Things are heating up in the world of nuclear fusion research, with most fundamental issues resolved and an increasing rate of announcements being made regarding commercial fusion power. China’s CNNC is one of the most recent voices here, with their statement that they expect to have commercial nuclear fusion plants online by 2050. Although scarce on details, China is one of the leading nations when it comes to nuclear fusion research, with multiple large tokamaks, including the HL-2M and the upcoming CFETR which we covered a few years ago.
In addition to China’s fusion-related news, a German startup called Proxima Fusion announced their Stellaris commercial fusion plant design concept, with a targeted grid connection by the 2030s. Of note is that this involves a stellarator design, which has the major advantage of inherent plasma stability, dodging the confinement mode and Greenwald density issues that plague tokamaks. The Stellaris design is an evolution of the famous Wendelstein 7-X research stellarator at the Max Planck Institute.
While Wendelstein 7-X was not designed to produce power, it features everything from the complex coiled design and cooled divertors plus demonstrated long-term operation that a commercial reactor would need. This makes it quite likely that the coming decades we’ll be seeing the end spurt for commercial fusion power, with conceivably stellarators being the unlikely winner long before tokamaks cross the finish line.
Electricity won’t be cheaper, so it’s pointless.
Depends how you measure electricity production. For example nuclear reactors are expensive, but provide base load, so the extra cost is worthwhile. Then there is the long term cost including de-commissioning, environmental clean up and carbon reduction and lifetime costs. These will vary over the lifespan of the reactor, and some are based on political imperatives
Nuclear only has those costs because we actually do clean it up.
Coal & gas? We just let climate change be someone else’s problem.
And as for renewables, whilst the cleanup is certainly cheaper, few have been running long enough to evaluate the cost of decommissioning. Solar in particular has a lot of heavy metals in those panels.
“Nuclear only has those costs because we actually do clean it up.”
Here in Germany, we had this. We had Castor trains who brought the material to France, for refreshing.. And then came back.
It reduced the waste, which was good because we have no real storage for such waste.
The saltmine in Gorleben is only one, I think and it has trouble with water flooding the lower levels.
Existing containers must be rescued already.
Another problem with that kind of energy is that our reactors are all old and broken by now.
Also, transporting such material in 21th century is much more dangerous.
The trains could be attacked, planes or drones could crash into reactors etc.
Even back in the days environmentalists did chain themselves onto the rail roads for protest. Would be even worse now, I think.
The time for nuc. energy is over, really. Let’s forget it for good. Holding on to “good old days” makes no sense here.
“And as for renewables, whilst the cleanup is certainly cheaper, few have been running long enough to evaluate the cost of decommissioning. Solar in particular has a lot of heavy metals in those panels.”
Here in Germany, renewables aren’t doing so bad actually.
The problem is getting power from north to south and back again,
because there’s no infrastructure for this so far.
And building one is considered for ages, but citizen think it’s “ugly” while other parties think it’s too “expensive”, so no real progress had been made.
(Simply put, there’s wind on the shores and sunny weather in the south.)
There has been a big (and reasonably successful) push in recent years to develop the technology for recycling PV panels. There are several companies doing so now commercially with recovery rates on the internal materials exceeding 90%. Turns out it can be financially worthwhile to recover the valuables in the panels.
We’re not at full reuse yet as a society, but it is getting there.
Can you name any of those supposed heavy metals in solar panels ?
Lead and cadmium according to the E.P.A.
Please enlighten us how you came to that excellent foresight that “Electricity won’t be cheaper”?
if the price of electricity with fusion stays the same that is a big win: as that means beating inflation and generates energy without CO2 pollution.
and possibly an end to energy-related hegemony?
Yep these two factors would be a big deal even if the energy isn’t significantly cheaper. And it would be strange if the second-generation commercial reactors aren’t more efficient and economical than the first-generation.
Bizarre to gloom and doom over the very first viable iterations of a technology. We wouldn’t disregard air travel with the assumption that it would remain a biplane carrying a single mustachioed man forever.
