Grid-Scale Nuclear Fusion Energy Debunked

This post debunks claims that grid-scale nuclear fusion energy will be commercialized in the next decade, and argues that fusion offers few benefits beyond those already offered by advanced fission.

Overview

In this post, I’ll argue that Nuclear Fusion energy is a counter-productive distraction from the advanced Nuclear Fission technologies that are far more suitable to solving Energy Transition and Climate Change. Specifically, I’ll make the case that grid-scale commercial fusion energy isn’t really close at hand, despite the many voices now claiming it’s just around the corner. I’ll further argue that even if grid-scale commercial fusion were practical, it still wouldn’t offer any substantial benefit over more economically viable nuclear fission technologies which should have been commercialized decades ago.

Ed. note: This is a re-write of an earlier post on this substack, which was titled “What does Nuclear Fusion offer that Thorium MSRs don't?”. This version more directly debunks the claimed benefits of fusion and includes a point-by-point debunking of a very popular article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard promoting the fallacy that grid-scale commercial fusion is just around the corner.

The “Fusion Ignition” Fallacy

In December 2022, it was widely reported that after more than 70 years of trying, Nuclear Fusion researchers finally achieved a very important milestone known as fusion ignition. Simply put, this means that they managed for the first time to demonstrate in a laboratory environment that it’s possible to release more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than it took to cause the nuclear fusion reaction to occur in the first place. This is known as a net-positive energy experiment, or fusion ignition. But there’s just one little problem: they lied, and it never really happened.

More precisely, the claim that a meaningful “net positive” fusion was demonstrated represented a just-barely truthful statement intentionally presented out of context, badly misleading the audience to believe the experiment proved something far more significant than it really did. To understand why the claim of “net-positive” energy was so misleading requires first understanding why this whole “net-positive” business is so important to start with, so let’s begin there.

Fusion Ignition in context

For any energy source to have practical value, it has to deliver more energy than it consumes. For example, if a new oilfield were discovered deep under the south pole, but because the location is so inaccessible, 2 barrels of oil would be consumed for every barrel produced, then that oilfield would be of no practical value. Similarly, a fusion generator that consumes two units of energy from the power grid in order to release one unit of energy from fusion serves as an entertaining science project, but has no practical economic value as a source of energy.

Now suppose a promoter looking for money to develop that oilfield under the south pole were to assert that technically speaking, the amount of energy required at the bottom of the well to lift 1 barrel of crude oil up to the surface is equivalent to the amount of energy contained in just 0.25 barrels of oil. That seems at first to imply that more energy comes out than goes in. But this charlatan is playing tricks in his choice of words. By saying the energy required to lift one barrel of oil out of the well is contained in just 0.25 barrels of oil is misleading.

What matters is not how much energy is theoretically present in 0.25 barrels of oil, but rather, how much oil is consumed in order to produce 1 barrel of polar oil. And because the diesel generator set being used in our hypothetical polar location is only about 30% thermally efficient, that means more than 1 barrel of fuel oil will be consumed to produce one barrel of polar oil. The fact that the required energy is theoretically contained in unrecoverable form in just 0.25 barrels of raw crude oil might be technically correct, but that statement is intentionally misleading to the point of being deceptive. And that’s exactly the game the charlatans of Fusion Energy are playing with their claims of net-positive energy experiments.

The “Fusion Ignition” Claims, out of context

The December 2022 experiment released approximately 2.5 megajoules of energy. It was reported that only 2.1 megajoules of energy were consumed to cause the fusion reaction to occur, for a net energy release of 0.4 megajoules. For context, 0.4 megajoules is the amount of energy needed to operate a consumer appliance that consumes 111 watts for one hour continuously.

Fusion ignition was demonstrated for the second time on July 30, 2023 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but this time 3.15 megajoules of energy was released after it was reported that 2.05 MJ of energy had been required to produce the reaction, for a net energy release of 1.1 megajoules, equivalent to 305 watt-hours of net energy.

