Essay by Eric Worrall
No doubt nuclear fusion is just 20 years away, just like last time…
New Record: Reactor Crosses ‘Crucial Milestone’ in Achieving Nuclear Fusion
TECH 22 February 2025
French scientists on Tuesday announced that they had reached a “crucial milestone” in the long road towards nuclear fusion by managing to maintain raging-hot plasma for a record 22 minutes.
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The WEST tokamak machine in southern France managed to maintain plasma for 1,337 seconds on February 12, France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) said in a statement.
This “smashed” the previous record set in China last month by 25 percent, said the CEA, which runs the tokamak machine.
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The goal is to prepare the ground for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in France, she added.
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It had been scheduled to go online this year, but repeated setbacks, delays and spiralling costs have postponed operations until at least 2033.
Read more: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-record-reactor-crosses-crucial-milestone-in-achieving-nuclear-fusion
…
What is missing from this French announcement is how long that plasma would have to burn to produce a true return on energy.
The big problem with fusion plasmas, aside from stability, is something heated to millions of degrees really wants to radiate its heat. ITER is an attempt to keep the plasma hot by making the plasma really big – taking advantage of the improved surface area to volume ratio of larger objects. Heat generation is governed by volume, while heat radiation is governed by temperature and surface area.
There is also a rarely mentioned problem that the radiation from fusion plasmas tends to destroy its containment vessel. The radiation is so intense a sustained plasma, even if contained, would cause mechanical damage to the containment vessel, leading to rapid structural failure. Solving that may require exotic self healing ceramic alloys or technologies not yet invented.
One government at least is not allowing such obstacles to dent their optimism. They are so confident, in 2023 they started construction on the first commercial British fusion reactor, promising local voters the fusion reactor would be providing jobs and economic prosperity by 2040.
I’m sure construction of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor isn’t just a cynical ploy to win votes from people politicians have no intention of helping. I mean, British politicians wouldn’t do that, would they?
Update (EW): I’m not a total pessimist when it comes to nuclear fusion, because a viable path to producing electricity from nuclear fusion has already been discovered and tested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gnome_(nuclear_test)
Project Gnome was an awful way of solving the problem, about as far from commercially viable and politically acceptable as you can get. But where one viable path exists, other better paths likely also exist, we just need to figure them out.
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Wind power, look out.
The radiation problem is not from the plasma being plasma, but the 14MeV neutrons generated by the D-T reactions that are supposed to occur in the plasma.
As for the amount of time to see fusion as a power source, studies in electricity were going on for more than a century before electric power systems became practical. Or for that matter, how long did man dream about travel to the moon?
I don’t expect to see fusion power reactors in my lifetime, but it may be another story for my kids.
Fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be…
In your haste to demonstrate your unoriginal wit, you have ignored the valid points made by Erik.
A powerful argument. How many millennia passed between the invention of the wheel and the Tesla?
It will probably take just as long to go from the fake French breakthrough to actual commercially-viable power plants.
22 minutes divided 525600 (a year) = 0,0000418569. somehow the word “insignificant” springs to mind, and it only took roughly 50 years to get there (and don’t mind the cost)
a little brainteaser
1978 : “42”
2025 : “47”
DON’T PANIC !
cheers from nutty Europe
The story is a trifle thin to know just what is going on.
A trifle thin = “All heat yet no fusion.”
“Break even” ignition has been demonstrated.
No, it hasn’t. You’ve been lied too – again! By the legacy media. By governments. And these people want to call everything else disinformation!
I know someone who works for the National Ignition Facility. While the amount of energy derived exceeded the amount of laser energy applied to the target, that energy is about 1/10 of the energy used to charge the lasers. So we are still a long way from “break even”.
And then there are the magnets. And the production of the fuel.
Yes, you are right. That is why I put quotation marks around “break even.” They didn’t account for all the energy input to the system. However, I was responding to Rud’s claim “All heat yet no fusion.”
“I’m sure construction of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor isn’t just a cynical ploy to win votes from people politicians have no intention of helping.”
Back in the 1950’s, my folks had an early Crosley B&W television. Later as a kid, I looked on the back of the chassis, and there was an RCA-type plug that was labelled “For Color Television Adapter.” Good to know my folks had purchased a black and white tv that could be converted to color as soon as the adapter was available.
The plug wasn’t connected to anything, which puts it on par with that commercial fusion reactor.
It would be good to know what went in or out of that plug, (by design).
A colour picture tube has a triphosphor screen and coating, a mono CRT doesn’t need the internal screening, just a single gun and single phosphor coating. What CRT was fitted to allow future colour display?
