What Will It Take To Build A US Fusion Industry?
A Recap from the White House Fusion Summit
Key Takeaways:
- In March 2022, the White House held it’s first summit on “Developing A Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy”— a strong initial signal of the US government’s support for the emerging private fusion industry.
- The fusion landscape today is unrecognizable from what it was 20 years ago. In 2002, there were two private fusion companies with a small group of financial backers. Today, there are 35 private fusion companies that have raised more than $4 billion in private investment from dozens of institutional investors and corporate entities.
- This shift in the fusion landscape reflects how the pace of technology advancement and fusion research around the world has accelerated.
- While the US has been a leader in fusion research for much of the past 70 years, we have entered a period of intense overseas competition and are seeing other countries ramp up their fusion programs. Facilities in China and the UK are setting records for how long the plasma can be kept hot, and how much energy is produced from each fusion experiment, respectively. Most of the world’s high-power, high repetition rate laser facilities are outside the US.
- To win the race to a fusion industry, the US needs to invest in new R&D facilities and upgrade existing ones to stay competitive. We need to develop a skilled workforce — not only fusion scientists and engineers but hard hats, technicians, and communicators. The industry needs a regulatory framework that is designed for fusion’s lower risk profile rather than one inherited from nuclear fission and ensures safety while operating on a competitive timeline.
This St. Patrick’s Day, I was fortunate to participate in the White House’s first-ever summit on fusion energy in Washington, D.C. (in person!) and moderate a panel on the “Fusion Industry’s Vision.” The summit brought together the full spectrum of stakeholders: legislators and policymakers, universities and national labs, private fusion companies, energy and engineering companies, environmental organizations, and private capital. The excitement of the fusion company founders present (including Commonwealth Fusion and Focused Energy), who have been working towards this for decades, was especially palpable. It was clear that the fusion industry has reached a first inflection point.
Most of the event was recorded and can be watched on YouTube at the link below:
[Please click the link below to watch the video]
Highlights:
[00m:00s] Opening remarks from the Head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Alondra Nelson, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, and Brenda Mallory of the Council on Environmental Quality.
[24m:40s] Remarks from Representative Donald Beyer, Chair of the Bipartisan House Fusion Caucus (yes! this exists!) and Representative Chuck Fleischmann, Member of the Bipartisan House Fusion Caucus. Rep. Fleischmann represents Oak Ridge National Lab’s congressional district.
[45m:00s] Panel 1, Status and Benefits of Fusion Technology: Leaders from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering program, Dillard University, and Southern Company discuss the status and benefits of fusion energy.
[1h:24m:40s] Panel 2, Energy Justice and Public Engagement: environmental, law, university, and youth perspectives on building an industry that includes and benefits everyone.
[2h:03m:40s] Panel 3, The Fusion Industry Vision: I led a conversation with leaders from the Fusion Industry Association, Helion Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Zap Energy, TAE Technologies, and Shine Medical Technologies on our vision for the fusion industry and how we get there.
[2h:45m:35s] Closing Remarks by Dr. Sally Benson of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Geraldine Richmond of the US DOE.
Scott Waldman of the Scientific American wrote a great article summarizing the event.
What Inspired the Fusion Summit?
Our political leaders summarized the reason for this summit elegantly in their opening remarks. Here is my perspective:
Two years ago, I wrote about the need for firm, dispatchable power, and the potential benefits of fusion specifically. Now the need for fusion energy is even more clear. As our partner Ramez Naam wrote recently, the heightened focus on energy security brought on by the war in Ukraine will accelerate the energy transition. The pressure (and resources) to find and scale solutions for climate change continue to grow. Even in the absence of efforts to electrify and decarbonize transportation and industry, the amount of new energy generation the world needs to install over the next 30 years is beyond incredible. Most new energy generation will be in developing economies, and if the US does not take a strong technology leadership position, other countries will. For example, Russia is currently providing technology for nuclear reactors under construction in India, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Slovakia, and Belarus. To paraphrase White House climate advisor Gina McCarthy, we have to act on fusion to win the 21st century energy economy.
Fusion has also transitioned from the world of science fiction to real reactor designs over the last two decades. Today, there are at least 35 private fusion companies. According to the Fusion Industry Association, 93% of these expect to see “net energy gain” — producing more energy from fusion than they use — within this decade. Five of these companies have raised more than $300mm and are building their own proof-of-concept fusion machines to demonstrate this: Commonwealth Fusion, Tokamak Energy, Helion Energy, General Fusion, and TAE Technologies. More than $4B of private capital has now gone into fusion; $3B in the past year.
Compare this to 2002 (twenty years ago): there were just two fusion startups (Tri-Alpha Energy and General Fusion), with few financial backers. The world’s best hope to achieve fusion was the ITER project [1], which at the time, the US had temporarily withdrawn from; no site had even been selected.
My take is that private capital and now the US government are responding to both the changes in the world discussed above and changes in the level of perceived technical risk.
Strides Have Been Made in Derisking Fusion
While there are still many risks and challenges ahead, the pace of technical progress in both fusion science and adjacent industries has accelerated dramatically. Just this past year saw several major fusion achievements:
- The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) held a temperature of 126 million degrees Celsius for 17 minutes in January 2022. [2]
- The Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK produced 59 MJ of fusion energy, doubling its record for the amount of energy produced from fusion. Moreover, JET was limited only by the experimental hardware and not the plasma stability. Both EAST and JET are part of the ITER project.
