Nuclear fusion news: The science behind the energy technology World Economic Forum

In February 2023, it reached a milestone by achieving an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules, with the discharge lasting a record eight minutes. In December 2017, it set a new stellarator world record for fusion products. In 1968, scientists in the Soviet Union released the results of their tokamak machines, which were simpler to make, as part of the magnetic field cage is created by a strong current flowing in the plasma. The stellarator concept was an elegant solution to a fundamental problem in fusion research but it was challenging to build such a device to the precision needed. The arrangement would allow the plasma to confine long enough to make fusion happen. And since then, a frenzy of research and a wide range of new electric models have hit the market.

Not a drop to drink: water

Nuclear fusion has been described as harnessing the same reaction that powers the sun and stars on Earth. OpenStar says its design – which turns the ‘tokamak’ design used by many other fusion projects “inside out” – could be faster to scale and commercialize than other. Global goals, agreed at COP28, of tripling renewable capacity and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 are crucial for limiting global temperature rises to below 1.5C. Annual investment in the global energy sector must grow by more than 2.5 times to stick to a 1.5C pathway, IRENA says. But she said the timescale to generating power could be “two or three decades away” and urged great collaboration to build a fusion “ecosystem”. Globally, government labs and companies are racing to generate power from fusion – including at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Pioneering nuclear fusion

The energy crisis in Europe (and parts of the US) is making this winter a particularly cold one for many people struggling to afford the high costs of gas and oil for home heating. Within electric vehicles, there’s an energy ecosystem that needs improvement to make electric vehicles a more viable choice for everyone too. Under the fusion-powered grow lights, hydroponically grown strawberries or lettuce or other crops can be grown to maturity without the use of pesticides and other harsh chemicals. Reshoring manufacturing from Asia and overseas to the US already cuts down on emissions both from shipping and production (for example, Chinese factories often rely on coal-fired power plants). More recently, factories still need some proximity to high-wattage transmission lines that can supply large quantities of electricity. As technology developed in the early 1800s, turbine systems could power mills of all sorts.

Nuclear Security

Nuclear fusion, however, was not a major part of the conversation — but as the drought and heat waves in Europe, the flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria and every other climate catastrophe has recently shown, we need large-scale changes. Nuclear fusion reactors around the world are being built to find the best way to control and capture the energy of such reactions. Digital power system transformation ‘essential’ – and more top energy stories How AI can accelerate the energy transition, rather than compete with it Almost half of the region’s electricity comes from water sources. Nuclear fission meanwhile – which splits a ‘heavy’ element to create energy, rather doing so by fusing two ‘light’ elements as with fusion – is having a moment.

It offers the prospect of an “almost inexhaustible source of energy”, according to the World Nuclear Association. There is a “significant gap” between political announcements around renewable energy and the actual plans and policies countries have in place, according to a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Countries have different starting points for the green transition.

The global smartphone market is set to rebound 3% in 2024, according to a new report from Counterpoint Research. The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare works with governments and businesses to build more resilient, efficient and equitable healthcare systems that embrace new technologies. The technology could help people redefine their lives, according to NHS England diabetes clinical director Dr Clare Hambling. The total number of people living with diabetes globally is projected to rise to 643 million by 2030 and 783 million by 2045, International Diabetes Federation data shows. A glucose sensor under the skin calculates how much insulin is delivered via a pump, with trials showing the technology improved quality of life and reduced long-term health complication risks.

To help address that, TAE recently spun off a new company called TAE Power Solutions to create advanced technologies designed to deliver faster charging, stronger performance, greater range and longer battery life for e-mobility and stationary applications. The already booming electric car market is set to grow even more with the new $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit that was included in the sweeping climate measures in the US Inflation Reduction Act. There’s also an entire hidden, energy-reliant infrastructure that exists between farms and your fridge — a vast expanse of refrigerated warehouses, trucks and other transportation collectively known as the coldscape. Here too, fusion can supply the solution, potentially allowing for a vast reduction in the land-use footprint of agriculture and shortening the supply chain for fruits and vegetables by growing them in indoor farms much closer to urban centres, if not within city limits. Factories could, for example, be located closer to the raw materials they rely on — or to the retail markets that goods are destined for — cutting down on transportation costs and carbon emissions. We could plant vast forests where there is today only scrub, using desalinated water to power these living factories for capturing carbon.

The long-due rebirth of the stellarator

Fusion energy projects and start-ups around the world may pursue the goal of fusion energy in different ways by playing to their distinctive strengths. E-waste, or waste electrical and electronic equipment, is the fastest-growing waste stream globally, with an estimated 62 billion kilogrammes produced in 2022 alone. Nuclear fusion has the potential to provide limitless, carbon-free energy by mimicking the phenomenon that powers stars.

Combined with heat pumps, the cheap and abundant power of nuclear fusion would revolutionize in-home energy usage wherever it is deployed. Shanghai start-up Energy Singularity is seeking $500 million to develop clean energy, one of 45 companies in around 13 countries working to commercialize nuclear fusion. Investing in the development of nuclear fusion energy today could pay dividends for generations to come. Inexpensive, plentiful power derived from a nuclear fusion-fueled grid could spell the end of heating-season chaos like we’re seeing this winter. Nuclear fusion power would revolutionize the energy sector — and one of the most environmentally impactful and increasing needs is in home heating and cooling. Companies have raised around $5 billion in private funding for nuclear fusion, in a quest to replicate the power source that fuels the sun, Reuters says.