If the CRT was colour, (triphosphor, with screen etc), then what would be coming in through a single plug that wouldn’t already be detuned by the inbuilt tuner section? It wouldn’t be a simple colour signal combination, that would take three connections, RGB or YUV. If in a composite format, eg PAL or NTSC, then the tuner would provide that already.
Love to see a circuit diagram on that one, just to find out what the single port was for.
“The plug wasn’t connected to anything…”
So, there was no circuit. It was a marketing ploy to fool people into thinking they wouldn’t have to replace their TV once networks started transmitting in colour. Given that, in the 50’s, colour transmissions were still at least a decade away, it was a smart way to make customers think they were getting something more than they really were. The real questions are: How much extra did that useless plug add to the price? And: Did it increase sales?
Wow, you sure missed the point my friend.
He said that the connector didn’t go anywhere. It was a shameless marketing ploy to deceive customers into buying the B&W set that might be upgradeable.
A cynical lie. Just like everything being reported as a fusion breakthrough.
Everyone knows that bird shredders and slaver panels are not fit for purpose but just deal with it now, sacrifice for the paradise we’re building! The miracle of fusion power, cheap, abundant, is perennially just around the corner.
It may never even be achieved technically but it will certainly never be commercially viable.
Did the connector have anything on the inside, if not, then you are correct. Oops.
However, I must have missed the sentence that said that.
I’ve got a sign on the back of the motorhome: “For Fusion Reactor Adapter.” I’m hoping to install the plug any day now and retire on Carbon Credits.
“ITER is an attempt to keep the plasma hot by making the plasma really big . . . .”
Like in a star?
That’s positively Stellar…
I wonder what the next ITERation will look lile
Jupiter might be big enough.
Wait, I guess not.
The problem with ITER is that there isn’t enough mass to contain the plasma, (like in a star).
Maybe in 40 years……
. . . or until we can capture, or manufacture, our first microscopic black hole to put into ITER.
Question is “How big does it have to be?” Bonus question: is there enough GDPin the world to build one?
“The radiation is so intense a sustained plasma, even if contained, would cause mechanical damage to the containment vessel, leading to rapid structural failure.”
Sounds like a “climate scientist” warning about impending doom. Predicting disaster by uttering meaningless (but sciency) word salad.
22 minutes sounds impressive to me. The main radiation produced is heat. Unfortunately, until the means to use this heat produce enough power to sustain a stable plasma is found, the process is commercially unviable.
Initial efforts at world changing technology tend to be underwhelming. The Wright brothers initial flight was all of 12 seconds. Within a year, they managed 5 minutes and 4 seconds. The US Government was unimpressed, and the US Board of Ordnance and Fortifications, in their wisdom, rejected their offer to provide flying machines on two occasions. The flying machine succeeded anyway.
So 22 minutes of sustained fusion reaction sounds good to me.
Michael, the purpose of the high temperature plasma is to allow for the fusion of Hydrogen isotopes into Helium. The typical reaction results in the release of kinetic energy via a high speed neutron. Catching and slowing that neutron converts the kinetic energy of the particle to thermal energy which can be used to make steam, etc.
Catching a neutron is not that hard, lots of elements are good at it. Unfortunately a lot of materials ultimately become radioactive if they catch a neutron. As an example, if Carbon 12 catches a neutron it becomes carbon 13, stable. If C13 catches a neutron it becomes C14, etc, etc.
Above carbon 13, all the rest of the isotopes are radioactive. So the walls of the containment vessel, if containing carbon, would become radioactive. Not good. Same for steel, copper, etc, etc.
If the walls could somehow bounce the neutrons back into the void, (difficult since neutrons aren’t deflected by magnetic fields), then the void starts to build up a surplus of neutrons. These too have a half life, in the range of 14 minutes. These break down to a proton and an electron, (plus neutrino), about 1 in 1000 also emit a gamma ray. Gamma rays are very high energy photons and can cause significant damage to living cells. You don’t want to be in the way of them.
So radiation is emitted by the fusion process, it’s not just heat. After a while the vessel will likely be neutron saturated and also showing signs of its own radioactivity.
“Catching and slowing that neutron converts the kinetic energy of the particle to thermal energy which can be used to make steam, etc.”
As I said, heat production is the aim. Your comment is misleading, however.
The whole idea is to convert matter into energy – e=mc2 and all that. Heat is what is used to turn water into steam to produce electricity. Pretty simple in theory.
Atomic fission (the basis of present nuclear power generation) converts matter into energy, but creates a lot of radioactive waste, and is fairly inefficient.