- The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, CA generated the first burning plasma through laser-driven fusion.
These experiments have shown that fusion is achievable through both tokamak and laser-driven approaches. This is in part why Prime Movers Lab invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems (tokamak technology) and Focused Energy (laser-driven). The progress in just the past few years has been incredible and has reduced the perceived technical risk associated with fusion science and plasma physics. The private investor community has also watched companies pursuing other approaches to fusion continue to make significant progress against their technical milestones. I personally feel we need to support a diverse range of technical approaches to fusion — for the US to identify the shortest path and most cost-effective tech for fusion energy, we need multiple shots on goal.
In parallel, innovations in adjacent technology areas have both enabled better fusion research and — importantly — reduced the expected cost of fusion power plants. More powerful physics and engineering simulations have helped researchers design better experiments and develop new fusion reactors, reduced the number of experiments on expensive equipment needed to get data, and allowed scientists to do more with the data collected. Better diagnostics and measuring devices have also helped. Meanwhile, advances in superconducting materials for magnets, additive manufacturing, power electronics, lasers, and optics have brought down cost projections. Improved metal alloys and molten salt chemistries have been developed and derisked by the aerospace industry, advanced nuclear community, and other industries. Techno-economic assessments by private fusion companies and third parties currently show pathways to fusion energy costs of less than $50/MWh, the target set by the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
What Else Is Needed?
This is not to say the fusion industry doesn’t still face challenges. Two comprehensive reports have been recently released that summarize the current gaps in research and technology, and suggestions for how the US government can best support the commercialization of fusion energy.
- Powering the Future. The US Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee released this report in late 2020.
- Bringing Fusion to the US Grid. The National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine issued it’s findings in 2021.
In particular, the US needs to invest in new R&D facilities to address challenges facing all fusion approaches. For example, more work is needed on materials that can survive long-term operation with high neutron fluxes, fuel-cycle advances including breeding tritium (an isotope of hydrogen), and systems to remove the energy and heat from the reactor for power conversion. Where possible, the US should upgrade existing facilities to remain competitive with overseas competition, for instance in high power, high repetition laser technology.
Beyond R&D, lots of pieces need to come together for a strong fusion energy industry to emerge in the US, or anywhere else for that matter. Here are a few of the topics discussed during breakout sessions. Most of these are not a surprise. I’m sure these will be the subject of many more conversations to come.
- Create public-private partnership programs to support the industry through early deployment. The US has already shown that milestone-based public-private partnerships can be incredibly effective in launching new industries. The most obvious example is the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that gave rise to SpaceX and reduced NASA’s costs for reaching low earth orbit by a factor of 20. There are other success stories as well, including SHINE’s partnership with the National Nuclear Security Administration on its production facility for critical medical isotopes in Wisconsin.
- Develop a risk-informed regulatory framework that addresses fusion’s safety and security concerns rather than copying the nuclear fission playbook. The US also needs to create a framework for technology exports through international regulatory consistency and effective export controls.
- Workforce development. Fusion needs hard hats just as much as diplomas; many companies commented on difficulties finding technicians, welders, and tradespeople. We also need to create visa pathways for the best talent around the world (and the talent we already educate at US universities) to come work at US fusion companies that do not have the resources and legal departments of the tech giants. Take steps to build a diverse workforce domestically through education and recruitment efforts, starting in primary school.
- Public and community engagement. Living next to a fusion reactor as powerful as the sun may sound scary. Early outreach, engagement, and education are critical for both workforce development and earning the social license to build and operate pilot and commercial powerplants.
- Streamline the contracting and IP ownership processes for working with US national labs, which can currently take 6 to 24 months — incompatible with the pace of industry. Make it easy for scientists and engineers to transition back and forth between working at the national labs, universities, and the private sector, to increase knowledge dissemination and collaboration.
- Supply chains and the manufacturing of key materials and components need to be developed.
The US-made investments in solar, wind, and batteries in the 1970s that we are reaping the benefits of today in the form of clean, low-cost energy. It was exciting to see bipartisan support for making informed public investments in fusion energy as well. Given the magnitude and types of efforts needed to create a new industry, the US government is a critical partner. [3] I hope that this was the first of many productive working sessions on fusion between the public and private sectors.
Notes
- Quick history note on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Tokamak project. It began at the 1985 Geneva Conference, when US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Secretary-General Mikhaïl Gorbachev agreed to launch an international effort to develop fusion energy. The project was expanded a year later to include the European Union (Euratom) and Japan, and China and Korea joined in 2003. The US temporarily withdrew from 1998–2003, returning after China joined the project. (See the complete timeline for ITER here)
- The main achievement here is the length of time that EAST maintained this temperature. Last Spring, EAST demonstrated 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, well above the 150 million Celcius target temperature of ITER. Even hotter temperatures have been achieved by other fusion devices; for example, the US Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Center achieved a record-setting 510 million degree plasma in December 1994 (the TFTR facility was decommissioned in 1997).
- Curious what fusion research the US government currently funds? Here is the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences program’s budget for 2020, 2021 and requested FY22.
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Dr. Carly Anderson is a Chemical Engineer & Partner at Prime Movers Lab, where she invests in energy, climate tech, and technologies that can improve the lives of billions. Follow her on LinkedIn or twitter at @carlyande.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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