The CEO of a nuclear fusion industry group shared a striking statistic during a meeting at the White House. Eighty-three percent of the companies his group represents expect to see commercial fusion power come online in the 2030s or before — a bold prediction for a power source with 70 years of failure behind it and no obvious path to near-term success.
Private firms have raised $3 billion in venture capital funding in 2021 alone. That means startups that have moved into this field — once the domain of governments — need to show a return on investment.
Fusion has been the holy grail of energy production for more than 50 years. It is the technology striving to replicate the physics of the sun and the stars to produce limitless clean power to run the world’s economies and societies. But the technical difficulty of producing usable electricity from the fusion of atoms (fusing them together rather than splitting them, known as fission and used by existing nuclear plants do) has proved tremendously elusive for the national laboratories run by governments and research universities. Temperatures of 100 million degrees need to be achieved, let alone engineering the first generation of nuclear fusion power stations.
Yet, a group of startups insist they can make the required breakthroughs.
An article in Grid noted: Helion Energy proclaims on its website: “We aim to have a commercial plant operational in six years.” Canada-based General Fusion set a goal of demonstrating “this new clean, safe and economical concept by the end of 2006.” Then, in 2007, the company’s homepage promised “to demonstrate this new clean, safe and economical concept by 2010.” By 2011 the company was aiming for a net gain in energy within four years, projecting that “commercialization would take place before the end of the decade.” That did not happen.
Grid also quoted Fusion Industry Association CEO Andrew Holland declaring: “The 2030s will be the decade of broad fusion deployment around the world.”
On a more sober note, Daniel Jassby, a retired nuclear physicist who spent years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a Department of Energy institute managed by Princeton University, told Grid the startups may eventually produce advances that will help shepherd in fusion power, but those results are still decades away at best.
“Fusion power absolutely cannot contribute to solving the climate crisis,” Jassby told Grid. “It is simply not possible for private industry or government-funded programs to deliver practical fusion power for many decades, and perhaps not before the end of this century.”
Mike Consol (m.consol@irei.com) is editor of Real Assets Adviser. Follow him on Twitter (@mikeconsol) and LinkedIn (linkedIn.com/in/mikeconsol) to read his latest postings. Parts of this story were excerpted from the Grid story on the subject. Read Grid’s full report here.