22 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
ANNALS OFSCIENCE
GREEN DREAM
Is limitless clean energy finally approaching?
BY RIVKAGALCHEN
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXANDER GLANDIEN
L
et’s say that you’ve devoted your en-
tire adult life to developing a carbon-
free way to power a household for a year
on the fuel of a single glass of water, and
that you’ve had moments, even years,
when you were pretty sure you would
succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not
crazy. This is a reasonable description of
many of the physicists working in the
field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach
this goal, they had to find a way to heat
matter to temperatures hotter than the
center of the sun, so hot that atoms es-
sentially melt into a cloud of charged
particles known as plasma; they did that.
They had to conceive of and build con-
tainers that could hold those plasmas;
they did that, too, by making “bottles”
out of strong magnetic fields. When those
magnetic bottles leaked—because, as
one scientist explained, trying to contain
plasma in a magnetic bottle is like try-
ing to wrap a jelly in twine—they had
to devise further ingenious solutions, and,
again and again, they did. Over decades,
in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scien-
tists and engineers built giant metal
doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils,
they “pinched” plasmas with lasers, and
they constructed fusion devices in ga-
rages. For thirty-six years, they have been
planning and building an experimental
fusion device in Provence. And yet com-
mercially viable nuclear-fusion energy
has always remained just a bit farther on.
As the White Queen, in “Through the
Looking Glass,” said to Alice, it is never
jam today, it is always jam tomorrow.
The accelerating climate crisis makes
fusion’s elusiveness more than cutely
maddening. Solar energy gets more ef-
ficient and affordable each year, but it’s
not continuously available, and it still
relies on gas power plants for distribu-
tion. The same is true for wind power.
Conventional nuclear power has ex-
tremely well-known disadvantages. Car-
bon capture, which is like a toothbrush
for the sky, is compelling, but after you
capture a teraton or two of carbon there’s
nowhere to put it. All these tools figure
extensively in decarbonization plans laid
out by groups like the Intergovernmen-
tal Panel on Climate Change, but, ac-
cording to those plans, even when com-
bined with one another the tools are
insufficient. Fusion remains the great
clean-energy dream—or, depending on
whom you ask, pipe dream.
Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity
issues; our planet has enough of fusion’s
primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lith-
ium, which are found in seawater, to last
thirty million years. Fusion requires no
major advances in batteries, it would be
available on demand, it wouldn’t cause
the next Fukushima, and it wouldn’t be
too pricey—if only we could figure out
all the “details.” (A joke I heard is that
fusion operates according to the law of
the “conservation of difficulty”: when
one problem is solved, a new one of equal
difficulty emerges to take its place.) The
details are tremendously complex, and
the people who work to figure them out
have for years been dealing with their
own scarcities—scarcities of funding and
scarcities of faith. Fusion, as of now, has
no place in the Green New Deal.
In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research
and Development Administration pub-
lished a study predicting how quickly
nuclear fusion could become a reality,
depending on how much money was
invested in the field. For around nine
billion a year in today’s dollars—de-
scribed as the “Maximum Effective Ef-
fort”—it projected reaching fusion en-
ergy by 1990. The scale descended to
about a billion dollars a year, which the
study projected would lead to “Fusion
Never.” “And that’s about what’s been
Commercially viable nuclear fusion has always remained just a bit farther on. spent,” the British physicist Steven Cow-
