Clean energy from fusion will be more than a clever gimmick – The National

Clean energy from fusion will be more than a clever gimmick – The National

Q is familiar to us as the ingenious MI6 inventor, frustrated with James Bond’s repeated destruction of his gadgets. But Q may one day be also well-known as the energy yield from a fusion reaction — the source that powers the stars, and may light up Earth too.

Unlike traditional nuclear fission, fusion brings atoms — usually isotopes of hydrogen — together rather than splitting them. It has many advantages. The process is zero-carbon, uses common fuels with very high energy density, is inherently safe with no risk of meltdown or weapons proliferation, and produces very little high-level radioactive waste.

But fusion is technically enormously challenging. Depending on the approach, it can require a millionth of atmospheric pressure, temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius and magnetism 280,000 times the Earth’s natural field to contain the plasma of ionised hydrogen. The flow of neutrons from the reaction generates the heat to be captured as useful energy, but damages the materials containing it. Components the size of a six-storey building must be assembled with precision of less than a millimetre.