Half a dozen smaller and more recent private start-ups are exploring alternative ways to the same goal, and several promising ones hope to have demonstration reactors up and running within this decade. The front-runners are Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts and General Fusion, a Vancouver-based Canadian-UK partnership.
The “Skunk Works” at Lockheed Martin is also still in the game, working its way through progressively more advanced models of a compact fusion reactor at the rate of one every couple of years. One way or another, the job will get done.
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The long-term promise of fusion power is dazzling. It offers effectively limitless energy from an inexhaustible fuel: isotopes of hydrogen that are derived from water (deuterium) and from enriched lithium (tritium). The process cannot result in meltdown, produces no radioactive waste, and doesn’t take up much land.
Once fusion can produce large amounts of electricity at an affordable price, we can stop burning fossil fuels entirely. Unless there are further dramatic improvements in battery weight and storage capacity, we’ll probably need hydrogen for aircraft and ships, but you just use the abundant electricity to split water for the hydrogen. Wind and solar power will probably remain competitive in cost.
So what’s not to like about fusion? Only the delivery date. It is highly unlikely that there will be even a single prototype fusion reactor producing commercially relevant amounts of electricity before 2030. Greenhouse gas emissions may have stopped rising by then, but they probably won’t be falling yet.
So current forecasts say we will be irrevocably committed to a rise of more than 1.5 degrees in the average global temperature by 2029.
By 2040 we could be seeing a major rollout of fusion power plants if we’re lucky, accounting for as much as 5 per cent of global energy use, but any faster would require implausible changes in the way the world works. By then we’ll be staring a rise of 2-plus degrees in the face – or already experiencing it, if some of the big feedbacks are starting to kick in.
Fusion power may give us a long, happy future if we get through the next 20 to 30 years without a civilisational collapse, but it won’t be the magical vehicle that carries us through the crisis unharmed. We’ll have to figure that one out on our own.
Gwynne Dyer is a historian and London-based journalist. His latest book is The Shortest History of War.
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