The part they conveniently left out

What the charlatans of Fusion conveniently neglected to mention was that they didn’t really measure the total amount of energy that was required to run the equipment that produced these fusion experiments. All they measured was the amount of laser energy that was absorbed by the fuel to produce the fusion energy release.

Had they measured the amount of electrical current required just to energize the laser, it would have exceeded the amount of energy released by the fusion. And if they’d made the far more relevant measurement of the total energy consumed by all the vacuum pumps and other machinery required in order to produce the fusion energy release, it would have exceeded the energy actually released many times over!

So there was no “net energy” produced in the sense of making more energy than the energy that was consumed by all the equipment needed to produce the fusion. They just barely managed to release slightly more than the laser energy measured at the very last step of the very involved and energy-intensive process of producing the fusion reaction. I contend that this misdirection is an intentional form of deception intended to exploit the generally low technological knowledge of most institutional investors.

Remember, the whole point of “net positive” is to demonstrate that you can get more energy out of something than has to go in to achieve that result. By any honest evaluation, the December 2022 and July 2023 experiments consumed far more energy than was released from fusion. But that wouldn’t have made a compelling headline to mislead the investment community with, so the charlatans of fusion conveniently substituted a measurement of laser energy in isolation.

That’s an irrelevant statistic for any practical analysis, but it perfectly set the stage for most of their audience to be duped into believing that a truly net-positive energy result had been achieved. Their deception worked superbly. Very few people in the investment community even noticed that the “smaller amount of energy than the fusion released” was a measurement of something having no meaningful relevance to proving the viability of commercial fusion energy.

Understanding Fission vs. Fusion

Broadly speaking, “nuclear energy” comes in two categories known as fission and fusion. Nuclear fission involves taking the heaviest atoms in the periodic table, such as Uranium and Plutonium, and splitting them in half, creating two lighter atoms by doing so. When heavy atoms are split in half, the “nuclear energy” that was holding them together is released in the form of heat energy. That heat energy can be used to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant.

Nuclear fusion refers to taking two very light atoms such as hydrogen or helium, and squeezing them together to make one heavier atom. This process causes an even greater amount of heat energy to be released. The energy released by the Sun comes from an ongoing fusion chain reaction which is enabled primarily by immense pressure that’s only possible thanks to the gravitational mass of the Sun being so much greater than the planets.

Absent that extreme gravity environment, it takes a huge amount of energy to cause a fusion reaction to occur here on Earth, and that’s the primary reason it’s taken 70 years to achieve a fusion reaction that releases more energy than it consumes. In Nuclear Fusion circles, this is known a Q-Factor. A Q factor of > 1.0 indicates more energy is being produced than was required to cause the fusion to occur. But again, the devil is in the details, and investors should be cautioned to question what’s really being measured when Q-factors are being calculated.

The Fusion Charlatans aren’t telling the whole story!

The misdirection and deception perpetrated by the charlatans of fusion doesn’t end with the net-positive energy experiments not really being net-positive in any meaningful way. There are several possible fusion reactions, but by far, the one most widely favored for commercialization is called Deuterium-Tritium, or D-T Fusion:

One of the fusion charlatans’ favorite lines to investors that is their fusion reactors run on nothing more than sea water, which is obviously nearly limitless in supply, so therefore, unlike Uranium-fueled nuclear fission, their fuel supply is virtually unlimited. They’re lying. The impressions they’re creating in investors’ minds are completely misleading.

Deuterium and tritium are specific isotopes of Hydrogen. Common hydrogen atoms have one proton and no neutrons in their nucleus. Deuterium is a much less common isotope of hydrogen which has one neutron (blue circle above, top left) in addition to the proton in its nucleus. Tritium is an extremely rare (in nature) radio-active isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons in its nucleus.

The nonsensical claim that “fusion reactors run on sea water” has its roots in the fact that deuterium is found in small quantities in sea water. The same is true for uranium. There are fairly expensive processes for extracting both deuterium and uranium from sea water, so if you have an ample supply of both sea water and money, you can get either deuterium or uranium from that sea water to fuel either a fission or fusion reactor.