For example, the most powerful fission bomb was around 500 kiloton TNT equivalent, while a fusion bomb has yielded about 60 megaton TNT equivalent.
The heat output from both was quite evident.
All radiation is light (photons). The whole idea of a fusion reactor is to produce appropriate photons by annihilating matter. Sounds simple, but even using a toroidal magnetic field as a “container” for plasma tends to boggle most people’s minds. Even more complicated is the conversion of the energy contained in high energy photons resulting from the fusion reaction – your description is not correct for a tokamak fusion reactor.
The future will tell if current fusion power endeavours were worthwhile. I’ll remain optimistic.
It is always preferable to be optimistic rather than permanently disappointed.
My life is a time line in sync with the nuclear age. At the age of five I recall my father coming home to marvel at the news the first hydrogen bomb had been tested, My depth of knowledge at five was already honed and full of semi understandings.
When he said the power was many times greater than a nuclear bomb I corrected his obvious lack of worldly wisdom saying, ‘daddy hydrogen is just a gas and can’t be more powerful than a nuclear bomb’… Out of the mouth of babes and well you know the rest.
From that point in the 1950s fusion was always going to be the saviour of the worlds insatiable energy needs.
It has not lost that lofty position, that utopia of energy options in the whole of the 70+ years that have passed. it remains the answer to all our energy needs…..
It’s arguably better to be an optimist than a realist I suppose. As a realist, I will never win a billion dollar lottery (unless an optimist gives me a ticket).
What happened to Alpha, Beta and Gamma particles?
All radiation is light….. I think you should look at beta rays and alpha rays.
And unless you can take energy from those fast neutrons you are not going to get any water to boil. Capturing light is one thing, capturing neutrons, as I noted, is not always a good thing.
It was just over 60 years from Kitty Hawk to Concorde – that’s not underwhelming.
After 60 years of fusion research we get 22 minutes of… what exactly?
And with fusion it is not a case of changing technology, it’s a question of engineering it. Unless and until something can be engineered, it is of no practical use to Mankind.
Fusion was/is/always will be the fuel of the future. Live long and prosper – burn fossil fuels.
No, the main radiation produced is not heat i.e. IR radiation. It is a massive flux of neutrons. These strike heat exchangers to give up their energy but in the process make the heat exchanger material radioactive. They are lying when they say fusion energy is clean. Simply not true. Nor is it safe or stable.
Boron-proton fusion does not produce neutrons. Funny how 99.99% (WAG?) of the money devoted to fusion goes to deuterium-tritium fusion and ignores the cleaner possibility.
Have a look at the energy required to START a helium fusion compared to the Boron and proton fusion. It might explain why they starting at the bottom.
If boron-proton capture was easy, the sun would have done it first too.
The coulomb repulsion between boron-11 nuclei and a proton is five times stronger than deuterium-tritium, so yes, it would take a lot hotter plasma to sustain fusion. But the challenge of creating that plasma temperature might be easier to overcome than dealing with the released neutrons. Also, the p-B fusion energy release is all in the form of gamma rays plus kinetic energy of the carbon, the remaining fuel nuclei, and the electrons caught up in the reaction. That should be a lot easier to collect as heat for running a generator.
Of course, so far D-T fusion can’t be sustained long enough to even worry about the consequences of neutron capture.
Even if those 22 minutes consumed, oh, 30 MWh of electricity at an estimated cost around $4,500?
22 minutes is a leap depending on how it is being measured.
in 2023 they started construction on the first commercial British fusion reactor, promising local voters the fusion reactor would be providing jobs and economic prosperity by 2040.
It is incomprehensible to me that they would undertake such a mammoth construction effort without knowing in advance what the final design will look like.
This is magical thinking. That somehow if we just start building it, the answers will be discovered in time to modify the building to suit the purpose. I find this same magical thinking among the under 30 crowd when I explain why wind and solar are impractical without grid scale storage which doesn’t exist. The frequent reply is that “they” (whoever they are) will come up with something so we should build the wind and solar now to be ready for it when it comes.
Perhaps I can propose a teleporter network and take their money to build the teleporter stations because by the time they are done, teleportation will have been solved?
What pisses me off most about these things is that the people proposing them are getting stupid wealthy from them and know damn well they won’t work.
Invest now in the Barnum & Bailey Teleporter enterprise, while you can.
To paraphrase French Nobel Physics winner de Gennes:
’The idea of fusion is pretty. We just put the Sun in a box. The only problem is, we do not know how to make the box.’
Even the Sun has containment issues on occasion.
No kidding. Stuff like coronal mass ejections could NEVER occur in ITER.
