A
Early efforts to harness it, though, gave fusion a reputation
for hype and disappointment. After World War II, an Austrian
scientist who’d worked in Germany ended up in Argentina, where
he persuaded dictator Juan Perón to fund his fusion experiments.
On an island in a remote Andean lake, the scientist, Ronald Richter,
set up an elaborate facility. In February 1951, he detected what
appeared to be heat from a thermonuclear reaction in his reactor.
The next month, Perón announced at a press conference that
Argentina had harnessed the atom to create unlimited energy. A
subsequent investigation found that a glitch in Richter’s instruments
led to his mistaken heat reading. Richter was discredited.
Many physicists were skeptical of the initial report, but news
of the apparent breakthrough spurred research in the U.S., the U.K.,
and the Soviet Union. At Princeton, a top-secret U.S. government
project aimed at working on the H-bomb started researching fusion
technology. In 1951 scientists there began developing a device called
a stellarator that would use magnetic fields to confine superheated
plasma. The effort, code-named Project Matterhorn, was eventually
declassified and became the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
In the U.K., work on a machine called Zeta, which “pinched”
fusion fuel by running a huge current through it, led to another
premature announcement of the dawn of the fusion age, in 1958.
It turned out that strange instabilities in the fuel were what led
researchers to mistakenly think they were seeing evidence of fusion.
The Argentine news also fast-tracked work on an idea devel-
oped by Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, a dissident and Nobel
Peace Prize winner: confining fusion fuel in a doughnut-shaped
configuration with a machine called a tokamak.
Since the 1960s, when government labs and universitiesbout two dozen private companies around the world
are working to harness a transformative energy
technology that could rescue the planet from climate
catastrophe. One is using space in an old factory that’s
home to a mothballed U.S. Department of Energy-funded research
machine in Cambridge, Mass. Another is housed in an industrial
building behind a Costco outside Vancouver. A third is down the
street from a self-storage facility in the foothills of Orange
County, Calif.
The companies are working on commercializing fusion.
Fusion’s promise is huge. It would be the most energy-dense
form of power: A liter of fusion fuel is equivalent to 55,000 barrels
of oil. In its most common form, that fuel would come from a
practically inexhaustible source: water. In fact, 2 cubic kilometers
of seawater could in theory provide energy equivalent to all the
oil reserves on Earth. “It’s ubiquitous, inherently safe, zero- carbon
energy—at a scale that can fuel the planet,” says Matt Miller,
president of Stellar Energy Foundation Inc., a nonprofit that
promotes the development of fusion power. “Now that’s worth
working on.”
It was only about 100 years ago that people came to under-
stand that fusion was the process powering the sun. Shortly there-
after, scientists began trying to re-create it. From tabletop exper-
iments, fusion quickly developed into Big Science. Since 1953 the
U.S. government has devoted more than $30 billion to fusion
research, including basic science and weapons-related work, accord-
ing to data from Fusion Power Associates, another nonprofit. Euro-
pean countries, Russia, China, and Japan have also made huge
investments in pursuit of the holy grail of energy.
Since the 1950s, however, expectations that researchers
were on the verge of breakthroughs have repeatedly come up short.
What’s different now is that advances in technology are bringing
fusion within reach.
Turning theory into practical devices is being enabled by
advances in supercomputing and complex modeling, says Steven
Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and
former head of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. Fusion used to
be defined as “the perfect way to make energy except for one thing:
We don’t know how to do it,” Cowley says. “But we do.”
SO WHAT IS FUSION again? The idea is deceptively simple: Smash
two atoms together so they fuse into a single heavier element and
release energy. It’s the opposite of fission, the process used in
today’s nuclear power plants and the bombs dropped on Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki.
In fission, a large, unstable nucleus is split into smaller elements,
releasing energy. Fusion, by contrast, starts with light atoms. Take
two hydrogen nuclei, for example. Ordinarily, their positive charges
repel each other. But apply enough heat and pressure, and they might
get close enough for the attraction of the extremely short-range but
powerful nuclear force to kick in, joining them into a single helium
nucleus. When that happens, the mass of the newly formed nucleus
ends up slightly less than the sum of the two hydrogen nuclei. And
that difference in mass gets released as energy, in accordance with
Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2. Simple. Stars do it. The
sun does it. It’s the basic energy process of the universe.
Fusion was
once defined as “the perfect
way to make energy
except for one thing: We don’t
know how to do it.
But we do”70 BLOOMBERG MARKETS