governments have rediscovered their faith in industrial policy. In the US, the $700bn Inflation Reduction Act contains generous subsidies and tax breaks for greening the economy.
Over the past few years, corporate bosses, VC investors and speculators have been merrily throwing cash into the money pits of the metaverse, web3 and crypto, with little or no evident societal payback. With luck, investors may now focus more on transformational technologies, such as nuclear fusion. There should be no slowdown of investment in renewable energy. But the lamentable fact is that humanity now needs to take every shot on goal to preserve the planet.
What is often lost in the environmental debate is that energy is a wonderful thing and billions of people desperately need more of it. Nuclear fusion may one day provide carbon-free energy in abundance. It is hard to think of a greater societal good, even if it does take decades to deliver.