Inside a doughnut-shaped machine called a ‘tokamak,’ hydrogen isotopes will collide at enormous speed, fusing into helium. One day in the early 2030s, an engineer at a newly constructed power plant near Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, will press a button. What will it take to achieve net-positive AI energy by 2030? Bringing you weekly curated insights and analysis on the global issues that matter.

In the Sun, massive gravitational forces create the right conditions for nuclear fusion in the star’s core, but on Earth, they are much harder to achieve. Instead, the UK government has committed £650 million to national research programmes, including STEP, the world’s first fusion power plant in Nottinghamshire. Microsoft President Brad Smith said Helion’s work “supports our own long-term clean energy goals and will advance the market to establish a new, efficient method for bringing more clean energy to the grid, faster”. He was launching an international engagement plan – involving 35 countries – to boost nuclear fusion through research and development. The breakthrough came after the fusion markets review final experiment at the UK’s JET fusion laboratory in Oxford produced a new world record for fusion power generation. There are several “recipes” for cooking up nuclear fusion, which rely on different atomic combinations.

From one power plant to civilization’s primary energy source

It is a cross-industry platform building new coalitions and delivering insights required for a sustainable, secure and just energy future. The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities. On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick.

Explainer: Advanced nuclear technologies and their role in the energy transition

Both reactions release large amounts of energy, but with nuclear fusion, there is a high energy yield and low nuclear waste production. Meanwhile, work is underway on “the UK’s NASA moment” – a nuclear fusion energy plant in the north of England. Additionally, the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) is working to assemble public and private partners to further the industry transition to set heavy industry and mobility sectors on the pathway towards net-zero emissions. Recent research, including MIT’s first market analysis of fusion, projects fusion could surpass coal — which supplies 34% of global electricity — as the world’s leading power source.

• The JET lab, once the world’s largest and most advanced fusion reactor, began its pioneering experiments in 1983.
• In 2013, Lockheed Martin showed how compact fusion could meet global electricity consumption (44,000,000 GWh per year) by 2045.
• The stellarator concept was an elegant solution to a fundamental problem in fusion research but it was challenging to build such a device to the precision needed.
• In the past, the biggest hurdle to actually getting a heat pump has been cost.

Its final experiment, conducted in December, marked a significant milestone in fusion research. The JET lab, once the world’s largest and most advanced fusion reactor, began its pioneering experiments in 1983. The Joint European Torus site, to give it its full name, was a collaboration of European nuclear scientists. These companies are building on the earlier work of pioneering researchers, including those at the JET fusion lab. Private-sector investment in the nascent technology has surged in the past 20 years, according to McKinsey.

How can these technologies advance the energy transition?

The good news is that the world’s first commercial fusion power plant – a 400 MW machine we call ‘ARC’ – will break ground in the next few years. While it may not happen exactly as we’ve just described, the first fusion power plant will almost certainly begin operations shortly after President-elect Trump’s second term expires. Fusion is the future of the global energy sector — the near future. This reaction will produce 400 megawatts (MW) of clean, firm electricity, enough for a small city. As AI accelerates the path to commercialization, fusion energy is shifting from an ambitious science project to one of the most consequential markets of the century.

• While nuclear fusion is often dubbed as the holy grail of energy, it is also in the early stages of realization.
• MIT found that incorporating fusion into New England’s grid would cut annual energy costs by $36 billion — or 7% — by 2050.
• The global pursuit of fusion energy – a potentially safe, abundant, zero-carbon power source – has entered a decisive phase, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
• Even in a drought, when freshwater supplies are scarce, it’s not cost-effective to run most desal plants because of energy costs.
• Combining TORAX with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search methods such as AlphaEvolve, AI agents can explore vast numbers of operating scenarios, identifying the most efficient pathways to net-energy production.

Forum Stories newsletter

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses. CFS aims to bring its first grid-scale fusion plant online in the early 2030s and has already secured off-take agreements from Google and Eni, the latter valued at more than $1 billion. Combining TORAX with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search methods such as AlphaEvolve, AI agents can explore vast numbers of operating scenarios, identifying the most efficient pathways to net-energy production. With academic partners at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Google showed that deep reinforcement learning can control the magnets of a tokamak to stabilize complex plasma shapes.

Small modular reactors

Thanks to its success in advancing fusion technology, it operated for 40 years before entering decommissioning in October 2023. “If we want to take this forward, public-private partnerships are going to be essential,” she said. Using laser beams, the amount of energy from the fusion reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target for an instant. In August 2023, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California repeated a breakthrough they first made in December 2022, achieving a “net energy gain” in fusion ignition. It produced 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds – or enough energy to heat up to five hot baths, according to the BBC, triple what it generated back in 1997. The most promising combination for power on Earth today is the fusion of a deuterium atom with a tritium one.

Back in January 2023 at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, nuclear scientist and Director of the lab, Kim Budil, spoke on a panel, a month after her team made the original breakthrough. Australia, Germany and Japan are also pursuing fusion, according to Reuters. Kerry’s announcement followed the news of Britain and the US signing a cooperation agreement on fusion in November 2023. By using reinforcement learning, scientists were able to predict plasma tearing in the tokamak reactor DIII-D at the National Fusion Facility in San Diego, which would disrupt the reaction.