How Scientists Are Making a Virtually Limitless Source of Clean Energy: Nuclear Fusion
By Michelle Sandels
Nuclear fusion is how all the stars in our solar system get their energy, and if we could mimic that here on Earth, we could potentially have an unlimited source of clean, promising, sustainable energy. With this breakthrough, we can say goodbye to fossil fuels and hello to a virtually limitless source of clean energy!
This idea may seem far-fetched as we are literally recreating a nuclear reaction that happens on our sun, but the recent breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory managed to reach an astonishing temperature of 180,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit and achieve and prove that we can do the long-awaited for nuclear fusion reactions.
But before that: Why is this any different than any other energy source?
Well, if you’re like me, on long, boring car rides I tend to gaze out at the passing farm fields and often see wind turbines. And I always think, “These things are pretty darn amazing. Why isn’t all energy simply produced from them, or some source of sustainable energy? That way climate change wouldn’t have to be such a big issue.” To answer my own thoughts, I have learned in order for something to be used, three main things must be accounted for.
- Affordability — For a product to be used, people have to be able to afford the product. For example, unless you’re like Bill Gates, you most likely wouldn’t get a phone for $90,000 even if was the best, most efficient, and reliable phone in the whole world — it’s just not worth it. For nuclear fusion, the cost of all the technology used for the reaction is roughly 6 billion. So, looking at cost-effectiveness we can say fusion is definitely way too much for commercial use. This is the biggest problem and reason why nuclear fusion can still not be used like other ways of generating energy can. If that is true then why are we still even pushing for it? Well, let's look at the other factors.
- Efficiency — Even if something is cheap, if it doesn't do the job well, it most of the time is not worth getting. Nuclear fusion, however, releases nearly four million times more energy than a chemical reaction like coal burning, oil, and gas. It also releases four times as much energy than nuclear fission (the current way we use power plants).
- Environmental — Not only that but unlike nuclear fission, fusion leaves no radioactive waste or carbon emissions. Not only that but along with energy, the main output of fusion is helium-4, which can be reused in other things like research, MRI machines and even to blow up balloons and make your voice sound like a chirping bird. Because of its efficiency and environmental factors, scientists have not given up on the idea of commercial nuclear fusion, even given its cost. If we could somehow lower the cost (which is what scientists are trying to do), this could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in all of history.
How Nuclear Fusion Works
How does nuclear fusion work? It's what scientists have been developing an answer to for decades. And they finally got it. In the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on December 5, 2022, they were able to produce more energy (3.15 MJ) than they put in (2.05 MJ). This was the first time it had ever been done in history. Anywhere in the world.
Nuclear fusion happens when two atomic nuclei slam together to form a different element along with energy and one neutron as an output! While fusion can be done with other elements, the fusion we’re doing here on Earth is different from on the sun and is done with isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) and combining them into helium-4. It sounds simple enough, right? Well, we can’t just smush them together like any ol’ sandwich. After all, we’re mimicking what happens to the sun — a giant heat ball. So to do this we need to reach insane temperatures.
Here’s the step-by-step process used to achieve nuclear fusion:
1. Overcoming the electrostatic repulsion: Just like two magnets with similar poles repel, deuterium and tritium both have a positive charge and repel each other. To combine them we have to look back to our mentor of the process — the sun. So, how does the sun manage to overcome the barrier? Well, it uses extreme heat and pressure to move the atoms very fast and compress them together, overcoming the repel. So following the great sun — we do that!
2. Keeping hot: The only difference is that instead of open heat like the sun (which might just kill us all from the sheer 180 million degrees), we heat a toroidal (donut-shaped) chamber. From the 180 million degrees heat, the deuterium and tritium are forced together, creating helium-4, 1 neutron, and a whole lot of energy. There is also a magnetic field generated by the superconducting magnets in the chamber that helps to confine the plasma (the plasma is all the isotopes) and prevent it from touching the walls, which could cause energy loss and damage to the reactor.
3. Heating up with photons: When fusion occurs, a certain amount of mass is converted into energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc². This energy is absorbed by the surrounding plasma even more, heating it even hotter.
4. Getting the energy from neutrons: As said before, from the reactions, we now have helium-4, 1 neutron, and lots of energy. But now let's focus more on this cute, little neutron. Because it has no electric charge, the magnetic field does not affect it and it makes its way gently past all the drama to a neutron blanket. The neutron blanket acts like its name, capturing all the excess, fast-moving neutrons, and using them to generate electricity via a steam turbine.
So, that’s how it’s done! Nuclear fusion.
Companies working on fusion and their achievements
Throughout the world, there are just a bit more than a dozen companies, all over the globe sharing information and working together to make the future. The most funded and well-known ones are…
- ITER: ITER is an international collaboration with 35 countries working together on it, in hopes of by 2025, building a machine able to produce 500 megawatts of thermal power, with a net gain of 10. And it turns out that that is the largest science project that will have ever been attempted… in the world. It’s the most expensive thing that's being built on earth with a grand price of 50 billion dollars. That is significantly more costly than the $90,000 phone mentioned earlier, in fact, it costs 555,555 times more. So you can imagine if we’re putting all these resources into it… Scientists are really convinced this is going to work!
- Then there is the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which was the first experiment to catch an ignition generating more energy than the amount it to start it! This is a HUGE milestone in nuclear fusion energy and one, I believe, is not talked about enough. The fusion done at this lab was different than the one I explained earlier and ITER. The fusion done at NIF was done by shining 192 rays of lasers, which entered from two ends of a cylinder.
- There are SO many other companies working on this as well like TAE Technologies in California, Helion in Washington, Commonwealth Fusion in Massachusetts, General Fusion in British Columbia and the list extends on for around 15 more companies.
The problems with current nuclear fusion
Unfortunately, it is really hard to recreate a star in a lab and scientists are still facing many problems with our current techniques. Problems include:
- Finding tritium: The two atoms we combine are deuterium and tritium. While deuterium is quite simple to obtain as it's found in lots of the earth's oceans, tritium isn’t so simple as it is naturally found almost nowhere on Earth, and our total inventory supply of it is just 15kg.
- Making it commercial: Even if we are able to do nuclear fusion, that does not help us if we are not able to use it to power stuff! To be able to use it commercially, it has to be cheap. Cheaper than using other renewable energy, at least. And with the current price of fusion being sky-high, that is definitely off the table — for now.
But that’s not to say fusion can’t be the next electric car — it can! If we can solve these problems.
So, what do you think? Could fusion be the breakthrough that revolutionizes our energy production methods and propels us toward a more sustainable future? Or will it just be another failed science experiment?
