Tech

No, Fusion Energy Won’t Be ‘Infinite’


“It’s not a question I often get asked,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies. People are more likely to question how he plans to heat the plasma in his reactor to 1 billion degrees Celsius, up from the 75 million degrees the company has demonstrated so far. But the questions are intertwined, he said.

Those extreme temperatures are necessary because TAE uses boron as a fuel, along with hydrogen, which Binderbauer thinks will ultimately simplify the fusion reactor and make a power plant cheaper to build. He places costs somewhere between fission and renewables — roughly where the Princeton modelers say it should be. He pointed out that while fusion plants would be expensive to build, the fuel would be extremely cheap. In addition, the lower risk of accidents and less high levels of radioactive waste mean the removal of costly regulations that have increased the cost of fission plants.

Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a subsidiary of MIT, said he was pleased to see Princeton’s model, as he thought their tokamak could circumvent those cost claims. That claim relies heavily on a super-strong magnet that the company hopes will allow it to operate tokamaks — and thus power plants — on a smaller scale, saving money. CFS is building a miniature prototype of the fusion design in Massachusetts that will include most of the components needed for a working plant. “You can actually go see it, touch it, and look at the machinery,” he said.

Nicholas Hawker, CEO of First Light Fusion, an inertial fusion company, published his own book economic analysis for fusion energy in 2020 and was surprised to discover that the biggest cost factor was not in the fusion chamber and its unusual materials, but in the capacitors and turbines that any power plant need also.

However, Hawker expects a slower acceleration than some of his peers. “The first plants will always fail,” he said, and the industry will need significant government support—just as the solar industry has done for the past two decades. That’s why he thinks it’s good that more governments and companies are trying different approaches: It increases the chances of certain technologies surviving.

Schwartz agrees. “It would be strange if the universe only allowed one form of fusion energy to exist,” he said. That diversity is important, he said, because otherwise the industry runs the risk of finding science only to push itself into an uneconomical corner. Both nuclear fission and solar panels have gone through similar stages of testing before in their technological orbits. Over time, the two converged into a single design—photovoltaics and giant pressurized water reactors seen around the world—built around the globe.

For fusion, however, the first thing to do first: science. It may not work anytime soon. Maybe 30 years from now. But Ward, despite his caution about the limits of fusion on the grid, maintains that the research has paid off in its own right, creating new advances in basic science and in the creation of materials. new. “I still think it was totally worth it,” he said.

Updated on 4-11-2023, 1:10 p.m. EDT: An earlier version of this article wrongly referred to TAE’s reactor design as tokamak.

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