Yves here. Nuclear fusion technology is over my pay grade. Nevertheless, assuming charitiably that human civilization gets climate change enough under control so as to assure modern lifestyles continue, a proposition very much in doubt, nuclear energy seems destined to be a big part of base energy supplies given more reliance on variable solar and wind power. Even though this article touts the professed accomplishments of one Chinese company, it isn’t in the normal interest of a Western business outlet to tout that in the absence of at least some substance to the claims.
Nevertheless, there is also the question of how long it would take to commercialize this advance. My understanding was it would normally take 20 years. However, China still makes heavy use of coal-fired electricity and so has the incentive to greatly accelerate the timetable. But do they have the means?
Reader sanity checks encouraged.
By Alex Kimani, a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. Originally published at OilPrice
- For nearly two decades, the world’s hopes of building a practical nuclear fusion plant have rested on France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
- The ITER project costs have surpassed €20 billion ($21.8 billion), more than four times the original budget of €5 billion.
- Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device.
It’s been seven decades ever since scientists started working on nuclear fusion technology, with the allure of almost limitless clean energy proving too powerful to resist. Unfortunately, milestones have fallen time and again, giving rise to the running joke that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could be decades, if not centuries, away.
For nearly two decades, the world’s hopes of building a practical nuclear fusion plant have rested on France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), funded and run by seven member countries since 2006. Like many nuclear power projects, ITER has come under scrutiny for repeated delays and massive cost overruns. Indeed, Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University, recently sued ITER for lack of transparency.
According to Seife, ITER project costs have surpassed €20 billion ($21.8 billion), more than four times the original budget of €5 billion (then $5.5 billion) and nearly a decade late from its 2016 delivery date.
Now, however, the fusion sector might finally have something to show to the world for all its troubles thanks to a major milestone by a Chinese startup. Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device, giving China a first-mover advantage in the critical field of high-temperature superconducting magnetic confinement fusion. Energy Singularity has also become the world’s first commercial company to build and operate an all-superconducting tokamak.
“The design work of the device began in March 2022, and the overall installation was completed by the end of February this year, setting the fastest record for the research and construction of superconducting tokamak devices worldwide,” Yang Zhao, Energy Singularity’s Chief Executive Officer, has revealed.
So, how did this little-known Chinese company manage to pull off in two years what ITER has failed to achieve in nearly two decades?
According to Yang, using high-temperature superconducting materials can reduce the volume of a device to about 2 percent of that of traditional low-temperature superconducting devices, allowing the construction period of the device to be shortened from ~ 30 years to just 3-4 years.
According to Yang, the company owns independent intellectual property rights of HH70, with a domestication rate of over 96 percent, adding that all of the device’s magnet systems are constructed using high-temperature superconducting materials. Despite its commendable success, Energy Singularity is not resting on its laurels, with Yang revealing the company plans to complete the next generation high magnetic field high-temperature superconducting tokamak device dubbed HH170 with a deuterium-tritium equivalent energy gain (Q) greater than 10 by 2027. In fusion parlance, the Q value reflects the energy efficiency of the fusion reactor, that is, the ratio of the energy generated by the device to the energy input required to sustain the fusion reaction. Q values greater than 1 means the reactor generates more energy than what it consumes, which is essentially what fusion research has been trying to achieve in a commercial reactor for decades. Currently, the greatest Q factor that scientists have achieved is just 1.53.
Small Reactor Design
Energy Singularity is not the only fusion startup that’s pursuing small reactor designs. Deven, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their small fusion reactor. Dubbed Sparc, the reactor is ~1/65th the volume of ITER’s reactor. The experimental reactor is expected to generate about 100 MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds – bursts big enough to power a small city.
That said, small reactors are hardly unique to the nuclear fusion sector. The Biden administration has been a strong proponent of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) that have been making the waves in the nuclear fission space.
Three years ago, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)8 approved Centrus Energy Corp.’s (NYSE:LEU) request to make High Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) at its enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, becoming the first company in the western world outside Russia to do so. Applications for HALEU are currently limited to research reactors and medical isotope production; however, HALEU will be needed for more than half of the SMRs currently in development across the globe. HALEU is only currently available from TENEX, a Rosatom subsidiary.
