Opinion – Rodrigo Tavares: Nuclear Fusion in 2025?

In order to expiate the guilt and appease our internal fires, humanity launches itself in the search for totalitarian solutions that save us from ourselves. For centuries, finding the Holy Grail was a profession of faith and the expedient for the redemption of sins. For decades, the use of violence and political oppression were justified by the need to build a socioeconomic order based on the principles of common ownership of the means of production, egalitarianism and the absence of social classes.

And now that humanity faces the technical possibility of extinction due to climate change, we are looking for a new universal and radical solution that overcomes governmental pettiness and individual impasses. To face climate change, the question is: how can we have access to cheap, unlimited and green energy?

Solar, wind, nuclear, green hydrogen? None of the possible answers generate comfort. Princeton University has released the “Net-Zero America” ​​study, the first to model in depth US energy needs through 2050, and neither scenario is optimistic. We will live in the dark if we continue on our current trajectory.

The most revolutionary solution to solving humanity’s energy problems lies in nuclear fusion. But the science is so complex that most physicists look at this possibility in a joking way. The Princeton study completely ignored it. “I’ve been hearing for 30 years that nuclear fusion will be developed in ten years,” a Portuguese professor of physics told the column, smiling.

Fusion is the process that powers stars like the sun and makes it possible to generate a clean, safe and nearly unlimited long-term source of energy on Earth. It corresponds to the joining of atomic nuclei, a process inverse to what is at the base of current nuclear reactors, characterized by the separation of atomic nuclei from radioactive elements. Fusion is powered by water and can produce large volumes of energy without emission of carbon.

Since the 1950s, coalitions of governments and scientists have been developing imperial projects aimed at testing the feasibility of nuclear fusion as an energy source. All in embryonic and experimental stages. The best known is the Iter reactor (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), located in France, whose construction began in 2010. The experiment joins the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, China, the United States and South Korea. A scientist from Iter, interviewed by CNN Portugal, said he believed that fusion could be within reach, at an industrial level, in 40 to 50 years. Iter is “humanity’s biggest project ever in scientific terms”, he concluded.

But there are those who believe that we won’t have to wait half a century. Last week, also in Princeton, one of the most senior employees of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) gave a private presentation to 40 people about the plans of the company, created from MIT. The objective is to achieve the merger in three years.

The company uses high-temperature superconducting electromagnet technology and argues that it is much cheaper and more effective than the low-temperature superconductors used by Iter. While the development of the first option costs around US$ 2 billion, the second has a budget of US$ 50 billion, from public coffers. The high-temperature hardware and technology allow you to create much stronger magnetic fields, with an infrastructure that is 40 times smaller.

CFS is a startup created in 2018. Its initial goal was to capitalize. Hit target. It made a $1.8 billion fundraising round, the largest ever held in the state of Massachusetts (where Harvard, Tufts and MIT are located), with capital from American billionaires, global VC funds, Asian sovereign funds, a multinational European energy and European pension funds. The names were revealed to the public, in a private capacity.

The second goal, scheduled for 2021, was to successfully demonstrate a superconducting high-temperature magnet (HTS) producing an energy field with a force of 20 tesla, the most powerful of its kind. Hit target.

The next target, scheduled for 2025, is to produce energy through nuclear fusion in a commercially viable way. This will be achieved with the development of the Sparc, a fusion energy device that can create a plasma field, producing more energy than it consumes. “The name Sparc was inspired by Marvel’s Iron Man ‘arc reactor’,” said the executive. Achievable goal? The company is optimistic about the scientific results, but is concerned about current bottlenecks in supply chains that are difficult to predict and control.

From 2030, the company wants to develop a nuclear fusion plant, called ARC, and start injecting energy into the electricity grid. The CFS industrial center is under construction in a small town about 50 km from Boston. It will be from there that clean energy will be produced that will be sold to major consumers on the planet. Thousands of small nuclear fusion plants will be built by CFS in the coming decades.

Obviously, anything can go wrong. But if it works, it will be a startup and not the biggest powers to solve humanity’s biggest problem. It will be science and not politics. The world will be green and not high carbon intensity. And the US will regain geopolitical strength, delaying the shift in the axis of power to Asia.