Low-Energy Fridays: Will Fusion Energy End Energy Scarcity?

Last week, a British company experimenting with fusion energy released an exciting new video of the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor. For the uninitiated, fusion is the merging of atoms. Whereas conventional nuclear power comes from splitting atoms (fission), fusion energy mimics the process that goes on within a star, where the fusing of atoms releases energy. But while fusion energy commonly appears in science fiction, it’s important for policymakers to understand it realistically. Yes, fusion energy is something to strive for; however, it’s not an energy miracle.

Unlike nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is attractive as an energy source because it faces few of the same challenges as conventional nuclear power. While conventional fission requires fuel made from the same materials used to make a bomb, fusion does not. It doesn’t produce highly radioactive nuclear waste like fission does, nor is there any sort of meltdown risk. In a nutshell, nuclear fusion seems to offer all the benefits of nuclear fission without the downsides.

So why don’t we use it yet? The simple answer is technology. Some refer to fusion as the technology that “has always been about 40 years away.” Research on fusion energy reactors has been ongoing since the 1950s, and although a lot of progress has been made, commercially viable fusion is still far away. Though we’ve known how to create a fusion reaction for many years, the challenge is that it takes more energy to get the reaction started than is capturable as energy released from the reaction. In fact, even after decades of research, “net-positive” fusion energy wasn’t achieved until 2022.

Of course, a net-positive fusion reaction alone is insufficient for commercialization. The net-gain of energy released from 2022’s fusion reaction was described as “enough to boil a kettle,” and it happened at the National Ignition Facility which cost about $3.5 billion to build. Clearly, there is a wide gap between what fusion currently costs and what a customer is willing to pay. But this isn’t entirely new to energy innovation, either.

When nuclear fission was being explored as a commercial energy source, the belief was that the abundance of energy-dense uranium would make electricity “too cheap to meter,” with practically no fuel cost. The energy content of uranium is so enormous compared to other fuels that it was also considered a miracle fuel. The damper on nuclear ambitions came when it became clear that safety, security, and other factors significantly drove up the capital intensity of conventional nuclear reactors—not to mention that fuel is only a relatively small portion of electricity costs. Nuclear fission is affordable today, but certainly not too cheap to meter.

Fusion will likely follow a similar trajectory: a slow slog of efficiency improvements to increase energy production and the development of reactor designs to reduce costs. The challenge with fission was that safety concerns caused the cost of nuclear plants to rise rather than fall, whereas fusion power may not have the same constraints. Fusion power may indeed make electricity too cheap to meter one day, but that day is still far off.

From a policy perspective, the challenge is that economic conditions are hard to predict too far into the future. Today’s policymakers face the perennial temptation to invest in promising technologies and ignore others, but they must get the basics of innovation policy right rather than taking too heavy a hand in steering energy innovation. In other words, just because fusion probably won’t solve any energy problems in the near term, it doesn’t mean we should stop researching it. Similarly, just because fusion shows a lot of promise doesn’t mean we should abandon other energy innovation efforts.

I have enjoyed reading about the major strides in fusion energy over the past few years; however, as an analyst, I try not to let my optimism influence my policy recommendations. Fusion energy is great, and I applaud the progress of research on it. But I also know there are many other promising energy innovations, such as advanced nuclear fission or batteries, that may bear fruit prior to the commercialization of fusion energy.