Will this case of “just 25 more years” be the final one? That remains to be seen, but things have actually been moving. This is one of those notorious hard problems in physics and engineering… I would bet against China being the first to achieve it, but I have been wrong before
If you have a design for a cheap fusion reactor with larger than 3 q- factor, then well, just patent it and prove the GP wrong.
All of the best minds that ever tried to solve this could only manage to make reactors that cost tens of billions or dollars with a q-factor slightly lower than 1.
Electric grids need a stable source to operate properly. The need varies by country but especially countries with older grids or badly maintained grids (looking at California) can benefit from proper stable sources. Major drops in the grid overheat transformers, which can cause major issues, including exploding transformers. This has already caused hundreds if not more fires in California but even here in the Netherlands it’s a big problem, with companies that manage electrical grids, putting out major warnings that our grids are unstable, to the point where a government official warned us that we could expect rolling blackouts in the future. Two or three years ago we had a major one after a large transformer caught fire. Adding nuclear plants can be a major benefit to provide a clean and stable source for electricity. Not trying to rag on California but I work for a company that does environmental research and we had a big presentation on the failures of the Californian power grid over a year ago as it’s a good example on what not to do.
You are forgetting that large parts of the world still struggle to even get power at all. Cost isn’t always the problem to solve. Even if it’s the same, the increased generation capacity will improve many peoples lives.
show me the q. if q < 100 go build a fission plant instead. iter might get to 10 and they aren’t scheduled for first plasma until 2035.
A 2012 breakthrough in technology allows us to generate much higher magnetic containment fields, and the q scales with the fourth power of the strength of the field.
Some people at MIT are now designing the first prototype, and they’re so sure of the results that they’re also designing and building the first grid-scale plant.
Their prototype is scheduled to produce first plasma in 2026, and complete fusion a short time after that.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/commonwealth-fusion-systems-unveils-worlds-first-fusion-power-plant-1217
So… what you’re saying is that electricity “too cheap to meter” is just “five years away?”
Sarcasm aside, Dr. Robert Bussard’s “whiffle ball” demonstrated functionality justifying a grid-scale plant design a decade or more ago, just before his death. I think the US Navy is funding his group now, and they seem to have gone silent…. Meaning either they’ve produced zilch, or we’re within sight of a future fleet of fusion ships and planes.
Bussard walked away from the magnetic confinement stuff saying it produced “useful science” while judging it would never be commercially viable.
So far, history supports Bussard’s position.
Around 1980 after I excitedly read a magazine article about fusion power plants, my father remarked to me that fusion power was 20 years away and had been for the last 20 years. Sounds like things have slowed down. Now it’s 25 years away.
i used to follow polywell but updates are few and far between. last i heard they were using computer models to validate a final design for a demo reactor. at some point they will put out a new paper and start looking for funding. dr park is a bit more cautious than bussard was. bussard just wanted to build the thing, park wanted to test high beta first, which he did, and then wanted to use computer models to optimize the final design. polywell is a lot more suitable for a power plant than a ginormous tokamak or complex stellarator with a simple design that would be fairly easy to mass produce.
but i mostly lump them with the other startups in that they spend most of their time looking for funding and make lofty promises that never come to fruition. they are important though because a reactor at the scale of iter will never be economically viable as a power plant due to its scale and complexity. so if just one of the startup designs have a solution to that, it will make rolling out power plants a lot faster and cheaper. part of the “fusion is always 20 years away” cliche is that is about the amount of time it takes to go from ground breaking to first plasma on a tokamak. iter->demo->powerplant requires 3. on that time table, and assuming nothing goes so wrong you need another one, we should have fusion by 2075. il be dead then.
In many ways, nuclear fusion is just a way to make nuclear power palatable to boomer hippies. Ironically they will no longer be a concern by the time we get there.
Citation needed.
Verification by independant bodies needed.
I want to be excited i really do, but i’ve let my hopes get raised before.
