Can The Quest For Clean Energy Finally Help Tackle The Climate Crisis?

Topline

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have managed to get more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than they put in to trigger it, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday, a major breakthrough experts told Forbes is a huge step towards developing a near-limitless source of clean energy that is probably still decades away and will arrive too late to tackle the most pressing problems in the fight against climate change.

A technician reviews an optic inside the preamplifier support structure at the Lawrence Livermore … [+] National Laboratory in Livermore, California, in 2012.

Associated Press

Key Facts

Scientists have eyed nuclear fusion—the star-powering process that combines lighter elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier ones and releases energy—for decades but have struggled to achieve a net energy gain due to the energy intensive conditions needed to trigger fusion reactions.

Achieving net energy gain is a “huge milestone” for fusion research and “paves the way for practical fusion energy,” Troy Carter, a plasma physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Forbes.

Developing a machine that can harness fusion would give us a “major new clean energy source,” explained Todd Allen, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, though he noted this will take years as there are “some major challenges” to be tackled like keeping the reaction going for long periods of time and capturing the energy affordably.

Aneeqa Khan, a research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester, praised the “promising and exciting result” but told Forbes it doesn’t account for the energy needed to run the lasers containing the fusion reaction or other inefficiencies or losses in the process, all of which must be accounted for when designing a viable commercial plant.

“We are still a way off commercial fusion,” Khan said, which means fusion “cannot help us with the climate crisis now.”

Ajay Gambhir, a senior research fellow at the Imperial College London Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, concurred, telling Forbes it has historically taken electricity generation technologies “several decades to go from lab-scale breakthrough to commercialization” and that commercial breakeven for fusion “could be several years away,” beyond a point when analyses suggest electricity generation should be decarbonized.

News Peg

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved fusion ignition on December 5, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday, marking the first time in history that a controlled fusion experiment produced more energy than was used to trigger it. “Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Tuesday, saying the development would “strengthen our national security” by improving the U.S.’s nuclear capabilities and “moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society.”

Contra

The timescales involved with developing fusion as an energy source are too big to help with the most pressing climate concerns, which involve the immediate reduction of carbon emissions. “Fusion is already too late to deal with the climate crisis,” Khan told Forbes. “We are already facing the devastation from climate change on a global scale, looking at the floods in Pakistan, the droughts in China and Europe this summer alone.” Experts warn tackling these issues and carbon reductions cannot wait years or decades to begin and Gambhir said multiple analyses on achieving net-zero by 2050 show global electricity would be fully decarbonized by about 2040. Khan stressed it is important to have both long- and short-term strategies, adding we should make use of existing low carbon technologies like nuclear fission and renewables while “investing in fusion for the long term.”

What We Don’t Know

How long fusion will take. It has been a long running joke within the field that fusion has been just a few years away for decades. All the experts Forbes spoke to underscored the importance of the finding but highlighted major technical and scientific challenges lying ahead to make fusion viable. Allen, who told Forbes he is not a good predictor when assessing when fusion might be ready, said he guessed it was “still a couple of decades” away. Significant amounts of private and public funding could push this forward quicker, he added. Carter told Forbes it was more important to speak of “the will to invest and innovate” than of time, pointing to recent White House initiatives promoting fusion and significant private investment in the sector. Some initiatives aim to develop pilot plants on the scale of a decade or less, he added.

Key Background

Scientists have pursued nuclear fusion for decades, eying it as a potentially abundant green energy source. It is considered green as it does not emit carbon and though it still produces waste—some byproducts are radioactive—this is manageable and far less dangerous than that produced by nuclear fission. It offers a nearly limitless energy supply owing to the abundance of the fuel used—the primary fuel is a heavy form of hydrogen found in sea water—that Carter said could “provide enough energy for the globe for many hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years.”