Getting Fusion to the Grid – Differences in Approaches Between Fusion Companies and Research Labs
Understanding the timeline for fusion power and the factors shaping it.
In our blog last week entitled “The Elephant in the Fusion Room is…When?”, we explored the question of “When will fusion provide power to the grid?” In response to a question from one of our subscribers, let’s look further into this subject. In this article, we will define what it means when we ask, “When will fusion provide power to the grid?”, as well as explore some common misconceptions regarding the development of fusion energy and the extent to which these confuse (rather than clarify) the timeline for “When will fusion provide power to the grid.”
What do we mean by “When will fusion provide power to the grid?”
If you search the internet for “when will fusion provide power to the grid,” you will find many answers, depending on what is meant. Here are some examples of what you are likely to find (from earliest to latest):
2028: This is the year that Helion has contracted to provide power to Microsoft from their first fusion power plant, which is scheduled for deployment in 2028.
Early 2030s: This is when TAE Technologies has stated it believes it will commercialize fusion energy; this is also the date that Commonwealth Fusion Systems believes fusion will be operational.
2035: The year that Ignition Research (publisher of The Fusion Report) has stated when commercial fusion will become a meaningful part of the power grid.
2050: The year anarticle inScientific American states is the opinion that “most experts” state is when we will be able to generate “large-scale energy from nuclear fusion”, notably without citing any of the “most experts”.
A poll of 23 investors (results shown below) showed that most of these investors believed that fusion will be “operational somewhere in the world” in the next decade, while a few believed it would be operational in the 2020s, and a few more stated in the 2040s.
But all of this begs the question of what do we mean by “When will fusion provide power to the grid”. Our answer to this question is, “When will electrical power be commercially available on the public utility grid from an energy company?” While some experts believe that to be commercially viable, utilities will have to be able to achieve a price of $80-$100/MWh (in 2020 USD) to be “competitive” (i.e., able to compete with energy sources such as fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and renewables), we do not believe that hitting this price is required for electrical power from fusion to be “commercially available,” as the initial prototype power plants (as with the first instances of any new technology) will likely operate at a loss as learning curves are “sorted out,” and the design of the plant and its equipment (which for fusion is very complex) is “optimized.”
ITER is not expected to fuse deuterium and tritium until 2039. How can the industry expect commercial fusion power before then?
The relationship between ITER operation and the availability of commercial fusion energy is a common area of misconception. The driver of this misconception relates to a misunderstanding of what The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is meant to be relative to commercial fusion operations. ITER, as its name implies, is an experimental fusion system that is being financed, constructed, and operated through a collaboration between China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the US focused on exploring magnetic confinement fusion (MCF). Like its predecessors, such as the Joint European Torus (JET), which operated from 1983 to 2023, ITER’s purpose was never to produce commercial electricity. Rather, “the primary objective of ITER is the investigation and demonstration of burning plasmas,” exploring the physics and behavior of plasmas in a tokamak. Because of the scale of ITER (30 meters by 30 meters, with a weight of 23,000 metric tons), it has proven to be a difficult platform to “iterate” on, which is one of the reasons that its schedule has continually slipped from its original date of 2023 to 2039. Interestingly, ITER will not reach a “Q” (the ratio of energy produced by fusion divided by the energy injected into the fusion reaction) until well after 2034, over a decade after the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), which uses laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF), reached a “Q” of over 1.5.
So, what drives the timeline for commercial fusion?
As our previous article pointed out, there are five challenges to achieving commercially-available fusion power on the grid. Let’s relook at these from the perspective of commercially available fusion power:
Plasma confinement and stability: The longer a plasma stays confined and stable, the greater percentage of the fuel will be fused and produce energy. This is true whether the system uses MCF (like ITER) or ICF (like NIF), and has a significant impact on the overall Q that is achieved. This is an area of significant research for most commercial fusion ventures, which are iterating quickly on heating, compression, ignition, and fuel approaches. As an example, Focused Energy is working on ICF approaches that separate the heating and compression cycles, allowing larger fuel pellets and increasing the percentage of fused fuel.
Materials development: This is also an area where commercial fusion companies are also moving ahead of projects like ITER. Companies today are building on the “lessons learned” by ITER and other projects to date by performing AI-based simulations and “snapshot testing” to confirm the simulations. Because these are occurring at a smaller scale, companies can iterate quickly on mixtures of materials to find the “right formula” for components such as first walls, high-temperature superconductors (HTS), and similar high-risk components.
Tritium breeding and fuel cycle, and heat extraction and energy conversion: These two challenges are a function of the thermal blanket, which was the subject of one of our earlier articles on The Fusion Report. Thermal blankets is one of the riskiest areas for producing commercially-available fusion electricity, as it impacts both the economics of the fuel and the “Q” that can be achieved. However, it is also one of the areas where development is rapidly occurring across a number of groups, with approaches settling on solid ceramic pebbles of lithium titanate (Li2 TiO3), lithium orthosilicate (Li2 SiO4), or similar materials inside a water-cooled chamber. While this requires periodic replacement of the pebbles as the lithium is converted into tritium and helium, it does not have the corrosion, reactivity, or magnetohydrodynamic issues that affect other approaches such as liquid metals.
Scaling up to commercial size: This is probably the area where the approach of commercial fusion ventures and government laboratories differ the most and which impacts timelines to the greatest extent. Commercial fusion ventures are approaching the design and building of fusion power plants from the standpoint of minimizing time to market (TTM), which they do through an iterative combination of small-scale experiments and simulations to refine their approach. This allows them to quickly (usually in a matter of months or quarters) to “close” high-risk areas. In contrast, large projects like ITER are exactly that – large projects that attempt to solve these problems at scale. The result is that they take years to decades to improve their approach.
Conclusion: Achieving Commercially-Available Electricity
The three critical factors to sizing any emerging market are figuring out:
When the first “real” customers will buy the first system(s);
The accelerators and inhibitors that either make a market grow or keep a market from growing; and
The limits on the size of the market.
For fusion energy, the limit on market size is the worldwide electricity market, which is growing, and expected to accelerate due to EV charging, the growth of AI, and the continuing electrification of the globe. The accelerators and inhibitors (in general) for power sources include fuel costs, pollution/waste generation, ability to integrate with the existing grid, the physical footprint of the production facilities, and the capital costs of the investment, all but the last of which favor fusion energy. That leaves the “trillion dollar question” – when do customers start buying fusion power plants?
While it seems “reasonable” to state that the technical challenges to building first-generation production power plants should be solved by the mid-2030s, the customer question is far less settled. Utilities are notoriously conservative in adopting new technologies, even when they are low risk and the benefits are clear. Fusion today represents a significant risk; however, a number of oil and gas companies who are “close” to key utility players (not to mention hedge funds and venture capitalists) have made private investments into fusion ventures. In a world where the demand for electricity is likely to outpace our ability to generate it, even potential power sources with risks such as fusion become incredibly compelling.
