Fusion breakthrough will lead to investments, but its use won’t come overnight 

The dramatic and historic breakthrough on fusion energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is expected to bring an injection of cash into the clean energy source — even though it’s still many years away from becoming a mainstream power source.  

“I think that this will encourage a lot of people who realize that fusion is a very, very important part of the future,” said Chris Gadomski, head of nuclear research at BloombergNEF when asked about the potential for putting more money in. 

The Energy Department announced on Tuesday that for the first time, a federal laboratory was able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than scientists put into it.  

Nuclear fusion refers to the process of fusing atoms together to produce energy. The type of nuclear power that is used commercially today does the opposite, getting its energy from splitting atoms apart.

Both are carbon-free energy sources, but nuclear fusion is not expected to generate the same challenges related to storing hazardous waste. As a result, the Biden administration and others touted the breakthrough as a huge development in the search for cleaner forms of energy for the future.  

The news has sparked chatter about investments in the technology, and speculation over how long it will take to bring it to the market.  

“This shows that it can be done,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said during a press conference. “That threshold being crossed allows them to start working on better lasers, more efficient lasers, better containment capsules et cetera — the things that are necessary to allow it to be modularized and taken to commercial scale.”  

The announcement generated enthusiasm from the private sector, including from investors.  

“We’ve been pretty bullish on fusion for a few years now … but I think for other investors, it’s just also getting them kind of interested, especially with all the media attention,” said Phil Larochelle, who leads fusion investments at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. 

Mike Farrell, vice president for inertial fusion technologies at defense and technology company General Atomics described the announcement as “providing the impetus” for both government and private investment.  

Others, however, voiced skepticism that the breakthrough would quickly lead to fusion becoming a reliable form of energy. Some suggested it could take decades.  

Gadomski said that while the latest development may stimulate capital flow, after listening to a technical panel on the specifics of the experiment, he thought the announcement overall would do “very little” to advance commercial fusion  

“This doesn’t seem like it’s got any hope for being a replicable technology that can be commercialized,” Gadomski said of the Energy Department’s experiment.  

“I think this will carry much more weight if they replicated the experiment and they do get a gain again, because who knows? Maybe they just got lucky,” he said. 

During the press conference, Granholm highlighted the administration’s goal of commercial fusion within a decade, but Kim Budil, director of the Livermore laboratory, said it could be multiple decades away.  

Industry estimates also vary, with some echoing the Biden administration’s take that it could take a decade, and others including Farrell saying even prototypes could be 30 years away.  

“We probably moved the timeline in by one, maybe two decades, but the engineering challenge is still quite large,” Farrell said.  

While Gadomski said he believes fusion plants could exist in 10 years, he added that the size of the machine used in the Energy Department’s experiment makes it difficult to repeat.  

“That technology may not be able to shrink small enough so that it becomes a viable power generating technology,” he said, noting that some private companies are instead working on smaller technology.  

On the other hand, Larochelle, with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said he believed a lotcan be transferred between different types of technology, as companies pursue different methods to achieve fusion.  

“A lot of this plasma science and fusion stuff, some of it is specific to the different concepts …but a lot of it is cross-cutting,” he said.  

In order to get fusion power to the general public, Gadomski said, fusion companies will still have to show that they have a legitimate way to generate commercial electric power from fusion and then sell such fusion plants to utilities.  

“It’s not getting to the moon, but it is like … getting a person into space and bringing them back alive,” said Andrew Sowder, a senior technical executive at electricity research organization EPRI.  

Duke Energy said it was “tracking” nuclear fusion along with other emerging zero and low-carbon technologies.  

“We are excited to hear more about this development and how it may impact the electric utility industry in the coming decades,” the power company said in a statement.