Many technical challenges are holding back the commercial development of fusion energy. One is the amount of energy needed to kickstart the ignition of sustained fusion. Vast amounts are used to kickstart fusion ignition, the point where a sustained nuclear reaction occurs. Until recently it has taken far more energy going in than has been coming out which defeats the entire exercise.

In December of 2022, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California was the first to achieve ignition with an experiment that produced more energy than it took to get the fusion going. LLNL used 192 lasers that focused on a tiny hollow cylinder the size of a pencil eraser. The cylinder contained a capsule of deuterium and tritium. The heat generated from the lasers reached 3 million Celsius (5.4 million Fahrenheit) which vaporized the capsule and caused the capsule to implode at a speed of 400 kilometres (248 miles) per second fusing the two elements. The output yielded 3.15 million joules, 1.5 times the energy needed to obtain ignition.

A repeat of the experiment in July 2023 produced a 1.9 times energy gain. Another experiment in October 2023 further upped the ante. LLNL states that its goal is to achieve fusion reactions yielding 10 times more energy than goes into them.

But is LLNL telling the whole story? I have my suspicions based on the latest experiments from the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in the United Kingdom. The EUROfusion partnership announced on February 8, 2024, that its controlled fusion experiment yielded 69 megajoules of sustained and controlled energy, considerably more than the LLNL experiments.

The JET facility contains a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak. It is lined with magnets that trap hot plasma containing a mix of deuterium and tritium inside. The heat created is significantly higher than LLNL with temperatures hitting 150 million Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit). JET, which will be shut down shortly, is described as the largest and most successful fusion experiment in the world. But JET data shows its energy yield to be a third of the amount being put in to get sustained controlled fusion. The energy value is measured in Qs. The LLNL experiments have so far yielded a Q value of 0.7 and only for about 4 billionths of a second. That contradicts LLNL’s announcements of greater energy output.

ITER is the multinational fusion reactor project that was supposed to be completed in 2019 but remains unfinished. ITER uses a tokamak design and even when it is up and running with its first plasma in place in 2025, and full fusion complete by 2035, the facility will be an experiment and not a working commercial nuclear reactor. The goal is to sustain 500 Megawatt/hours of output by the latter date. Before it can be considered safe for commercial use, the heat generated to produce ignition will have to be managed.

Besides using tokamaks to create controlled fusion, there are other tokamak designs like the one being developed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Some devices bear little resemblance to a tokamak. For example, the Wendelstein 7-X is a Stellarator that looks like a hundred intertwining Mobius bands. Or there is General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion device, a sphere containing plasma and nuclear fuel surrounded by pistons that pound it until compression leads to ignition.

So where does AI fit in? AI can analyze billions of data points in fractions of the time needed by humans. It can be used to test designs and analyze materials used for the containment vessels. During testing and when operating commercially it can be the plasma chamber sentinel and controller, making adjustments in real-time to maintain sustained fusion safely. Finally, it can flag problems before they happen by being an effective predictive maintenance tool.

AI is already being viewed as a way to speed up the pace of getting to a commercial fusion reactor. Commonwealth has started using AI tools to provide real-time control and optimization of the plasma in its SPARC tokamak. EUROfusion is developing a set of AI tools for fusion that will be used for successors of JET and ultimately for ITER. I am certain this hasn’t escaped the attention of others in or entering the commercial fusion reactor race.

The National Ignition Facility repeatedly tweaks and fires its lasers at a variety of designed nuclear-fuel-containing pellets, about once every four to eight hours. But on December 5th, the test produced a milestone with an energy yield greater than input. The experiment was considered so significant that it led to a spate of announcements from the White House and the U.S. Department of Energy and a press conference on December 13th in Washington, D.C. to announce the results to the world.

Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the U.S. President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy attended the announcement where she described how back in 1978 when she first came to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a young woman, she first heard about using lasers to generate fusion energy.

Forty-four years later, this fundamental research she witnessed in its infancy finally started to pay off. Fusion ignition is a triumph of science and engineering. It represents the first step to producing unlimited nuclear energy here on Earth with no radioactive waste.

An issued press release described the output of the experiment which used 192 lasers and 2.05 Megajoules (MJ) of energy input, to create an ignition yield exceeding 3.15 MJs, a gain of 1.5. The single pulse took less time than it takes light to travel 2.54 centimetres (one inch).