Why is this a ‘Crucial Milestone’ ?
Had it been 21 minutes and 42 seconds would it have been a milestone or just a so-so attempt? Is a ‘crucial milestone’ similar to a tipping point, like 2C degrees?
I have the feeling the folks doing this will be like those that proposed the CA High Speed Rail. Before anything useful is accomplished the originators will have “left this vale of tears”.
25% improvement is not just scraping out an incremental efficiency. It’s a big change.
Think about your investments. Would you take a 25% annual interest rate at the moment?
And, the improvement is in just one month. There has also been a recent announcement about employing a Neural Net to stabilize plasmas. I’m optimistic that we will see more announcements like this in the near future.
Why hasn’t AI—since it’s so smart—given us the design to make a practical fusion-based electricity power plant?
/sarc
It is waiting on its engineering license.
Helium 3 is needed for fusion? He 3 is not common? I would bet on thorium in liquid salts reactors over fusion.
Read my essay, Going Nuclear, in ebook Blowing Smoke. Thorium molten salt reactors are not the.only, nor perhaps the wisest, of the near term molten salt G4 fission concepts.
Totally agree. It’s like people in the 1970s arguing over whether a rotary engine would beat a small block V8, when all you wanted was to drop the kids off at soccer.
ANY damned fission reactor can be made safe enough and efficient enough to be worth building.
Currently the capital cost per MW dominates the economic viability equation – largely due to over regulation – and that is the main reason for type approved small modular reactors.
YouTube search for thorium….molten salts ….Billy Gates Natrium reactor uses molten salt….Copenhagen Atomics uses thorium and molten salt….and there are others. Chernobyl probably resulted in thousands of premature deaths,,,nuclear scare is still large and there is a plumbing problem with molten salts.
Reactors in an on-paper design stage have a perfect safety record.
China started a test thorium liquid salts cooled reactor in 2021 and Copenhagen Atomics has built almost everything needed and there is Thor Energy,,,etc……just search….
“No doubt nuclear fusion is just 20 years away, just like last time…“. Oh ye of little faith. They said the same of Hero of Alexandria, and just 1700 years later the steam engine was commercially viable and transformed society. Things do tend to happen faster now.
Often times in the past — as with Lonardo de Vinci’s flying machine designs — progress was impeded because the materials with sufficient strength or lightness did not exist. Progress in other areas of technology were dependent on progress in materials science.
One cannot create, control and direct a larger amount of energy with a smaller amount of energy.
Fusion power is simply never going to be a productive source of electricity.
Oh come now. They just haven’t found the right DeLorean yet.
Golly. So you actually have a 1000bhp right foot!
Impressive /sarc
Yes that’s why hydraulics are just a pie in the sky ideas
It takes but a single pull of a trigger with a 3-10 pound pull to discharge a bullet with several thousand foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle.
Consider how much energy it takes to turn the steering wheel of a large truck moving down the road at the speed limit?
Do you want to re-consider your claim?
I think a way will eventually found, because a way of producing power from nuclear fusion has already been found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gnome_(nuclear_test)
The proof of concept is way not commercially viable, but where one path to viable nuclear fusion energy production exists, another better path likely also exists, we just need to figure it out..
Transforming energy is EASY (E=mc^2) . . .creating energy, like creating matter, is reserved for the gods.
Those pesky neutrons are tough to contain. They do tend to cause problems wherever they go.
In the meantime, France idiotically turned OFF a working breeder reactor, the Phenix, more than 25 years ago. If that were reversed, it would be less than 20 years before the world, including France.would possess enough fission reactors to keep us all warm and lighted until fusion was finally conquered – whenever.
The Asians and the Russians know this; why do Westerners act like dunces?
That’s a very bold statement.
Commercial and geopoltical interests – people with oil and gas – have colluded to block nuclear as it directly replaces 20% or more of their market…
Go figure
It is easy to expand the energy market if you make it cheap.
That, and Russian campaigns in the 1980s with our useful idiots
Sounds very dangerous to me.
Science moves in mysterious ways.
The German ‘stellerator’ is rebuilding; tokamaks – ITER- are growing ever larger – slowly; JET toots its horn by improving its result – a little; laser ignition creeps closer and then goes quiet for years. Everyone ‘almost’ has a solution. Reminds me of ‘global warming’ a little.
Personally, I now expect a lot from Buck Rogers (but, maybe not in my lifetime).
Dark matter and gravity waves seem just as likely to lead to man’s first controlled gravity container.
We KNOW that works.