Deuterium extracted from sea water costs about $4,000 per kg, while uranium can be extracted from sea water for about $500 per kg. We don’t do that today because it’s much cheaper to mine uranium out of the ground, but someday prices will rise to the point where seawater will provide a virtually limitless uranium supply.

So to say that fusion is better than fission because seawater offers an unlimited fuel source is abject nonsense. Seawater can provide a virtually limitless supply of uranium at a much lower cost than deuterium. But wait, it gets much better… we haven’t even gotten to what it’s going to cost to source the tritium you still need to fuel a fusion reactor in addition to the already expensive-to-produce deuterium.

The fusion charlatans seldom mention that the present market price for tritium is thirty million U.S. dollars per kilogram! Just a minor little detail, I know, so maybe it’s an honest mistake when they fail to mention this? I think not! They also neglect to mention that their claim that “fusion reactors run on sea water” is equally true for old-school fission reactors which can also run on uranium sourced from seawater.

In fact, the claim that you could run the reactor on fuel sourced from seawater is only true for fission, but not for fusion! This is because you truly can produce uranium to run a fission reactor from sea water for about $500 per kg of uranium. But sea water will only supply half of the fuel required for fusion—the deuterium. You still have to pay up thirty million bucks a kilo for the tritium!

Of course the fusion charlatans have an answer for that: They claim a simple process called breeding will make unlimited quantities of tritium from lithium. They never bother to mention how much that costs, or that you need some sort of nuclear reaction to supply the neutrons needed to breed lithium into tritium. One of their solutions involves building a separate fission reactor to breed the lithim into tritium to fuel the fusion reactor! That’s right—the same people who sold you on fusion being good but fission is always “bad” are actually planning to build fission reactors for the purpose of making the fuel needed for their fusion reactors! So much for eliminating the supposed cons of fission reactors…

But wait, it gets better… They’ll go on to tell you there’s a better way called a breeding jacket which could encircle the fusion reactor and use the excess neutrons it radiates to breed lithium into tritium. No, that’s not their brilliant novel invention. They lifted that idea off the Thorium breeder reactor developed in the 1960s which I’ll discuss more later in this post. What a pity they didn’t just commercialize that Thorium breeder reactor instead of wasting everyone’s time and energy on all this fusion nonsense!

The charlatans never mention that you can’t breed lithium into tritium with a breeding jacket until you get the fusion reactor up and running (and radiating neutrons) in the first place. And to do that, you’ll need to buy at least the first load of tritium fuel required to start the reactor, at a current market price of thirty million bucks per kg! Funny how selective the fusion charlatans are in which details they do and don’t share with investors!

And yes, fusion reactors most assuredly do produce radiation, just like fission reactors, and that means the stuff surrounding them will eventually become radio-active over time. So much for the impression they may have left you with that there was no radiation involved in fusion.

Heat Energy Released vs. Usable Energy Released

There’s still yet another dimension to the deceptions being perpetrated by the charlatans of fusion: The Fusion reaction releases heat energy, but in order to run the fusion generator and make more fusion reactions happen, you need electrical energy, not heat energy. The charlatans never mention that converting heat energy into electricity is an extremely inefficient process that’s only about 50% thermally efficient.

In other words, for every two units of heat energy released from the fusion, you can only get one unit of electric energy to run the fusion generator and cause the next fusion reaction to occur. So even when they do (someday, well into the future) get to the point of an honest “net positive” energy release, it still won’t be enough. They’d need to release more than twice the electric energy consumed to produce the fusion in the form of heat energy, in order to be able to convert that heat back into electricity just to break even! Fusion researchers are still a very, very long way from getting enough energy out of fusion to sustain an ongoing net-positive energy producing fusion reaction.

The fusion charlatans are well aware of this, and if you confront them with this issue they will promptly declare that they already thought of that and have a solution. It’s called aneutronic fusion, and it was first conceived decades ago when fusion experimenters first realized the challenges of converting heat energy into electricity. Instead of the D-T fusion process, they use much more difficult to produce fusion reactions that will take many more years to actually perfect than D-T fusion. The idea is to release energy in a form that can be more efficiently converted into electricity. And that’s a great idea, but it requires even higher temperatures and pressures, and it’s much farther from becoming commercial reality than D-T fusion.

