Is Fusion Getting More Real?

This is an excerpt from a Physics Today interview with Francis Chen (a huge name in plasma physics):

PT: Cynics like to say that fusion power is always 20 years away. How do you address that sort of skepticism in your book?

Chen: You have to understand how it was before 1990. We didn’t know how to prevent instabilities from destroying plasma confinement, or even what the instabilities were. The skepticism stems from those early days when we were flying blind. But great changes came in the 1990s as large tokamaks were built, confinement got better, and a better understanding of scaling was possible. Supercomputers allowed three-dimensional simulations of toroidal plasmas. High-confinement modes were invented, and internal transport barriers could be made by tailoring the current distribution with radio-frequency power. The problems, which are still hard, are well enough understood now that the ITER machine in France can be planned with a definite schedule. The people who still retain their impressions from 1970 should realize that the situation has changed. That is the main point I was trying to explain in my book.

PT: What is your take on existing clean energy technologies, which aim to fill the gap until fusion power comes online?

Chen: Wind power is very efficient. Solar cells are now cheap. But they are not steady, and you can’t store the electricity for base power. Adding more than 10% of temporary power would destabilize the grid. Carbon sequestration wastes 30% of the energy produced and is very expensive. To store the CO2, you have to compress it, which takes energy, and then inject into a geological reservoir, which could be leak-proof only if you didn’t drill holes into it for injection. Nuclear power is very clean and very safe. Public hysteria is its problem. It should be used until fusion comes online. The power plants and grids can remain the same; the power core simply changes from fission to fusion.

The arrival of fusion would change the energy game for everybody, but having been a “fusion power is always 20 years away” guy for 25 years, I’m still pretty skeptical. Still, given Chen’s reputation, I guess it’s worth taking another look at the maturity of the technology, perchance to change my ossified mind.