The National Ignition Facility covers a space larger than three football fields. You can see just how massive it is in the picture appearing at the beginning of this article. The laser beams target tiny capsules of deuterium-tritium hydrogen isotopes firing once every four to eight hours. In the successful experiment, approximately 4% of the fuel was converted to energy. For commercial nuclear fusion that 1.5 number will have to grow by 50 to 100 times and the fusion ignition event rate will have to speed up to at least ten per minute.

Other Nuclear Fusion Options On The Table

Using lasers to generate fusion energy is one of a number of options nuclear scientists and engineers are working on today.

1. Plasma-based nuclear fusion using magnetic confinement is by far where most of the research is being funded. The ITER project in Europe is just one of a number of projects that use a containment vessel called a tokamak to confine a plasma field to generate enough heat to induce a controlled fusion ignition.
2. A German team at The Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics has been working with a confinement vessel called a stellarator which is described as a simpler solution than a tokamak.
3. And General Fusion, a Canadian company is using a sphere of molten lead and lithium with a core containing deuterium-tritium fuel.  Its technology is called Magnetized Target Fusion and includes an array of 300 pistons that apply pulsed pressure to the sphere to compress the contents within it to a point where controlled fusion ignition occurs. General Fusion’s novel design was recently given a boost with a contract to build a demonstrator power plant near Oxford, England with an opening date of 2025. It will be 70% to scale of what eventually could become the first working commercial fusion reactor.

So What’s Next?

The Lawrence Livermore achievement, however, represents the first positive energy yield from a fusion technology. These others still need to prove they too can create more energy output than the amount needed to achieve a controlled ignition.

One thing is for sure, with demonstrated fusion ignition the nuclear power industry has moved us one step closer to a secure clean energy future with a solution to support efforts to reverse the effects of fossil-fuel-energy sources on global climate. We cannot afford to wait several more decades for nuclear fusion energy to become mainstream. The stakes for the planet are too high. That’s why I expect renewed interest and billions of dollars more to be spent on commercial fusion power technologies.

So that’s why I was heartened a bit by the announcement from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California where a test was conducted that produced significant amounts of energy in a nuclear fusion experiment. The target was a minuscule BB-sized container of hydrogen atoms, referred to as a hohlraum capsule shell and fill tube, within a 10-metre diameter vacuum chamber. Precision-targeted lasers were fired at it causing a pre-ignition fusion response that released 1.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy. The energy input to create the reaction still was greater than the energy released, but for the first time, at 70%, it was described as being on the threshold of fusion ignition.

Now 1.3 MJ is not a lot of energy. As a frame of reference, it translates to about 0.36-kilowatt-hours which is enough energy to run a 100-watt lightbulb for about 3.6 hours. Mind you the amount of fuel was small, but as energy requirements go, it was still far from the aha moment for fusion energy as a viable technology for commercial implementation.

The Lawrence Livermore team described their results as an eight-fold improvement over a previous experiment conducted in the spring and a 25-fold increase over those conducted in 2018. Plans to repeat the experiment to see if the results can be duplicated are moving ahead.

In an article about the Lawrence Livermore experiment that appeared in The Guardian, Jeremy Chittenden, Co-Director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, noted that the results represent a more than 1,000-fold improvement from yields in 2011. He went on to say “we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kickstart the process.”

Fusion energy reactors take small atoms like hydrogen and fuse them together to produce heavier ones like helium. The form factor for these facilities need not be the monsters we see for fission reactors with their enormous concrete containment structures. A fusion reactor can be housed in an average-sized building. And the fuel to run it is readily available. But other than the net positive yield challenge, the construction of such a facility and the materials used still needs to be addressed. Unless a fusion reactor produces 30-times greater energy yield than input, and its containment structure demonstrates the ability to withstand continuous nuclear bombardments over a facility lifecycle of 30 years or more, commercialization of the technology remains problematic.

There is no doubt that Lawrence Livermore is on track to soon achieve a net positive energy output over input. It is in a race to beat the competition which is coming from government and private industry in other facilities in the U.S., the European Union, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and China.

Solving the construction material issue will need to overcome some pretty prohibitive costs. Current material candidates for fusion reactors include beryllium and tungsten. A gram of beryllium costs $27 US. There are a million grams in a metric ton so you can figure out just how steep the cost will be using this material. On the other hand, tungsten at $270 US a metric ton seems relatively cheap, although it is not. And the longevity issue remains unknown until we have a fusion reactor operating continuously for a period of time.

