POWER May 2023 - 16

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Fusion Energy Reaches
Prime Time
Over the last three years, electricity generation from fusion has moved from the
realm of science fiction to the brink of serious development. A lot has happened, but
challenges remain before fusion arrives on the grid.
Thomas W. Overton
or close to a century, electricity generation
from fusion remained the
stuff of science fiction, little more
than a plot point that served to separate
the present from the future. All that
came to a dramatic end over the past
three years, as a cascading series of scientific,
technical, business, and political
developments yanked fusion out of the
labs and onto the front pages.
Fusion scientists have been quietly
F
working toward practical electricity generation
since the 1950s (see " Fusion
Energy Is Coming, and Maybe Sooner
than You Think " in the June 2020 issue of
POWER). These incremental advances
reached a critical mass in 2021 as the
financial and political establishments
finally began seeing fusion energy as a
worthy investment-not for the distant
future but as something that could be
achieved within the next decade.
This article is intended as an update to
the 2020 piece and will review the key
events since its publication. No single
development is responsible for the dramatic
shift in attention toward fusion,
and the organization below should not
be taken as indication of relative importance,
as all of them have contributed.
Scientific Breakthroughs
While there has been continued progress
in fusion science over the past
several years, three events stand out
because of their significance in reaching
practical generation.
The first, in May 2021, took place
at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting
Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei,
China. Researchers at EAST maintained
a steady-state fusion reaction for a remarkable
1,056 seconds-almost 20
minutes. This achievement, in a device
using a design and technologies similar
to those likely to be employed by future
power plants, clearly indicates that longterm
operation is possible.
The next event took place only
16
1. The Joint European Torus (JET) at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the UK is the central
research facility of the European Fusion Programme, and the largest tokamak in the world.
Courtesy: UK Atomic Energy Authority
months later. The Joint European Torus
(JET), at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's
(UKAEA's) Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire,
is the largest fusion tokamak
in the world (Figure 1) and has held the
record for fusion power since 1997. That
record-21.7 megajoules
(MJ)-was
smashed in late 2021 with a fusion pulse
that achieved 59 MJ. The significance
of this experiment was not just in the
increased power but also because JET
has been reconfigured in recent years to
help prepare for operations on the ITER
experiment under construction in France.
The pulse was part of a dedicated experimental
campaign designed by EUROfusion,
the scientific organization that
operates JET, to apply advances from the
past several decades to ITER-relevant
conditions. Though the pulse lasted only
five seconds, the results bode well for
scaling up the approach at ITER.
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" This achievement is the result of
years-long preparation by the EUROfusion
team of researchers across Europe, "
EUROfusion Programme Manager Tony
Donné said at the time. " The record,
and more importantly the things we've
learned about fusion under these conditions
and how it fully confirms our predictions,
show that we are on the right
path to a future world of fusion energy. If
we can maintain fusion for five seconds,
we can do it for five minutes and then
five hours as we scale up our operations
in future machines. "
Put another way, the results on JET
strongly suggest that the magnetic fusion
technology being used for ITER can
produce the net energy that it is designed
to. JET is not large or powerful enough to
reach that milestone on its own, but the
much larger ITER machine will be, once it
begins operations in the 2030s.
POWER | May 2023

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POWER May 2023

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