Fusion: Sustainable Fusion Projects Advance

Atomic fusion is the merging of two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. It is a process that requires very large amounts of heat and pressure. Fusion occurs naturally on the sun, but so far, humans have been unable to achieve sustainable fusion. Our attempts at fusion to date have only been successful in environments where the energy that was used to enable fusion was greater than the energy produced by the fusion process itself.

That may be changing. One group at MIT and another international group based in Europe are both making good progress in being able to achieve sustainable fusion. Key to creating the environment for fusion to occur is the need to produce an enormously powerful magnetic field.

Andrew Holland, Chief Executive Officer of the Fusion Industry Association, said that “nobody — no companies, universities, national labs, or governments — have achieved the goal of break-even fusion to date.”

The MIT group achieved building a magnet of enormous strength, 20 tesla, the most powerful magnet ever produced. The MIT team used a high-temperature superconducting material in order to create it. Because of the higher temperature, the design allowed for a more compact cooling capability was required, 40 times smaller than the original design using a more conventional superconducting material.

Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, said that “the challenges of making fusion happen are both technical and scientific. It’s an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time. It’s really a fundamentally new energy source.”

Martin Greenwald, deputy director and senior research scientist at the PSFC, said that “the niche that we were filling was to use conventional plasma physics, and conventional tokamak designs and engineering, but bring to it this new magnet technology. So, we weren’t requiring innovation in a half-dozen different areas. We would just innovate on the magnet, and then apply the knowledge base of what’s been learned over the last decades.”

Paul Dabbar, former US Under Secretary for Science, writing for The Hill, said that “everyone should absorb that the fusion age is upon us. The target for net-energy-out fusion is now four years; not 30. And we should identify how to take this jump in technology and drive the future: Built here in the U.S., with American technology and innovation.”