The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy

“I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an INEXHAUSTIBLE SUPPLY OF ENERGY, without pollution or global warming.”—Stephen Hawking

By L. J. Reinders

Don’t expect scientists to harness the power of nuclear fusion anytime soon. Fusion occurs when atomic nuclei join to create a heavier atom, releasing power that lights up the stars, including the star we call the sun. Researchers have a lot of challenges to meet before they can control that process efficiently on Earth and use the resulting energy to light up homes. But they continue to try. JET laboratory in the United Kingdom announced in February that scientists there doubled their previous record by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen to create a “mini star” yielding “59 megajoules of energy over five seconds or 11 megawatts of power,” according to the BBC. By some estimates, that’s enough energy to power more than 700 homes. The BBC suggests fusion could hold the key to unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy. However, L.J. Reinders, who has identified basic flaws in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, suspects that’s highly unlikely in this century.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the stars, including our own sun. As soon as these stellar processes started to be understood (in the early 1920s), people began dreaming about harnessing their power both for the benefit and for the destruction of mankind. The development of the hydrogen bomb made the latter part of this dream come true. We now possess bombs that can destroy the Earth and all that is on it in a matter of hours or less. The other part of the dream, which concerns an inexhaustible clean source of energy that will save mankind from the horrors of climate change and pollution, has not yet become a reality.

For the past 70 years, nuclear scientists and engineers have been trying to create this source of energy on Earth. So far in vain. From the early 1950s, promises have been made that its unlimited benefits will be available in at most two decades.

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There is no possible scenario in which fusion will make a sizable contribution to the energy mix in this century, let alone before or around 2050 as required by the Paris Climate agreement. Fusion will not make any positive contribution to the mitigation of climate change, nor will fusion energy be as clean and limitless as claimed by its proponents. If it ever becomes a reality, at the earliest in the course of the next century, electricity production from nuclear fusion will most likely be so expensive and so complex that it will never become economically viable.

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The public trust in nuclear fission as a power generation option has suffered a lethal blow and nobody seems to be able to turn the tide. This is unfortunate as many have argued that decarbonization of electricity generation will be a tough job, if not impossible, without nuclear fission plants. Whatever the rather fanatic anti-nuclear lobbyists are saying about nuclear fission power, it remains a fact that in the past (1980s–1990s) several countries, including France, Belgium, Switzerland and Sweden, managed to radically cut their greenhouse gas emissions by installing nuclear power. These countries now enjoy comparatively low carbon dioxide emissions, while the countries that have been installing renewable energy (solar and wind) in the last 20 years have hardly been able to cut their emissions and are still at a much higher level.

The bad reputation of fission power also has consequences for nuclear fusion, which likes to present itself as the safe nuclear option. That may well be the case, but it is a hazardous strategy as everything nuclear is viewed with suspicion by the public. Germany is a case in point, where the Green Party also opposes nuclear fusion as an energy option.

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There is no other endeavor or project undertaken by mankind on which energy and money have been spent for close to a hundred years without any tangible results, and only a dim prospect of success in another fifty years or so.

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It is the next, and probably the last step in the attempts to harness the ‘inexhaustible’ source of nuclear fusion energy. It is undoubtedly a great scientific project, a jewel of technology, as the proponents like to call it, that has resulted in admirable, albeit not always smooth cooperation and collaboration between the leading nations on Earth, making it into a globe-spanning, transnational technology project. But there is a great chance that it will finally go down into the history books as one of mankind’s greatest follies, born out of sheer arrogance, a true case, if ever there was one, of misplaced confidence. Not satisfied with the daily bath of energy coming from the Sun, man wants to bring the Sun to Earth and tap its source of energy at home and at will, but it is doubtful that this vision will ever come true.

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(Reinders weighs in on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor also known as ITER.)

ITER is too big. The core of an ITER-based power plant would be at least 60 times more massive than a conventional nuclear fission core. And that is just the core!

ITER is too complex. The machine has roughly one million parts. Imagine the cost of doing maintenance and repair on such a machine.

ITER is too expensive. More than $58 billion, while any fusion power plant may well cost considerably more.

ITER is too late. Delays are slowly running into decades now, and whatever fusion may do in the future, it will not be able to contribute anything to combating climate change. It just comes too late.

ITER is not safe and not clean. ITER creates two safety issues: plasma disruptions and quenching, apart from radioactive waste and radioactive fuel. If disruptions accidentally happen, it will be expensive and dangerous. The second problem is quenching, when a superconducting magnet suddenly becomes a normal electromagnet and releases its energy. ITER’s coils contain the same energy as 10 tons of TNT.

Sun in a Bottle? … Pie in the Sky!: The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy, L. J. Reinders, 2021

Excerpted with permission from Springer Nature Switzerland AG. These excerpts have been edited for length.

L. J. Reinders has enjoyed a varied and illustrious career in theoretical high-energy physics, earning a Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 1976 and doing postdoctoral work at research centers in Europe and Japan until 1988. He’s currently at work on a book about carbon capture and storage.

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