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Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin announced last month that the largest private fusion company in the U.S. had selected the state to be the location for a multi-billion dollar investment in the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant. Commonwealth Fusion Systems promises to deliver power to the grid within a decade from a facility 16 miles south of Richmond. 

Fusion power has been getting a lot of attention lately, including a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing in September, with a panel of experts speaking optimistically on the development of the technology. 

Even if developers manage to overcome the technical challenges of bringing fusion energy to fruition, nuclear proponents say that the barriers to development of nuclear fission remain political and not technical or economical. There’s little reason to think the same political challenges could stand in the way of fusion, even if the technology is realized. 

The International Atomic Energy Commission explains that while fission splits a heavy element (with a high atomic mass number) into fragments; fusion joins two light elements (with a low atomic mass number), forming a heavier element. In both cases, energy is freed because the mass of the remaining nucleus is smaller than the mass of the reacting nuclei. Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. “Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas.”

Too cheap to meter

Fusion works by combining isotopes together, in a process that releases energy. It’s the same process that the sun uses. Theoretically, a fusion reactor could generate massive amounts of electricity, without any carbon dioxide emissions. 

It also doesn’t carry the risks of a nuclear meltdown that, while very rare, can occur in a fission reactor, which releases energy by splitting atoms apart. There’s no chance of a chain reaction in a fusion generator. Fusion also doesn’t produce nuclear waste. 

While the prospect of an abundant, carbon-free energy source is attractive, the promise of fusion is nothing new. At an Atoms for Peace conference in 1955, Homi Bhabha, an influential Indian nuclear physicist predicted fusion would be a reality by the 1970s. “I venture to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades,” Bhabha said. 

The prediction, of course, turned out to be wrong, and 70 years later, there are no commercial fusion reactors powering the grid anywhere in the world. While fission reactors have been deployed and have provided about 9% of global energy in 2023, that technology too had its share of hype, once promising to be “too cheap to meter.” 

Net fusion energy

In 2022, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, became the only facility to achieve what’s called “net fusion energy,” which is a fusion reaction producing more energy than the reaction required. The reaction released 3.15 million joules of energy and required 2.05 million joules of laser power to produce it. The 3.15 million joules is the equivalent of 875 watt hours. That could power a small refrigerator for about 3.5 hours. 

While the experiment produced more energy than it consumed, the facility cost $3.5 billion to produce electricity that would cost a residential U.S. energy consumer about 15 cents at the average U.S. rate. The cost of the facility doesn’t include overhead, including utilities, staff and the fuel used in the experiment. 

This means that fusion is a long way from being commercially viable, but at the Senate Energy Committee hearing the panel of experts said they could see it happening within the next decade.

Milestones and deadlines

Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., said that 40 fusion companies across the world have raised more than $7 billion in the last five years, and 85% of that is private capital. 

Among the witnesses in the hearing was Jackie Siebens, director of public affairs at Helion Energy. The company has signed power purchase agreements with Microsoft, including an agreement to buy the power produced from Helion’s fusion reactors. The agreements require the company to have a plant construction and operational by 2028. The company is required to reach full commercial operations providing electricity to Microsoft by 2029. Siebens said that the reactor will produce electricity at market rate or below. 

Manchin asked Sibens if that deadline is realistic and if there are penalties if they don’t reach that goal. 

“We do have penalties that evolve and change as we grow closer to the milestone of actually producing commercial power for Microsoft. And yes, we do have deadlines,” Sieban replied, though she declined to provide further details. 

Opposition

A group of analysts who publish on the Substack “Doomberg,” point out that limitless, zero-carbon power already exists. The main issue, they explain, is environmental groups who oppose it are fundamentally anti-human. 

While fission carries risks, major accidents — primarily Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl — represent only three of the 440 reactors operating in the world today. In the case of Three Mile Island and Fukushima, there were no deaths or serious radiation exposure. The Chernobyl accident was the result of a flawed reactor design no longer in use. 

“The prospect of cheap, abundant energy for the masses was considered no solution at all to the elites who founded many of the well-known environmental groups still in operation today, individuals that understood all too well that nuclear power from fission was capable of providing an energy bounty with minimal damage to the environment. Thus began a decades-long propaganda campaign directed at the technology that continues to this day,” Doomberg writes. 

The Doomberg analysts point out that reactor designs today, requiring no new inventions, are already commercially demonstrated. They have become safe enough to all but eliminate the risk of meltdowns, and nuclear waste is not the problem nuclear opponents make it out to be. 

“The stated purpose of fusion solves problems that don’t exist,” Doomberg states. 

As others have argued, the modern environmental movement is primarily anti-human, so they will find reasons to oppose fusion, regardless of how safe and clean it may be, for the same reasons they oppose nuclear fission. And they have plenty of resources to fight it. 

Why Virginia? 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the company planning a fusion reactor in Virginia, notes in a blog post on its selection of the site in Virginia that it has yet to reach net fusion energy with its reactor design. It also explains that the main interest in Virginia is that the state offers the fastest permitting process for a site where they can build their facility. 

“To keep our schedule of the fastest path to fusion energy on the grid, we’ve been looking for a site for ARC for the last two years. Before selecting the site in Chesterfield County, Virginia, for the first ARC, we evaluated more than 100 locations around the world, performed due-diligence scrutiny, and talked with hundreds of key stakeholders,” the company explained. 

As Manchin said at the Senate Energy Committee meeting, there’s a lot of investment flowing into fusion energy. Whether that funding makes the technology commercially viable by the 2030s is far from certain. Should it solve the technological problems to realize abundant, safe, affordable energy, it’s likely to encounter the same political problems that its fission cousin encountered, and for the same reasons.