A company based in the United States just got one step closer to making nuclear fusion a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), an MIT offshoot, just inked a deal with a Japanese producer of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) in the largest deal of its kind in history. The contract is going to bring the company’s tokamak fusion device a step closer to commercial reality at a pivotal point in the global race to unlock the technology hailed as the holy grail of clean energy.
This specialized tape is a critical material for making tokamaks – which control plasma with ultrapowerful magnets – durable, effective, and achievable at smaller and therefore more affordable scales. “HTS tape allows engineers to build stronger electromagnets within a compact footprint,” Interesting Engineering recently reported. “These intense magnetic fields trap high-energy plasma inside a far smaller vessel, dramatically reducing construction costs and engineering complexity.”
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers our own sun, has long been touted as something of a silver bullet for the clean energy sector as it is essentially limitless, considerably more powerful than nuclear fission, and leaves behind no hazardous nuclear waste. While scientists have been working toward achieving the process here on Earth for about a century, the technology remained something of a thought experiment ripped from the pages of science fiction until the last couple of decades.
Now, the technological breakthroughs are piling up, and commercial nuclear fusion seems like it finally may truly be just around the corner. And companies like CFS are a huge part of the reason why.
Historically, nuclear fusion research projects have been so gargantuan and so costly that only rich governments – or coalitions of rich governments, in the case of ITER – could orchestrate and maintain such projects. Moreover, not only were early fusion experiments extremely expensive, but they were never going to make money. But as the science behind nuclear fusion has improved to the point where commercially viable nuclear fusion now seems like an issue of when and not if, private enterprises are now getting involved. Now even Wall Street is getting involved, indicating that the sector shows serious promise for return on investment sooner rather than later.
Increased competition and diversification of the playing field have catalyzed technological advances and breakthroughs by labs and startups around the globe. It doesn’t hurt that some of the tech sector’s biggest figures – and deepest pockets – are major proponents of the technology. CFS, for example, is backed by none other than Bill Gates.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is also a vocal advocate for and financial supporter of nuclear fusion research as a critical solution to the energy monster that his own company is helping to create through the proliferation of large language models and data center hyperscaling. Altman has admitted that the world simply doesn’t have enough energy to support the tech sector’s growth trajectory unless we develop new energy sources in the immediate future.
“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It motivates us to go invest more in fusion.”
The AI boom is not just catalyzing the race for commercial nuclear fusion, however. The integration of AI tools could also be integral to overcoming some of the most critical barriers to achieving and sustaining nuclear fusion reactions here on Earth. For example, a new machine learning tool called Diag2Diag is being developed to help monitor and control plasma in fusion experiments, and particularly to avoid what is known as the Edge Localized Mode (ELM), a condition of instability that rapidly breaks down the materials around the plasma, causing major issues for huge and costly fusion plasma experiments.
It’s unclear whether CFS will be the firm that breaks through into commercial success and changes the energy sector forever – but it is exemplary of a very exciting and quickly evolving sector that could bring about a sea change in the way that we create energy – and not a moment too late, as AI and geopolitics place unprecedented strain on global energy resources as well as our changing climate.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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