MIT’s New Framework Aims to Tackle Nuclear Fusion’s Money Problem

Haley Zaremba

Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…

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• MIT’s new framework weighs the physical inputs and plant construction costs fusion needs to actually compete in energy markets, not just achieve ignition in a lab.
• The system works across any fusion approach, tokamak, laser confinement, or z-pinch, which could help settle which technology wins commercially.
• Researchers argue the physics of fusion is proven; the real hurdle now is money, and getting honest about the economics before scaling up.

For decades, the joke was that nuclear fusion was and would always be 30 years away. But a rapid string of breakthroughs over the last five years, catalyzed by privatization and the pressure as well as the support of the AI boom, has changed the calculus and suddenly brought the technology onto a real and achievable timeline.

Nuclear fusion is treated as a ‘holy grail’ of clean energy because, if harnessed in a commercially viable and scalable way, it could provide limitless energy production with zero greenhouse gas emissions and negligible environmental externalities. In short, it’s a silver-bullet solution for the world’s energy trilemma.

“To power one person’s lifetime, it’s a bathtub of seawater and a laptop battery’s size of lithium,” nuclear physicist Annie Kritcher recently told Fortune. “It’s not a lot of materials, and there’s no [long-term] radioactive waste like we have with fission.”

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The first major breakthrough took place at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in late 2022, when a team of scientists led by Kritcher made a breakthrough that many doubted would ever happen. The lab achieved ‘first ignition’ when it achieved a man-made fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed for the first time in human history. Since then, this amazing feat has been recreated, and other breakthroughs have started piling up in fusion experiments around the globe.

Breakthroughs have been achieved in a wide variety of fusion experiments. The breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was achieved using high-powered lasers, but other extremely promising options use a device called a tokamak that uses ultrapowerful magnets to contain plasma. China’s tokamak-based EAST ‘artificial sun’ is currently on track to achieve ignition by next year, at which point it would become the first fusion reactor to sustain plasma without external heating. Another promising approach is offered by z-pinch systems, which use electrical currents.

We now have a wealth of proof that nuclear fusion is possible and replicable through a number of different technologies – but are any of them scalable? As it stands, nuclear fusion is nowhere close to being commercially viable. The resources required to create a relatively miniscule amount of energy are enormous and completely untenable for any practical application.

A new framework from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) seeks to puzzle out how to keep the momentum moving forward to bring fusion from a lab environment to an industrial and economic reality. The framework weighs “the physical inputs needed to sustain controlled fusion energy production, as well as the cost of building power plants that can compete in energy markets” according to a recent press release from MIT. The scientists argue that the age of throwing methods and materials at the wall to see what sticks is now over. We now know that fusion is possible scientifically, and how to achieve it. Now it’s time to crunch the numbers.

“It’s all the things that come along with finding, allocating, and spending money at this scale,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and co-author of the study, published last month in the Journal of Fusion Energy. “This is critical to what we do. We should look at the economics. If we want this technology to actually be meaningful in the world economy, we have to start getting straight with ourselves about these topics.”

Critically, the framework is applicable to any and all of the fusion energy approaches that are currently under development. At this early stage of fusion research, it’s still not clear whether tokamakaks, laser-controlled internal confinement, or z-pinch systems will hold the key for commercial viability. But MIT’s system could help us figure that out.

Whyte says that the framework is “completely agnostic to whatever fusion concept you use, because the physical reality of fusion is that you expend money to build the capability to produce fusion power.” Moreover, Whyte’s co-author Andrew W. Lo emphasizes, “It doesn’t matter whether the fusion power plant is small or large, the bottom line is: In both cases you better have money coming out that exceeds the money going in, otherwise it’s not going to be around for very long.”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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