After the ITER project was initiated, decarbonization of global energy production has emerged as an urgent objective for industrial society. Thermonuclear fusion is an inherently safe, ubiquitous, zero-carbon source of energy on a scale large enough to power a growing global industrial economy. It is therefore appropriate to examine fusion research by asking whether economically viable fusion power plants will come on line soon enough to affect climate change. The field has seen advances in high-temperature superconductors, inexpensive high-field permanent magnets, and other materials and in modeling and manufacturing. Those new technologies enable a range of heating and confinement approaches far beyond what was conceivable at ITER’s inception.
The 2019 Final Report of the Committee on a Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes the following recommendations:
First, the United States should remain an ITER partner as the most cost-effective way to gain experience with a burning plasma at the scale of a power plant.
Second, the United States should start a national program of accompanying research and technology leading to the construction of a compact pilot plant that produces electricity from fusion at the lowest possible capital cost.1
Since the publication of that report, much has changed in the US fusion community. In the public sector, the American Physical Society’s division of plasma physics led a community planning process that identified scientific and technological opportunities in plasma physics and fusion energy sciences and provided the Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee with strategic recommendations for addressing those opportunities.2
The private sector has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in pursuing novel approaches to accelerate the deployment of commercial fusion power plants (see, for example, Physics Today, August 2018, page 25, and February 2019, page 28). The BETHE Project (Breakthroughs Enabling Thermonuclear-Fusion Energy) under the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy recently released a funding-opportunity announcement that targets transformational research “with the potential to be disruptive in the marketplace” and specifically encourages development of “timely, commercially viable fusion energy.”
ITER will make important contributions to the mission of deploying commercially viable fusion. And public, private, and partnership groups are aggressively pursuing ways to accelerate commercial deployment. New designs may eliminate the physics challenges cited in the article by Richard Hawryluk and Hartmut Zohm.
ITER will not be on the critical path for commercial deployment, and the answer to when we will have commercial fusion is this: sooner than you think.
