In 1952, a machine with a funny name and a funny shape was zapped to life in the mountains of New Mexico. The Perhapsatron, a doughnut-shaped glass tube surrounded by magnets, was one of the world’s first nuclear fusion devices. Its name reflected the feelings of its creator, James Tuck, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory: “Perhaps it will work and perhaps it won’t.”
For a long time, that’s how fusion was. Perhaps we could use the process that powers the sun to produce clean, abundant energy on Earth. Perhaps it would help us move past fossil fuels and global warming. Perhaps, or perhaps not.
Recently, though, in talking with dozens of people across the fusion world — start-up founders, investors, scientists at government labs — I’ve been hearing many fewer perhapses. There’s a confidence that commercial fusion is at last within striking distance, a prospect that I explored recently for The Times.
Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of the fusion company TAE Technologies, summarized where we are on the mountain: “The fog has cleared. We know where the peak is. We obviously have a journey still. We think we know how to ascend the last steps.”
What cleared the fog? You may have heard about a couple recent breakthroughs, like when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California produced more fusion energy than the energy in the incoming laser beams for a tiny moment in 2022. Behind those are advances on several fronts: Better computer modeling, to design better reactors. Better technology and better materials, to push the limits of what we can build.
But also, more people and more companies are putting in the work, and there’s more money, to construct prototypes and test out ideas — “blood, sweat and tears,” as Ben Levitt, vice president of research and development at the fusion start-up Zap Energy, put it.
Let’s be clear: Nobody has achieved the really big breakthrough yet, namely, a machine that generates more fusion energy than it takes to run, and in a way that can work in a commercial power plant. A handful of companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and General Fusion, say they’re close.
Even after their technology gets to that point, there’s plenty more they’ll need to do before their reactors can become safe, reliable, affordable providers of electricity. Price in particular is a question mark.
“I don’t think anyone knows enough about the economics of their plants to give you a number that’s not disingenuous right now,” said Benj Conway, Zap’s president and co-founder.
One reason it’s so hard to make predictions about the fusion age is that we’re still not sure what the best fusion device will even look like. A tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine Commonwealth is building? A giant laser, like Livermore Lab’s? Or one of the many other shapes and concepts that other start-ups are working on?
Each type of device has its own alluring pluses and dismaying minuses. But given how expensive these machines are to build, there simply isn’t enough money out there to pursue them all in equal measure. “There is a need, I think, for things to focus,” said Richard Buttery, director of the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego.
In Europe and China, governments are working more narrowly to develop a particular kind of reactor. “The advantage of that is that they are steaming ahead,” Buttery told me. The disadvantage, he said, is they might end up missing out on the approach that proves most effective, the one that really changes the world — once, of course, it gets past all the perhapses.
More coverage of nuclear power:
Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Three Mile Island, Notorious in Nuclear Power’s Past, May Herald Its Future.
U.S. Approves Billions in Aid to Restart Michigan Nuclear Plant.
Saudi Arabia is a ‘wrecking ball’ at global climate talks
As U.N. climate talks, known as COP29, enter their final week in Baku, Azerbaijan, and G20 leaders gather in Brazil, diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, are working to foil any agreement that renews a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, negotiators said.
Negotiators say it’s part of a yearlong campaign by Saudi Arabia to stymie an agreement made last year by 200 nations to move away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
Diplomats inside the rooms in Baku said the current Saudi opposition was unlike anything they had seen. It is taking the form of procedural objections that have blocked almost every set of talks, whether on carbon markets, decarbonization, or scientific research. Saudi diplomats have blocked negotiating texts, some of which were years in the making, from being allowed to move forward and, in at least one case, flatly refused to join meetings. — Lisa Friedman
More coverage from COP29:
Negotiators are still far apart: As nations try to agree on a plan to provide potentially trillions of dollars to developing countries suffering from the effects of climate change, divisions remain over how much money should be made available, what kind of financing efforts should count toward the overall goal and how recipient countries should gain access to the funds. — David Gelles and Brad Plumer
A global fund for climate disasters: A long-awaited fund designed to help lower-income countries respond to natural disasters is finally taking shape. Wealthy nations agreed to create the fund at the 2022 climate summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, after decades of resistance. Last year, a group of nations, including the United States and the European Union, made the first financial commitments. Now, the fund has a leader and is looking to start distributing money within the next year. — David Gelles
Democrats arrive and try to calm nerves: Donald Trump’s election has cast a pall over the negotiations, putting U.S. representatives at COP29, most of them Democrats, in an especially awkward position.
“Effective in January, the United States government will be defecting from any position of responsibility,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on Saturday at the talks in Baku, Azerbaijan. “But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be considerable activity coming out of the United States.” — David Gelles
China’s soaring emissions are upending climate politics: For many years, wealthy places like the United States and Europe have had the biggest historical responsibility for global warming and have been tasked with taking the lead in stopping it.
China’s astonishing rise is upending that dynamic.
Over the past three decades, China has built more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants as its economy has grown more than 40-fold. The country has become by far the largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Last year, China for the first time passed Europe as the second-largest historical emitter, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by Carbon Brief, a climate research site. — Brad Plumer and Mira Rojanasakul
A novel to make sense of the climate summit in an oil nation: Perhaps the perfect book to capture the dissonance of a petrostate hosting a climate summit is Lydia Kiesling’s 2023 novel “Mobility.” It begins and ends in Baku, following its antiheroine, Bunny Glenn, from her adolescence as a State Department brat in the 1990s, when Baku was at the frontier of a post-Soviet oil boom.
To glean some perspective on this strange moment in climate diplomacy, I spoke to Kiesling about the book and Baku’s place in history. — Coral Davenport
More climate news:
The goal of keeping global temperatures increases to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times is now “deader than a doornail,” according to climate scientists who spoke to The Guardian.
E&E News explains four things Trump can and can’t do to boost oil and gas.
Heatmap News talked to climate conservatives who are excited about the next Trump administration, in part because of hopes of cutting red tape.
Thanks for being a subscriber.
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here. And follow The New York Times on Instagram, Threads, Facebook and TikTok at @nytimes.
Reach us at [email protected]. We read every message, and reply to many!
The post Inching Toward a Fusion Energy Future appeared first on New York Times.