And Zeno demonstrated that an arrow will never reach its target because it always has to traverse half the remaining distance before reaching the target.
So, I sez to Zeno, I sez, I just pretend that my target is more than twice as far away as it really is, and so that way my arrow gets there before it even has to go the first half way.
Now come along.
It is time to get up to speed, fusion reactors are so last century.
Here in the UK, one of the founding nations of the nuclear age remember, we have moved on. We are now at the Black Hole level of development. A few £billions here and there on that old fashioned fusion stuff pales against our black hole developments and all that promises to bring to the world of energy.
As you will already know, there is a catch. The Hawking radiation given off by black holes is for the moment a bit of a problem. It has already impacted the wellbeing of many politicians engaged and focused on the black hole discoveries. Ed Miliband is a walking example of the damage done, Rachel from accounts was actively engaged in monitoring black hole development when she became entrapped by the radiation. The £22billion hole she was working on, was particularly damaging. She quickly handed over her £22billion black hole to the carbon capture black hole development run by Ed her colleague. She was unaware that he too was already addled by the effects of the radiation mostly given off by the left side of the black hole endeavour.
It is still research in progress and I will keep all informed as new developments occur…..
Years ago, I contacted an “Ask a scientist” website and asked, “If containment is the problem, why bother trying; – could we not just set off a very small hydrogen bomb in a hollowed out salt dome and take out the heat from the surrounding rock, repeating the explosions as necessary to maintain the temperature?”
The answer I got suggested that the “Scientist” didn’t know any geology, but my later reading indicated that something like this had at least been suggested before.
Yup. I remember that one being tossed around.
My own favourite is the internal fusion engine that runs on deuterium and self ignites like a diesel.
Only needs a compression ratio of something like 10,000:1
Line it with something that will absorb neutrons and become a useful isotope…
The “Infernal Combustion Enigma”
I wonder if that was what Terry Pratchett was thinking about
Molten salt breeder reactors. There you go. Problem solved.
Tokamak style fusion reactors are a dead end. The three fundamental problems with tokamak style reactors still remain:
1) How do we get the heat out in a usable form?
2) How do we get the waste products (helium) out?
3) How do we get more fuel (hydrogen isotopes) in?
A practical fusion reactor power plant requires all three of these for continuous operation.
As long as fusion is dealing in futures, these issues are nebulous. Fusion is, unfortunately, dealing in futures.
I am sure in the 19th century powered heavier than air flight was ‘only 20 years away’ but the reality was that until a decent lightweight power unit was available it remained a dream.
The Wright brothers took advantage of earlier aerodynamics to build a stable platform but the real key issue was their own lightweight 12bhp [variously stated as 8bhp – 16bhp] gasoline engine and the chain gear reduction drive to match the motors peak power to the most efficient speed for propellers.
In fact their success, though laudable, was actually one of several that took advantage of new technology to make an aircraft possible
In the same way, containment of plasma has always been the issue for fusion reactors. But materials and control systems get better every year. What we can do today would have been impossible in the 1960s.
22 minutes is phenomenal. I think – I wont live to see it – that some sort of almost viable fusion reactor will be built before 2050.
The fact that this has been promised for years and not delivered, doesn’t alter the reality. Leonardo Da Vinci was sketching out designs in the 15th century for aircraft that would have been viable if he had had a gasoline engine.
It’s the same position today with electric aircraft., All the bits are there except a lightweight battery.
So maybe you can get a couple of hours at 300mph out of a plane that can carry a few passengers. Its not enough.
As a lifetime engineer, what we can build depends on te technology that is available, and we don’t normally build things that we know cant work, except maybe to measure some important parameter.
The exception being when politics enters the arena. E,.g, ‘renewable energy’
Fusion reactors have a huge problem: Neutrons
Nuclear reactors use neutrons to heat a direct jacket of water, gas, or molten salt and circulate this medium to generate thermal power.
There is no known way for fusion reactors to be blanketed with a direct thermal exchange medium. Instead, stationary solid walled materials are to be exposed to the neutron flux. The walls will become highly radioactive over a short time, which will make it impossible to work on the system without total robotic interaction. This, while possible, will make operation and maintenance extremely expensive.
The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, at Princeton University became so radioactive, mostly due to Tritium fuel, that it had to be abandoned for several years to “cool” off. It was then remotely sliced into chunks with enormous diamond cable cutters, and hauled off to the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste facility. That is where it remains to this day.
Was the tritium absorbed by the superstructure?
Surprising nuclear fusion discovery may make US reactors safer, more efficient
Notify us when fusion electricity added into the grid reaches GW-hrs continuously each and every day.