Still 30 years away...

Here's a reality check for nuclear fusion

By ARIANNA SKIBELL

If the news of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy and its potential for cheap, carbon-free electricity sounds too good to be true, there’s a reason for that.

Theoretically, fusion holds the potential to be a practically waste-free and unlimited source of clean energy by using the same process that fuels the sun — basically, squeezing two atoms together and turning the energy they produce into electricity.

In an exciting first, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are expected to announce that they have managed to produce a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed.

Yet there are daunting scientific and engineering hurdles to developing this discovery into machinery that can affordably turn a fusion reaction into electricity for the grid. That puts fusion squarely in the category of “maybe one day.”

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to announce the scientific breakthrough Tuesday. While the development, which was first reported by the Financial Times, may be incremental, the Biden administration is sure to tout it as a major milestone in its climate and energy agenda.

Here are some reasons for tempering expectations that this breakthrough will yield any quick progress in addressing the climate emergency.

First and foremost, as climate scientists have warned, the world does not have decades to wait until the technology is potentially viable to zero out greenhouse gas emissions.

Plus, the hurdles associated with a national or global power switch remain. Reducing greenhouse gas output from the nation’s top carbon source — transportation — will still require either transitioning entirely to electric vehicles or dramatically re-imagining how we travel (or some combination of the two).

The bureaucratic and technological hurdles to expanding and upgrading the nation’s grid system to transmit clean power, no matter the source, also remain the same — not to mention the inevitable political complications of closing coal plants and oil and gas operations for a new carbon-free source.

“I'd be more excited about an announcement that U.S. is ending fossil fuel subsidies,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann tweeted.