Iran is implementing power blackouts as it struggles with a shortage of natural gas ahead of the winter. Developers have submitted plans for what would be the world’s biggest renewable energy project in Australia. Fusion research is taking place across various projects around the world but its use as an energy supply is considered to be many years away.
Unlocking Latin America and the Caribbean’s clean energy future “SMRs are compact, reliable, versatile, require minimal land and have potential for standardized mass-manufacture production that can achieve the scale of deployment required to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centres and transport.” Emissions-free nuclear fusion technology could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change, if it can be scaled up. The buzz around fusion energy as a way to reduce emissions keeps building. The global impact of electricity from fusion will be huge.
- Artificial intelligence could help solve a problem faced by the biggest magnetic fusion facility in the US, according to research published in February 2024 in the journal Nature.
- As the electric vehicle’s story shows, a technological resurgence can take time and may need to demonstrate breakthroughs in adjacent fields – e.g. the electric car brought advances in high-capacity batteries and low-losses electrical engines.
- But these energy sources are inherently variable; the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.
- Effective policies, private-sector action and public-private cooperation are needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable, affordable and secure global energy system.
- Right up against the arctic circle in Norway, nearly two thirds of homes rely on heat pumps to stay warm, and just over 40% have them in Sweden and Finland.
Fusion fuel – different isotopes of hydrogen – must be heated to extreme temperatures of around 50 million degrees Celsius, kept stable under intense pressure, and dense enough and confined for long enough to allow the nuclei to fuse. At Davos in 2023, Kim Budil, the lab’s director, explained the experiment involved beaming 192 lasers on a tiny target and heating it to create a self-sustaining reaction. In December 2022, scientists at the lab managed to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumed – a net gain of 1.5 megajoules in less time than it takes light to travel one inch.
Challenges for nuclear fusion researchers
The KSTAR nuclear fusion reactor is known as South Korea’s “artificial sun”. According to The Global Fusion Industry in 2022 report, 93% of companies believe that fusion electricity will be on the grid in the 2030s or before (up from 83% in 2021). The difficulties in designing current-carrying coils to produce the magnetic fields required for confining plasmas to create fusion energy have been critical since the beginning of research into magnetically-confined plasmas in the 1950s. The jump from fossil fuels to fusion energy will inevitably be more profound than the jump from burning wood to burning fossil fuels. From there, fusion will naturally expand to markets where consumers need constant power and lack affordable clean alternatives — or where leaders have made ambitious climate commitments. Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation.
Nuclear fusion news: The science behind the energy technology, explained
Controlling the plasma in magnetic confinement fusion is challenging, as it must remain confined and within a stable, defined volume for a prolonged period. Conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the study projects that fusion generation will rise from 2 TWh in 2035 to 375 TWh in 2050, reaching nearly 25,000 TWh by 2100. At least 45 companies worldwide are pursuing commercial fusion and the IAEA reports that more than 160 fusion facilities are now operational, under construction or planned. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has underscored AI’s emerging role by noting its potential to enable breakthroughs in materials science, digital modelling of stellar fusion processes and molecular dynamics.
Different types of advanced nuclear technologies
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about the transition to clean energy? Modelling the impact of fusion power — which has been compared to the discovery of fire and called “the last energy source humanity will ever need” — is challenging. DeepMind is also developing an AI pilot to control magnetic configurations, optimize fusion power and manage heat load for CFS’s SPARC reactor outside Boston. Early power-purchase agreements from end users such as Google, global energy company Eni and Microsoft signal rising industry confidence. Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-lived waste, which has excited scientists since the 1950s.
The home-heating chaos makes it abundantly clear that the inefficient and highly polluting systems we have need to be relegated to the past. This rather tiny difference in mass drives a tremendous release of energy. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. The UAE’s experience in energy efficiency initiatives offers an example to other emerging markets and the wider world.
AI and nuclear fusion
In addition, fast neutron reactors can utilize spent fuel from existing power plants and provide a sustainable solution to the issue of waste. They use fission technology, so they’re not as frontier as fusion, but they’re closer to becoming a reality. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are another promising area of advanced nuclear energy. According to the US Department of Energy, fusion reactions are hard to sustain due to the extreme heat and pressure needed to fuse atoms. Currently, however, the main hurdle is making fusion produce more energy than it consumes.
- Companies have raised around $5 billion in private funding for nuclear fusion, in a quest to replicate the power source that fuels the sun, Reuters says.
- In December 2022, scientists at the lab managed to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumed – a net gain of 1.5 megajoules in less time than it takes light to travel one inch.
