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“Scientists announced Tuesday that they have for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it — a major breakthrough in the decades-long quest to harness the process that powers the sun… The breakthrough will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other officials said…
“Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike [nuclear fission] reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.” AP News
Both sides celebrate the achievement but caution that investment into existing technologies must continue:
“This is not exciting because of the absolute energy released — that was small, only enough to boil two or three kettles… This is exciting because it’s the first scientific proof that fusion can produce more energy out than is put in, also known as ‘net energy gain’. If the numbers check out, the experiment generated 54% more energy than was put into it…
“Releasing energy through fusion reactions isn’t unusual in the wider universe: the sun produces 4bn kilograms’ worth of pure energy from fusion reactions every single second. But, despite decades of hopes pinned on fusion as a clean and plentiful energy source on Earth, no one has ever shown it can release more energy than is needed to set it off – pretty fundamental for a power source. That is, until now.”
Arthur Turrell, The Guardian
“This is a pretty remarkable breakthrough. We may finally be on the path toward workable fusion power… in the scheme of things another 10 or 20 years to make this into an electricity generating system doesn’t seem all that far away. Now that we’ve apparently shown it’s possible there will be a renewed rush to make it better and to make it practical.”
John Sexton, Hot Air
“[The chances of converting this] energy on the grid, much less energy on the grid that is economically competitive with other forms of energy, is slim to none in the next few decades or even the next half-century, I would say…
“One can argue that we should spend more government money on fusion, but is fusion above all the other things the government could do—improving the efficiency of our grid system, helping improve energy storage? Is fusion the best bang for your buck? I would tend to argue no… We’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of effort, and no one has gotten to square one, where you can say, ‘OK, make the energy and make me a cup of tea.’ I just don’t think that we can say this is the path forward until someone has a working prototype.”
Charles Seife, Slate
“The fuel for nuclear fission is already abundant — it’s about 2 million times more energy dense than hydrocarbons like oil or gas. Waste storage for spent nuclear fuel is a political problem, not a technical one: all the nuclear waste in America, if stacked up, can fit in a football field. Plus, fission is already one of the safest forms of energy ever crafted by the hand of man — second only to solar…
“This isn’t to detract from the scientific achievement at [the] National Ignition Facility, nor is it an argument against fusion. We should continue to explore its potential because societies that cease to invest in their own future cease to survive… [But] For now we have fission. We should work on figuring out how to liberate the atom from the regulatory shackles that have imprisoned it and how to become the kind of country that can build advanced engineering projects again. If we don’t, how will we ever achieve fusion?”
Emmet Penney, Spectator World
Other opinions below.
Dated But Relevant: “Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act pledged to invest $369 billion in so-called ‘green’ energy sources such as wind and solar power over the next decade… America already poured almost $450 billion, even more than the amount provided by Biden’s legislation, into ‘green’ energy between 2010 and 2019. Yet solar and wind power provided only 1.5 and 3.4 percent, respectively, of the energy produced in the U.S. in 2021…
“Perhaps the saddest part of the unending funneling of taxpayers’ money toward ‘green’ pet projects is that it distracts attention and research resources from more-promising energy sources… Investment in fusion power has gotten less than 1 percent of the funding that ‘green’ sources have gotten, receiving only $4.4 billion between 2010 and 2019… Biden’s bill provides no additional money for nuclear-fusion research.”
Andrew Follett, National Review
“Government’s proper role is to fund basic research of the sort that produced Tuesday’s breakthrough and which businesses have little incentive to do. Private companies do a far better job of taking discoveries out of the lab to the market…
“A bipartisan complaint is that the U.S. spends too little on research and development, which has the country trailing China. That’s not true. U.S. businesses in 2019 spent nearly eight times more on R&D than the federal government. The U.S. as a whole spent a third more as a share of GDP on R&D than China…
“China spends more subsidizing politically favored companies, but its industrial policy has reduced productivity, as a new study in the National Bureau of Economic Research shows. The fusion breakthrough shows that America still leads the world in innovation, and that what the government does best is basic research, not picking winners and losers.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Ambivalent environmentalists are now frequently conceding that keeping fission plants open and generating low-carbon energy is better than closing them, but 12 fission power plants in the U.S. have nonetheless been shut down since 2012. Only one new U.S. fission reactor has gone online in the entire twenty-first century: a unit at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee. And that took 43 years to build…
“If the excited physicists are right about the future of fusion-based electricity, we’ll start to see fusion power plants in about the next 25 years… It’s not for nothing that the joke about fusion has for decades been: ‘It’s thirty years away, and it always will be.’ But this is the counterintuitive truth to keep in mind: Even if commercial viability for fusion takes another 30 years, that’s still shorter than [the] 43 it took to get the fission plant in Tennessee.”
Mike Pearl, New Republic
“Governments should invest in research but remain technology-neutral as much as possible, providing incentives to deploy any zero-carbon energy source that can help at a competitive cost — immediately…
“That will likely result in accelerated investment in wind and solar farms along with facilities that store energy for times when nature does not cooperate. Power plants that can burn hydrogen — via traditional combustion, not nuclear fusion — or natural gas plants that sequester the emissions they emit might be necessary to back up these renewables…
“A renewables-heavy grid will require massive high-capacity power lines to zip electricity from where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing to where people need it. Advanced fission reactors and machines that pull carbon dioxide directly out of the air might also help in the decarbonization effort. While fusion physics advances, it is crucial that government and private investors not lose sight of the pressing challenge that humanity faces now.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