Do you see the pattern here? The fusion charlatans are pathological liars. They know full well the challenges I’m describing in this post, but they never admit them to investors. The fact they’ve been fantasizing about aneutronic fusion for decades evidences that they knew all about the inherent challenges of converting heat energy back into electricity all along. But they never volunteer this information when pitching their wares to investors.

Measuring “Net Positive” Honestly

Now let’s consider what should be measured in order to declare that a “net-positive energy breakthrough” has occurred, in the sense that such an experiment would genuinely evidence that net energy can be produced from an economic standpoint. Here’s how an honest engineer would measure this:

1. Start by measuring all the energy consumed by the fusion generator. Not just the laser energy that hit the fuel capsule, and not just the electricity needed to energize the laser, but all the energy consumed by the entire machine in order to run the vacuum pumps, electronics, lasers, and everything else.

2. Next, measure all the energy consumed to make the fuel used to produce the fusion. And don’t be surprised if that number is much bigger than all the energy needed to run the fusion generator! As noted earlier, D-T fusion relies on tritium, which is so expensive to produce that the current market price is thirty million bucks a kilo! To honestly declare that more energy is being produced than was “needed to cause the fusion to occur”, you have to include the energy cost of producing the fuel. That means you count all the energy needed to extract the deuterium from sea water, plus all the energy needed to breed the tritium. But the fusion charlatans never disclose these figures, because if they did, it would be painfully obvious that we’re still decades away from true net-positive energy production using fusion in any grid-scale commercial context.

3. When measuring the “energy released” from fusion, count only the net electrical energy that can be recovered. That figure will only be about half the total amount of heat energy that was released by the fusion, but the higher number isn’t relevant. Only count what you can actually use to produce the next fusion event!

The charlatans of fusion know perfectly well what measurements are actually relevant. They conceal them from investors intentionally, because no investor in their right mind would invest in this stuff if they knew the real facts. I really do believe it’s that simple.

What makes Fusion “better” than Fission?

Nuclear fusion can release much more energy than nuclear fission, but it also requires much more energy to bring about the fusion reaction in the first place. That’s why it took 70 years to get to the first successful fusion ignition demonstration experiment in December 2022.

To be sure, if your goal is to make nuclear weapons powerful enough to destroy humanity several times over, nuclear fusion is the way to go. H-Bombs, or more accurately, two-stage fission-fusion thermonuclear warheads, are as much as 1,000 times powerful and destructive than pure-fission bombs like those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But if the goal is producing electricity, I would argue that nuclear fission already offers an EROEI of at least 75, even with 1950s-technology pressurized light water reactors which don’t make very good use of the fuel they consume, wasting at least 95% of it. Newer breeder reactor designs are many times better and at least double the EROEI to 150+. So far, the best EROEI we’ve seen from nuclear fusion is 1.35, and to get that number they only counted the laser energy. The real EROEI is still well below 1.0. Fusion still has a very long way to go before catching up with the efficiency of nuclear fission energy which has worked reliably in the real world for more than seven full decades now.

My point is simply that there’s no reason to conclude that fusion is somehow “better” because it could theoretically release more energy than fission. The requirement to consume so much energy to produce the fusion reaction more than outweighs any benefit of “greater energy output”, especially considering that nuclear fission already produces so much energy that the primary challenge in fission reactor design is making sure that too much fission energy isn’t released all at once. Nuclear fission already works, and has worked for decades. It releases all the energy we could possibly need. Why in the world should we strive for even greater sources of more energy than we can possibly use?

The waste argument

The next claimed “benefit” of fusion over fission is only slightly more credible: Fusion typically involves fusing two hydrogen atoms together to make one helium atom. Helium is an inert gas that never hurt anyone, so the “nuclear waste” from fusion energy could literally be used to make helium-filled balloons for children’s birthday parties. In contrast, the pressurized light water nuclear reactors based on 1950s technology, which are used in almost all nuclear power plants today, work by fissioning, or splitting Uranium-235 atoms in half. The resulting spent nuclear fuel waste from one of these 1950s technology reactors is some pretty nasty stuff. It can stay moderately radio-active for upwards of 100,000 years, and needs to be handled carefully.