- For example, two hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, releasing far more energy than fission.
In the rural northeast, heat pumps, in combination with rooftop solar, are increasingly common, moving residents away from burning fuel and firewood. Right up against the arctic circle in Norway, nearly two thirds of homes rely on heat pumps to stay warm, and just over 40% have them in Sweden and Finland. But, as widespread adoption in Scandinavia over the last ten to fifteen years has shown, heat pumps can operate in frigid temperatures. In the past, the biggest hurdle to actually getting a heat fusion markets review pump has been cost. During the summer, the process can be reversed, moving heat out of the house in order to cool it.
A number of clean and important inventions have lagged because of high energy costs. No single technology will solve the energy crisis on its own; it will take a mix of solutions. The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Energy and Materials is driving the transition to a “fit for 2050” energy system. Investors are pouring money into these advanced nuclear technologies, and they’re progressing quickly. Innovative start-ups are developing ways to shrink the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste. But even with its small footprint, waste remains a key concern for the public, as it can take thousands of years to decay.
Nuclear Security
Since fusion power is dispatchable and constant, it offers a solution while reducing costs. Energy consumption and production contribute to two-thirds of global emissions, and 81% of the global energy system is still based on fossil fuels, the same percentage as 30 years ago. Last month, CFS, Dominion Energy and the Governor of Virginia made an historic announcement to site the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
The long-due rebirth of the stellarator
How is the World Economic Forum facilitating the transition to clean energy? But bringing them to market will require new policies and regulations, and the nuclear industry must win public trust by addressing concerns over cost, safety, and waste. The amount of waste is relatively small because nuclear fuel is very dense and very little of it is required to produce immense amounts of electricity.
Scientists have been conducting fusion reactions since 1952, but these reactions always consumed more energy than they produced. With fusion, our oceans contain enough energy for billions of years. And it will be the cheapest reliable power, and incidentally, the cleanest power too. By the time their children retire, fusion may be the world’s dominant energy source, ushering in an era of energy abundance, not scarcity. 4 ways the private sector can empower utility resilience amid severe climate risks
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The International Atomic Energy Agency says that over 80 SMR designs are in development worldwide, targeting electricity, heating, water desalination and industrial steam. Unlike traditional nuclear power (fission), which splits atoms, fusion joins smaller atoms to make heavier ones. According to the World Nuclear Association, fusion offers a nearly endless energy source with close to zero emissions. Surging power demand from AI and other applications for carbon-free energy sources that operate 24/7 are steeply increasing levels of interest in nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy’s role in achieving a net-zero future, amongst other clean energy sources, has been a contentious issue. If we as a society are going to electrify home heating and other residential appliances, we need affordable, carbon-free electricity to power them. The transition to nuclear fusion in the coming decade could provide just that. The US Department of Energy has announced a breakthrough on nuclear fusion, achieving a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers.
Energy-related emissions are poised for a prolonged period of decline for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. These critical pillars of economic growth account for around a third of the country’s total carbon emissions. As global concern about climate change intensifies, China is undertaking significant measures to move its industrial sectors, including chemicals, steel and cement, towards sustainable development. Norway’s government has reached a $1.6 billion deal with seven private investors to take over much of the country’s gas export network. Drought and floods are causing problems for hydropower production across Latin America.
But what’s next for this vital technology in the age of power-hungry AI systems? US electric utilities are predicting a surge of new demand from data centres, with some companies forecasting electricity sales growth several times higher than just a few months ago, Reuters reports. While the research on tokamaks surged globally, a handful of projects kept exploring the stellarator design. After confirming these initial results, the PPPL decided in 1969 to move from the stellarator to a tokamak design – an important decision followed by other scientists working on fusion projects worldwide. The same resurgence can be seen with the origins of fusion research in the stellarator, replaced with the tokamak due to seemingly insurmountable difficulties at the time. The resurgence of the electric vehicle could prove similar to another source of innovation, this time in fusion science.
As people seek out cheap ways to keep warm this winter, it is clear that we need long-term investment in cost-competitive, stable and clean energy. The result of the US presidential election has had a negative impact on the country’s clean energy sector, according to the FT, with some developers putting projects on hold and investors dumping shares. To meet net-zero commitments and energy demand, nuclear new builds of multiple sizes and technology types will be needed, the report adds. Creating plasma is the first step towards nuclear fusion, and while much higher temperatures are needed to achieve that goal, the test was notable due to the unconventional design of the reactor, the FT says.