When the United States created the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, the total investment in dollars at the time was $2 billion which equals approximately $23 billion in current dollars. That is an interesting number when you start looking at investments to date in fusion reactor technology. ITER in France when complete will probably cost $20 billion. Lawrence Livermore’s fusion research is costing $4 billion. The UK and China are each putting in about a billion on separate projects. Add in private enterprise and venture capital firms with the total numbers well exceeding a billion and you have an amount even greater than what it took to build the first nuclear weapon.

Under the imminent threat of anthropogenic climate change, fusion energy could provide a means to mitigate global warming by accelerating the switch away from carbon energy sources. Fusion could have many advantages over renewable energy sources including smaller facility footprints, smaller carbon footprints during construction, and less material and waste. (What do you do with old wind turbine blades?)

The $23 billion price paid for the Manhattan Project won’t get us there, but a Manhattan Project Plus equalling ten times that amount or more spent now could advance the technology far more rapidly. And when you consider the end results, energy self-sufficiency for the entire planet with net-zero emissions, that is not a big ask. And when you consider the massive investments made by nations all around the world in the last two years to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, we know the big ask is possible. Global warming is an existential threat. Whereas we may learn to live with low levels of COVID-19 infections persisting, rising atmospheric temperatures may make much of the planet uninhabitable.

How much would this cost? About $10 billion US per year or less than 0.4% of the State’s current gross domestic product (GDP). The solutions proposed to meet this goal exist either at scale or in demonstration and pilot projects, and among them is converting waste into hydrogen fuel.

California isn’t alone in seeking a waste-to-fuel solution that produces a green-fuel end product. But therein lies the challenge. So far, the cheapest technologies to make hydrogen fuel, a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, involves processes that churn out greenhouse gas emissions.

Technologies to Harvest Hydrogen Are Largely Not Green

The LLNL report describes various hydrogen harvesting technologies in its search for negative-emissions end results. But other than hydrogen electrolyzers that are powered by renewable energy sources (hydro, wind, solar and geothermal), none of the methods reported include green hydrogen fuels.

Instead, hydrogen extraction is coming from a variety of sources such as syngas from biomass, natural gas, and methane. Carbon emission problems with these processes do not move the state into the desired negative emissions scenario. This type of hydrogen is classified as gray. Only by adding carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to the post-production process can the classification move closer to green.

Another described process extracts hydrogen using hydrothermal liquefaction. The energy and materials used come from feedstocks of forest and green municipal waste. This hydrogen extraction also produces GHGs and needs added CCS for reclassification to blue, one step short of being fully green.

Another described process uses recovered bio-oils (animal and vegetable fats and the like). It uses fast pyrolysis to convert the rendered oils into non-polluting hydrogen. Even here the process yields GHGs and requires CCS.

LLNL Could Have Looked at Ways2H in Their Own State

Not mentioned in the LLNL report is a hydrogen systems supplier, Ways2H Inc., a Long Beach company that converts waste to hydrogen fuel. This California company announced last week that it was teaming up with Element Two, a U.K. fuel retailer, to implement waste-to-hydrogen refuelling stations throughout the United Kingdom, beginning with deployment in Scotland where it plans to implement 40 sites.

Ways2H recycles municipal solid waste, plastic, sewage sludge and other garbage by using a carbon-neutral process to extract pure hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles or power generators. The company sees unrecyclable plastic as a perfect feedstock for its patented technology which it describes as an advanced thermochemical process producing hydrogen with net zero-carbon output.

In Scotland, Ways2H and Element Two will produce every day up to a metric ton of renewable hydrogen at each of its filling station sites. The plan is to grow to a hydrogen-fuel infrastructure to 2,000 stations across the United Kingdom and the European Union by 2030. The technology has already successfully been deployed at a waste-to-hydrogen plant in Tokyo, Japan.

Element Two and Ways2H see their primary target as the long-haul trucking industry. A fuel-cell-powered rig could conceivably travel 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) between hydrogen refills which would take no longer than pumping diesel or gasoline.

A proposal to build 100 hydrogen-refuelling stations in the works for implementation along the interstate highway system in the U.S. With the Biden administration putting infrastructure money into recharging stations on the interstate system it should be a no-brainer to add hydrogen to the energy mix. Currently, California has 50 working hydrogen refuelling stations. That’s why it was surprising to me that Ways2H was never mentioned in the LLNL report.