What’s worse, the low-enriched Uranium fuel used in these light water reactors only contains 3% to 5% U-235, the kind of uranium that actually gets consumed as fuel. The remaining 95-97% of the low-enriched uranium is U-238, a kind of uranium that can be consumed as fuel in a modern breeder reactor, but not in the old-school 1950s pressurized light water reactor designs used by almost all of the civilian power reactors in operation today. That means the nuclear waste is at least 20x more massive and voluminous than it really needs to be, and that’s precisely why more than a quarter million metric tons of spent nuclear fuel waste is now in storage worldwide. In reality, that spent fuel waste isn’t nearly as dangerous or problematic as the public perceives, but that’s beside the point for the purposes of this article.

Most of the waste-related shortcomings the fusion charlatans falsely ascribe to fission generally are only true for light water reactors. Thorium breeder reactors (described in more detail later in this post) don’t share those problems, and don’t produce much waste at all. So the whole waste argument goes straight out the window as soon as we refocus on the right fission energy technology.

The weapons argument

Yet another reason the charlatans argue that fusion is “better” is that the only way to make the low-enriched uranium fuel required by pressurized light water reactors is to be in possession of enrichment centrifuges which concentrate the U-235 from its natural concentration of only 0.7% in natural uranium, up to the 3 to 5% concentration required for pressurized light water reactors to operate. The problem here is that once you have the centrifuge equipment, you could in theory keep going and enrich natural uranium all the way to 90%+ U-235.

That’s known as weapons grade uranium, and just like the name implies, you could make a bomb with it. So the argument is that in order to have commercial fission energy, someone needs to have enrichment centrifuges to produce the fuel, and if those centrifuges fell into the wrong hands, they could be used to produce weapons-grade Uranium for bomb-making.

Uranium-fueled pressurized light water reactors also produce small amounts of Plutonium as a by-product of the fission chain reaction. Plutonium is one of the ingredients in the spent nuclear fuel waste those old-school reactors produce. The argument here is that bad guys could steal the spent nuclear fuel waste and somehow separate and recover enough of the plutonium it contains to make a nuclear bomb.

Frankly, separating the plutonium from the rest of the nuclear fuel waste is a task that took thousands of our best engineers and chemists several years to achieve during the Manhattan project, and for a random band of terrorists to reproduce that achievement would be profoundly improbable. But it is theoretically possible, and this is often cited as one of the “benefits” of fusion over fission. In reality that argument is badly flawed because there are easier and well-known ways to make weapons grade plutonium, but that doesn’t stop the charlatans of fusion from invoking this argument.

Fusion compared to what kind of fission?

Ok, ok, I know what you’re thinking. The disadvantage of old-school fission reactors producing spent nuclear fuel waste that stays radio-active for upwards of 100,000 years makes fusion sound a hell of a lot better! Fair point. And even if the weapons proliferation risks created by uranium enrichment and small amounts of plutonium being contained in the spent fuel waste are miniscule, they’re still non-zero, and nuclear bombs are mighty scary. So already, fusion is sounding a lot better!

But wait, what if instead of comparing fusion to 1950s-technology light water reactors, we instead made the huge jump all the way forward to 1960s technology, and instead compared fusion with more advanced reactor designs, such as the thermal spectrum Thorium molten-salt breeder reactor? The first one of those was built in the early 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and was first turned on 59 years ago in 1965. It ran continuously for four years until it was shut down without incident when the experiment it was being operated under ended in 1969.

Sadly, that design was abandoned by the U.S. Government in the early 1970s, but was resurrected in 2018 by the Chinese, who have since announced their intention to build container ships powered by these far-superior reactors. And that’s the kind of fission we should be focusing on.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that 1950s-technology pressurized light water reactors don’t look great in comparison to what’s hoped for from nuclear fusion. But is it really even relevant to compare fusion’s purported benefits solely against out-dated 1950s reactor technology? Spoiler alert: Fusion suddenly doesn’t look all that hot when you put it up against 1960s fission technology. And compared to current advanced fission technology, I don’t see any substantive benefits of fusion over fission.

