Federal funds fuel fusion energy research in Southeast
4 min read
An Alabama university is among institutions in the Southeast poised to take advantage of rekindled interest in nuclear fusion.
Hopes of turning the fusion process that powers the Sun into a controlled source of inexpensive energy on Earth were boosted in December when a federal laboratory in California, for the first time after decades of fusion research, produced more energy from a self-sustaining fusion reaction than was put in to create the reaction.
The Dec. 5 achievement at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announced a week later by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, added new energy to the Biden administration’s effort to funnel millions of dollars into federal grant programs, corralling universities, and private companies into a research and development network focused on the most promising processes and technologies while in their infancies, pursuing an ambitious goal to develop a commercial-grade fusion reactor in just a decade.
That includes projects like the Compact Toroidal Hybrid at Auburn University in Alabama, where David Ennis, associate professor in the Department of Physics, works with a team doing research into an area key to what many experts think is the most commercially viable model for fusion reactors.
Confinement of plasma, the superheated soup of particles created as part of the process of fusion, has been a major hurdle and a focus of Ennis’ work.
In nature, gravity produced by the sheer mass of the star work to keep plasma and the energy released by the process confined. On Earth, scientists at the leading edge of the field in many cases use powerful magnets to do it by creating a containment field that guides a steady flow of plasma around a donut-shaped circuit while holding the whole reaction in check.
The process is different and predates the method used at Lawrence Livermore, called inertial confinement, but is considered likely the best candidate for any commercial-grade reactor prototype, Ennis said, because it allows for continue operation with better potential for large-scale delivery of power.
“To get some sort of break-even condition, you would need to be producing these reactions many, many times per second,” something magnetic fusion is more likely to be able to achieve sustainably.
Compared to the still-monumental task of producing a commercial variant, the task of integrating the technology into the existing grid would be relatively easy, Ennis explained.
“You’re finding a way to produce heat and this is just a different way of producing heat,” he said. “The U.S. grid is very old and may need to be upgraded for other reasons. But it’s not going to require any changes to the to the grid.”
Like most other projects funded by the federal awards programs, Auburn’s targets just a small piece of the overall problem of commercializing fusion.
Other recent awardees in the southeast included two projects at the University of Tennessee looking at magnetic fusion technology and one public-private partnership between the federal Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina and General Atomics, a private applied sciences company, seeking to solve problems with the fuel required for the process.
Granholm called the Dec. 5 achievement at Lawrence Livermore “a watershed moment” for the development of carbon-free energy.
“America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough, one that happened because we invested in our national labs and fundamental research,” she said at a press conference announcing the achievement.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicists replicated in the lab the conditions native to the interior of stars, where intense pressure and gravity work to compress and then fuse separate atoms together, producing a small modicum of energy in the process.
While the net energy gain from the artificially induced reaction was just 3.15 megajoules, scarcely enough to power a lightbulb for a day, it was a proof of concept and of a vision of fusion as an integral part of the nation’s quilt of green energy infrastructure in the future, Granholm said.
It’s been a decades-long saga to get from the first experiments into fusion at the end of World War II to the technical knowledge to replicate the process here on Earth in a lab.
Over that time, the U.S. has funded programs across the public and private sectors but, since peaking in 1977 amid the OPEC energy crisis, when fossil fuel prices soared and energy independence became a focus for policymakers, research support has generally been in decline.
That seems primed to change now as the Department of Energy increases the pace and total amount of awards as it hones in on specific projects into technology with early promise as a basis for a commercial-grade reactor.
While other experts agree that targeting funding at magnetic fusion is the most likely the best way to lay the foundation for a future public infrastructure, many think the Biden administration’s timeframe might be too ambitious.
“It all depends on the expertise on the people who would try to build the reactor, what concept they follow, how much funding they have at their disposal, and whether it is done in the public or private sector,” said Per Hollander, head of the Stellarator Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany. “It also depends on the time taken for governments to pass the necessary legislation and grant permission.”
A decade may not be realistic, he said. “But two may be so.”