So a communist country making outlandish claims about things that are just 25 years away. Newsworthiness is at the same level as someone publishing their plans for the Star Trek transporter beam by 2050.
You beat me to it. My less pithy reposte below is now redundant. :(
“Communist”. Sigh. To be fair, it’s pretty much a capitalist country by now, as well.
It has learned western concepts and may beat the US in its own game soon.
Bad labor rights have both nations, too. But China has cleaner streets, a healthcare system and intact public transport.
And both are into warefare and into destabilizing the world to their own advantage.
And here we are in Europe and wonder what’s wrong with everyone. USA, Russia, China, North Korea..
They’re all into world domination in one form of another. But that’s another story. Sigh.
Yeah. Counties that aspire to world domination are the worst. Thats totally never been a European thing ever. And healthcare? Man the UK is like the best. And pollution? Germany has that in the bag. No issue at all about where much of Europe gets its fuel from either. You guys got it figured out perfectly.
Yeah you can tell they aren’t communist because they aren’t all starving on account of murdering every single kulak farmer en masse
“So a communist country making outlandish claims about things that are just 25 years away. ”
The eastern countries have this tradition in planning on the long run, as
They think in decades rather than months or years, far as I heard.
Also in terms of making business or becoming market leader.
In early 80s they had plans for the 2000s, already.
You know, there are, I dunno, about, oh, 40 to 80 million Chinese who might disagree with you about your assessment of China’s long term planning had they not actually starved to death during “The Great Leap Forward” and other “long range plans” China tries to pretend never happened.
Also, you know, clean streets was probably not what people were expecting when totally nothing happened in Beijing from June 3 through June 5 of 1989.
And they totally had COVID locked down as an issue back in 2019 and definitely didn’t arrest people who were reporting an emerging disease back then.
Their human rights record is also flawless, just ask them.
But seriously. They’re going to have commercial fusion reactors in 25 years and it’s the US who’s messed up?
So … China says they’re going to be in commercial production with something by 2050 and that becomes article worthy?
How about every time OpenAI says AGI will be here Real Soon Now?
Domestic robots for everyone?
Tesla and colonies on Mars?
This is just silly. A little research on that countries history with announcing 5 and 10 year plans should be in order.
NYSEG, NewYork State Electric and Gas raised there rates 43% in 2024. Even if electricity is cheaper the twats running the show will still charge more for it. ESAD NYSEG.
“All we need is $10 billion and 20 years” I have been hearing since the 1960’s. By pure coincidence the time scale is always the length of a career.
This ^^^
Plasma stability is one thing, but what about the tritium fusion fuel? Tonnes would be required per year but world production is at the level of 100s of grams at best (and thats mostly all earmarked for strategic purposes).
ITER was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of tritium breeding, but this has been dropped due to the immense toxicity of the process – turns out that handling neutron irradiated beryllium isn’t very popular.
I’d love to see some reporting on alternative fusion projects, not just the same D-T reactors which will never be feasible because there isn’t any fuel to run them at even remotely commercial levels.
Nuclear fusion: The energy source of the future! And always will be!
Which has been true for 75 years…
Recent modest technology updates raise our expectations enough to justify hope (and further funding), but it’s hard not to be a skeptic after the better part of a century of concerted research has failed to come up with a viable solution.
Keep the research going … Who knows. But until there is a major breakthrough (ie, energy out is 50% greater than going in and running for a 30 days straight…) , it is still just a pipe dream. And maybe some other cheap reliable energy source will pop out of the woodwork in the meantime. Meanwhile, nuclear fission, coal/gas/oil will keep the world running.
The term “Stellerator” is a bit confusing – it is also used to mean the mm-wave device used to heat the plasma (to the temperature of a star – hence the term). This could be the spin-off that delivers big benefits, as it can be used to make holes in the ground much cheaper and deeper, for geothermal power almost anywhere. Also tunnelling for underground power cables could be more cost-effective.