Last November, Centrus Energy announced that it had made its first delivery of 20 kilograms of HALEU UF6 to the DoE, completing Phase One of its contract. The company managed to complete the first phase under budget and ahead of schedule. Centrus will now immediately proceed to Phase Two of the contract–requiring HALEU production at the rate of 900 kilograms per year.
In January, the DoE issued a request for proposals (RFP) for uranium enrichment services to help establish a reliable domestic supply of fuels using HALEU. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will provide up to $500 million for HALEU enrichment contracts selected through this RFP.
Let’s just recall that a nuclear fusion power generator comes in at least three generations:
1st generation: build a Tokamak, or anything similar that ‘generates power’ (‘Q much larger than 1’ as mentioned in the article) in a consistent way.
2nd generation: build a device that can a/ sustain fusion for minutes, hours, days and weeks and b/ do something useful with the extraordinary amount of heat being generated.
3rd generation: build a power generation system that is useable and serviceable and can be deployed.
The Tokamak design has been around since ~70 years. Reaching fusion is a milestone, reaching Q>1 is another, doing this for more than 1 second still another.
The nuclear fusion technology is today at about the same level of maturity as nuclear fission in 1939: we know it exists, and we have a few prototypes that exhibit the desired behavior. 80 years later, we are still inventing the SMR.
People have been saying for at least 50 years that fusion will be available in 50 years. That’s still at least two generations away, so way beyond the Jackpot (which imnsho will hit in 2045 at the last).
Interesting, though somehow vague. Has Energy Singularity actually pressed the “on” button? Results? Unclear from this article.
Yes. They have injected and contained plasma in their thingy. As far as I understood, they aim to build a Q=10 version by 2030.
That said, containment is just one of the problems with fusion. Cooling that 150-300 million °C beast is a problem not yet solved. The fission reactors of today are having issues due to the lack of enough cool fresh water for their secondary cooling system and they barely reach 1000 °C.
The best option for cooling the mantle before it melts is helium, which can take a lot of heat, but unfortunately is not very good at transferring it (being so light), so enormous amounts will be needed. And on the planet Earth, helium is one of the rare elements.
What does that Q=10 mean exactly? A couple of years ago, there was a great outpour of optimism as one of those experimental fusion lab in the USA relying, IIRC, upon some super-advanced laser technology, had managed to sustain a Q>1 reaction for a tiny amount of time.
When all was clearly laid out, the Q>1 referred to the energy produced with respect to the energy delivered by the laser beams. When the totality of the energy put into the whole installation necessary to drive the reaction was taken into account, that Q factor was reduced to something like 0.01.
So what are they actually measuring in that HH70 tokamak, and how big a step forward is it actually?
I don’t see a breakthrough here, just some nice incremental progress at best. As the article mentions, others are working on similar projects with various milestones achieved. I’d like to know what has really happened here, but the article is too much of a marketing fluff press release to tell. Hopefully the nerdosphere will react with a more objective take within a few days. Meanwhile this is the same thing we hear all the time about cancer cured in mice, 5x better batteries in a lab, etc. Not a scam, but overblown reporting.
Small nitpick: “gets climate change enough under control so as to assure modern lifestyles continue, a proposition very much in doubt”. Climate change is simply one of the impediments to modern lifestyles; if it were somehow overcome, we would still have resource shortages, destruction of the Earth’s capacity to maintain living beings, etc. So though climate change is the most pressing issue, it’s far from the only one; fact is, insofar as I see it, is that modern lifestyles are doomed, though we might be able to keep some parts of them going on even if we accepted that.
Useful US-based overview (2024) of China’s nuclear industry, including state enterprise and financing. It cites Kenneth Luongo a few times – elsewhere he claims Russia has threatened Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, so might be handy to check if he’s one of the usual neolib suspects.
It struck me that the mover-advantage dynamic is similar to Russia’s in arms development and manufacture. I wonder if the thorium reactor program is the most promising.