Fusion vs. 1960s Thorium Molten Salt Breeder Reactors

The Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was never commercialized thanks to abject corruption and malfeasance within the U.S. Government. So the commercial thermal spectrum Thorium breeder reactor I speak of technically doesn’t exist right now outside of China, save for a few prototypes in development by companies like Copenhagen Atomics and Flibe Energy. But neither do the commercial nuclear fusion reactors everyone is inexplicably getting so excited about! And the Thorium MSR was already tested and proven to work at Oak Ridge when I was still in diapers.

Now let’s compare the “benefits” of nuclear fusion against 1960s fission technology. The Oak Ridge reactor was fueled by Thorium rather than Uranium, so the whole argument about needing to enrich natural uranium into low-enriched uranium reactor fuel in centrifuges gets thrown out the window immediately.

True, the Oak Ridge reactor needed just a tiny bit of low-enriched Uranium “kick starter” fuel to start the process of breeding Thorium into fissile U-233 which actually fuels the fission chain reaction. But my friends at Copenhagen Atomics have already built a modern day (2020s) version of this reactor design that can burn spent nuclear fuel waste from the pressurized light water reactor fleet as kickstarter fuel. So we don’t need to enrich yellowcake uranium to power a Thorium-fueled energy transition. The 2020s version uses recycled spent fuel waste instead. (Surely the scene from Back to The Future Part II where Doc powers the DeLorean with a Cuisinart fits in here somehow).

Meanwhile, the thermal spectrum Thorium MSR doesn’t consume, contain, or produce any plutonium whatsoever, aside from the small amount of plutonium contained in the kickstarter fuel used just to start it up. So the whole nuclear weapons proliferation argument that made nuclear fusion sound so much better than 1950s technology light water reactors is completely moot now.

And by the way, the fusion charlatans are lying through their teeth when they claim their technology “can’t be used for weapons in any way”. They require tritium fuel! Tritium is the stuff you need to make a freaking H-Bomb, for crying out loud! That’s the kind of bomb that’s about 1,000x more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Yet despite that their fusion reactors are fueled by the essential ingredient needed to make an H-Bomb, they claim their technology presents no weapons proliferation risks!

Let’s return now to the subject of the nuclear waste produced by old-school nuclear fission technology, which stays radio-active for up to a hundred thousand years. Sorry, but that was a 1950s-era light water reactor design story. The Thorium MSR is many times more fuel-efficient than uranium-fueled reactors, and doesn’t produce anywhere close to the mass or volume of spent fuel waste that light water reactors produce.

True, the Thorium MSR does produce a small amount of spent fuel waste, but it only stays radio-active for about 300 years, i.e. less than 0.1% as long as waste from light water reactors. And unlike nuclear fusion, waste-burning Thorium MSRs like the one being developed right now at Copenhagen Atomics can solve the waste problem we already have by burning up the waste produced by light water reactors of yesteryear as kickstarter fuel to begin the process of breeding Thorium into U-233.

But if the Thorium MSR works by breeding Thorium into Uranium-233, couldn’t that Uranium-233 still be used to make a bomb? That scenario was actually given serious consideration during the Manhattan Project, when they were worried they wouldn’t be able to figure out how to separate enough plutonium to make the bomb used at Nagasaki. An alternative plan to breed Thorium into U-233 and then try and make a bomb from U-233 was carefully evaluated, but the conclusion reached was that although it was theoretically possible to make a bomb from U-233, the technical complexity of such a bomb would be so great that even the Manhattan Project scientists concluded it was beyond their reach. To suggest that terrorists might sort all this out when building an enriched uranium bomb is so much easier is just silly.

Suddenly Nuclear Fusion technology doesn’t stand up very well against thermal spectrum Thorium breeder reactors that our parents’ tax dollars paid for in the 1960s, but which the U.S. Government never allowed to be commercialized. So I for one don’t see a whole lot of advantages to justify all the hype and hoopla over fusion.

