Nuclear fusion could produce electricity within a decade, backers say

A nuclear fusion reactor creating clean power that could help stem climate change by replicating the process of the sun could be complete within four years and producing electricity within ten, its backers have said.

The timeline would put the Sparc project, by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and private spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, ahead of several projects around the world attempting nuclear fusion, in which energy is produced by fusing together atoms, rather than splitting them apart.

Nuclear fusion has long been the holy grail of energy production, because it holds the hope of abundant, safe, non-polluting power.

In theory, nuclear fusion reactors can take up a fraction of the space of renewables such as wind or solar, and produce a power supply that is not interrupted by changing weather. They would also produce much less toxic waste than fission technology, and rely mainly on seawater to run.

But scientists have so far been unable to produce a reactor that produces more energy than it uses.

Whoever manages it first will have a head start on a market that could boom as countries race to decarbonise swiftly in the coming decades.

“Nuclear fusion has so many positive benefits to society, providing baseload-continuous electricity on the scale that the world needs, and carbon free,” said Professor Ian Chapman, the chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).

Scientists involved in the Sparc project say they have demonstrated their reactor is theoretically viable and are now pursuing what would be the quickest timetable of all nuclear fusion projects. Once constructed and fully tested, the company says it could begin generating electricity within the next decade.

“We’re really focused on how you can get to fusion power as quickly as possible,” Bob Mumgaard, Commonwealth Fusion’s co-founder told the New York Times.

One of Sparc’s closest competitors is the British Tokamak Energy system, a more compact reactor, which its developers say will be more efficient than its rivals.

Tokamak Energy, a spin-out of Oxford’s Culham fusion research laboratory, says it is working to a similar timescale to Sparc, and is significantly ahead of the government’s own nuclear fusion project, run by the UK AEA. Mr Chapman said Sparc’s timeline was “very ambitious”.

All are moving far ahead of the major international nuclear fusion project, Iter, a joint initiative between the EU, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, which aims to produce a fusion reaction by 2035.

The £20bn project currently under construction in southern France is one of the biggest joint science endeavours ever undertaken.

Juan Matthews, from the Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University, said both it and Sparc had major efficiency advantages over Iter.

Both use more compact, spherical reactors, closer to an apple or a satsuma than the traditional doughnut. That makes them more efficient, but also means they can be placed at more locations, such as near major cities.

“This is steady, hard progress that is being made,” said Mr Matthews.

But despite the long-term potential, fusion technology is unlikely to be fully up and running on a commercial scale in time to contribute to keeping warming below 1.5C in the next few decades, the ultimate aim of the Paris Agreement.

And, Mr Matthews cautioned despite the ambitious timetable, Sparc is likely to see predictable delays to its ambitions. “From experience, it’ll slip a few years.”