The world’s largest nuclear fusion machine, currently being built in France, is unlikely to produce more energy than it consumes until the early 2030s, warned the UK’s head of fusion research this week. That is five years later than planned – by which time China could be ahead of everyone.
Nuclear fusion involves heating a plasma of hydrogen isotopes so that they fuse into helium, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. Many physicists see it as the holy grail for producing cheap zero-carbon energy. But initiating the fusion reactions requires temperatures 10 times as hot as the core of the sun. And decades of experiments have yet to produce self-sustaining fusion reactions – known as “burning plasma” – that generate the energy required to produce such temperatures.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a $20 billion machine being built in Cadarache, France, should get there. “We are confident that it will,” Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, told the science and technology committee of the UK’s House of Lords on Tuesday. But it is taking time and money.
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