Why not just commercialize Thorium breeders instead?

We’ve had the opportunity staring us in the face for my entire lifetime to commercialize the Thorium MSR, but have failed to do so thanks to U.S. Government malfeasance. Meanwhile, grid-scale commercial nuclear fusion doesn’t freaking exist yet, but investors have been duped into thinking it’s much closer at hand than it really is.

Why is everyone so excited about the hope for something new (grid-scale commercial fusion) to come along in “just a few years”, when we’ve had another solution that’s arguably just as good that we’ve been sitting on for more than half a century of inaction? This is crazy!

The misinformed press

I know what many of you are thinking… “No! That can’t be right. Commercial fusion is coming much sooner than people think. I read it in the newspaper!”. It’s truly shocking how poorly researched most of the articles about Fusion energy that have appeared in the press have been. There are many examples, but as of this writing, the one that seems to be getting the most attention comes from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, so I’ll focus on this article to show how baseless the arguments being made really are:

Mr. Evans-Pritchard begins with a diatribe opining that recent advances in electromagnets will prove to be game-changers for increasing Q-factor, because they will help to shape and compress gas plasma fields that cannot be manipulated by physical means because they have to operate at temperatures in the tens to hundreds of millions of degrees. Ok, look, there’s definitely some truth to the idea that better electromagnets will enable advances in this experimental technology. But please step back and consider the bigger picture!

This stuff makes Star Trek: Next Generation look low-tech in contrast! Shaping plasma fields that have to be heated to temperatures even hotter than the surface of the sun? And having to create pressures higher than at the center of Earth’s core? Dude, that’s some seriously challenging science! And meanwhile, the Thorium breeder (fission) reactor design that got moth-balled in the early 1970s already offers substantially all the same benefits as fusion, doesn’t require operating temperatures any higher than 800C, and was proven to work more than half a century ago! So to my eye, the very fact that it’s necessary to shape plasma fields at hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius in an indictment of Fusion technology being way past bleeding edge. The fact that better electromagnets will help overcome such daunting challenges hardly seems important.

Now let’s examine the principal arguments Evans-Pritchard makes in this article one by one:

“Dr. Mumgaard said [his company] is eyeing costs of $60-80 MWh with scale, undercutting the 24/7 cost of intermittent renewables paired gas peaker plants or with energy storage in most places.”

As I’ve argued at length elsewhere, we need to make nuclear energy cost less than energy from coal or gas, not more! First of all, I don’t believe these numbers are anywhere close to realistic in any timeframe that’s relevant. But even if they were, they’re still way too high! We need to make $20/MWh electricity from nuclear power, and we could do that before 2030 by mass-producing Thorium MSR Breeder reactors. Why are we continuing to waste time, money, and energy on all this fusion nonsense when even the most optimistic cost estimates from the charlatans themselves are 4x higher than what we could achieve simply by making fission energy more efficient?

“We don’t use uranium. There is no risk of melt-downs,’ he said.”

Thorium MSRs offer those same exact benefits, and could have been commercialized half a century ago. Why are we waiting for the fusion fantasy to become reality when we’ve had the technology that delivers the same benefits starting us in the face for fifty years now?

“The allure of fusion is by now well understood. It generates four million times more energy than fossil power, without emitting CO2 or methane. It creates almost no long-term waste. Its main by-product is inert helium.”

The allure of fusion has been badly over-hyped by journalists like Evans-Pritchard who have failed to do their homework and recognize that advanced fission technologies that deliver all the same benefits were proven to work half a century ago.

We don’t need four million times more energy than fossil power. A few thousand times more will suffice quite nicely, and for decades now, that’s been possible from already-proven (but not commercialized outside China) advanced fission technology. Those technologies don’t emit CO2 or methane, they don’t require tritium fuel that costs thirty million bucks a kilogram, and the small amount of short-storage-life waste they produce is trivial in comparison to the waste produced by old-school fission reactors. It’s ready to be commercialized right now, and China is doing exactly that with great success. The west needs to catch up else China will control energy for the next 100 years, as Western scientists continue to play in their fusion sandboxes.

