Fusion energy faces new reality
Wind, solar offer cheaper power
The world’s biggest scientific experiment is on course to become the most expensive source of surplus power. Components of the 20 billion ($34b) project are already starting to pile up at a construction site in the south of France, where about 800 scientists plan to test whether they can harness the power that makes stars shine. Assembly of the machine will start in May. Unlike traditional nuclear plants that split atoms, the socalled ITER reactor will fuse them together at temperatures 10 times hotter than the Sun — 150 million degrees Celsius.
But questions remain about whether the reactor will work or if it can deliver electricity at anything like the cost of more traditional forms of clean energy.
With wind farm developers starting to promise subsidy-free power by 2025 and electricity demand stagnating, even the project’s supporters are asking whether ITER will ever make sense.
“I ’ m dubious,” says Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of energy research at Oxford University, who has spoken in favour of the research project. “The cost of wind and solar has come down so rapidly, so the competition has become harder to beat than you could have conceivably imagined a decade ago.”
ITER, short for international thermonuclear experimental reactor, was supposed to offer plentiful power from a zero-pollution source when governments started it in 2006. Now, as wind and solar farms spread, some without the help of subsidies, ITER in Provence is still decades away from proving whether its scientific theories can be put into practice.
In the decades it will take to prove itself, renewables are likely to mushroom, thanks to a 62 per cent plunge in the cost of solar panels over the past five years. Wind energy has followed similar trends as turbine sizes surged. Batteries also are spreading, reducing the need for utilities to maintain the constant “baseload” of supply that ITER would feed to the grid.
“The concept of the need for baseload generation is fading away,” says Paolo Frankl, who heads the renewable power division of the Inter- national Energy Agency. “Technically, you could run a system 100 per cent on renewables and even 100 per cent just wind and solar.”
But Frankl says the world doesn’t “have the luxury of avoiding any option” in ensuring power supplies.
And ITER’s promoters say fusion is one of the few possibilities to generate electricity at a gigantic scale without boosting greenhouse-gas emissions.
“It’s a dream to feel we could go on only with solar energy,” says Bernard Bigot, the French theoretical chemist who is director-general of ITER. “You need a reliable supply of energy. If you don’t have baseload energy, renewable energy doesn’t work, unless you want go back to the time where people had to stop when there were no resources.” Even so, Bigot acknowledges he must demonstrate the project isn’t just a bottomless money pit to keep its backers interested.
Shares in the project are owned by the EU, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. Since its inception in 2006, it has been plagued by delays. Last year, it had to ask for another 5b to keep going.
Funding is starting to look shaky. In 2015, the EU diverted 500 million from ITER, saying that it would eventually pay it back. ITER has received half of it to date. The U.S. contribution comes through a congressional continuing resolution that expires in December. —