“It uses almost no land, and little water, and can be made practically invisible.

Equally true of Thorium MSRs, which were proven to work in the 1960s.

Unlike today’s fission, it produces industrial high-grade heat to help decarbonise glass, cement, steel, ammonia, hydrogen, etc.”

Notice Evans-Pritchard’s use of the word “today’s”. It seems he’s already aware that if we moved beyond the outdated 1950s technology used in “today’s” nuclear power stations and adopted 1960s technology instead, his claims would no longer be valid. So he adds this qualifying word to make his statement true, without acknowledging the far more relevant point that advanced fission technologies already solve these problems.

He makes an excellent point that high-temperature reactors are needed to produce hydrogen efficiently. The most practical and expeditious solution to that problem is to use high-temperature gas-cooled fission reactors, which are ideally suited to hydrogen production. While we in the west continue to waste time and money on fusion fantasies, China put their first large-scale high-temperature fission reactor into service on December 6th, 2023. We should follow their lead and focus on solving these problems with known and proven technology rather than playing in the fusion sandbox which is distracting capital investment away from much more relevant and useful advanced fission technologies such as Thorim MSRs and gas-cooled high temperature fission reactors.

“It runs continuously if you need it, or is dispatchable if you don’t.”

The feature he’s describing is called load-following, and it’s a feature of liquid-fueled Thorium MSRs. That technology was first proven in the mid-1960s and should have been commercialized in the early 1970s. And that’s what we should focus on now rather than wasting time and money on fusion.

“The fuel is effectively limitless for thousands of years and can be obtained anywhere: deuterium from seawater, and tritium by breeding with small amounts of lithium.”

These claims were debunked earlier. Again, this is equally true of uranium, but at a much lower cost. Seawater contains all the uranium we could ever possibly use, even if we make the mistake of continuing to build fission reactors based only on outdated 1950s technology. And uranium recovery from seawater costs only $500/kg, as opposed to $4,000+/kg for deuterium and $30,000,000/kg for breeding tritium from lithium at current market prices. It’s true that cost can be reduced by designing breeding jackets around fusion reactors, but the overall need is much better satisfied with known and proven fission technology.

“There is no risk of a runaway chain reaction. It does not use fissile materials and is useless for weapons.”

There’s no serious risk of a runaway chain reaction in a Thorium MSR. And to say that tritium is “useless for weapons” is ludicrous! It’s the key ingredient for making an H-Bomb! And because tritium’s half-life is only 12 years, today’s thermonuclear warheads have to be “topped off” with a fresh dose of tritium every few years to keep them in operational status. It was even speculated that Russia’s nuclear weapons might not be sustainable if the Russians couldn’t afford to produce enough tritium to keep them topped off. So by claiming that tritium (the fuel for D-T fusion reactors) is “useless for weapons”, Evans-Pritchard is just flaunting his ignorance!

In Closing

We already have all the nuclear energy technology we need to completely replace all the energy we presently derive from fossil fuels, with minimal waste, and we can even get rid of all 250,000 tons of spent fuel waste now in storage in the process! We should stop wasting time and get to work on that agenda, while recognizing Fusion Energy for the counter-productive distraction which it truly is.

Is it possible that grid-scale commercial fusion could become reality in the next decade thanks to some sort of revolutionary breakthrough? Of course, anything is possible and we can never say “never”. But frankly I think the odds are far higher for Donald Trump marrying Nancy Pelosi while simultaneously having an affair with AOC. Anything is possible, but both of these scenarios are so unlikely as not to warrant serious consideration.

Don’t get me wrong; as a technologist I still think fusion is the coolest thing going, and I truly enjoy reading about it. But Fusion simply cannot and will not be ready for grid-scale commercialization in any timeframe that matters, and we’ve already wasted half a century not commercializing the advanced fission technologies which can fully solve Energy Transition and Climate change by delivering nuclear electricity that costs only $20/MWh, as opposed to hoping the false claims of the fusion charlatans might someday come true at four times that price.