According to a recent report from ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, “policymakers should not rely on, or fund, fusion power as a core pillar of future clean energy systems” for the two primary current fusion designs (magnetic and laser inertial) because of their low “experience rates” (economies of scale).
Fusion industry professionals already pursuing commercial development discounted these findings. Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard says ETH Zurich’s authors are unaffiliated with fusion and never spoke to any industry leaders. Helion co-founder Anthony Pancotti, whose company is developing a pulsed, non-ignition fusion system, “absolutely” believes fusion can be affordable and cost-competitive with other energy sources.
Zap Energy, which has been in the fusion business for nearly a decade, last week announced it was moving in a radical new direction – building the world’s first integrated fission and fusion nuclear energy company. Zap’s principals argue that a false wall exists between fission and fusion, whereas they are two points along the same technological continuum, and developing them together accelerates deployment of both.
Zap’s core mission, according to co-founders Benj Conway, Uri Shumiak, and Brian A. Nelson, remains the commercialization of fusion using the sheared-flow stabilized (SFS) Z-pinch, initially developed in Japan. But, he adds, “We also believe the energy transition cannot and should not wait for fusion alone.”
To jumpstart the company’s new direction, Zap recruited Zabrina Johal from Canadian nuclear firm AtkinsRéalis to serve as CEO. Johal, a former U.S. Navy nuclear propulsion officer, will lead the development of an integrated nuclear platform that brings together fission, fusion, and hybrid systems to deliver scalable, carbon-free power.
In a recent interview, Johal said that she and Zap’s founders had been in discussions for months since they realized they all see fission and fusion as “two sides of the same coin.” It makes so much sense, she has believed for years, to integrate the two into a single business to accelerate innovation across the entire nuclear energy system.
As Conway describes it, “fission and fusion are two expressions of the same underlying physics. By integrating them into a single platform, we can move faster, reduce risk, and build a more enduring company.” Johal calls the union “the perfect marriage” and says that Zap Energy is agile – not bureaucratic – and that she can hardly wait to get up in the morning and get to work.
Zap’s strategy comes as a direct result of its work in developing its fusion power plant, with the key insight that many of the hardest problems in nuclear energy are problems of industrialization and not specific to either fission or fusion.
Both require high-temperature materials, nuclear-grade manufacturing, advanced heat-transfer systems, modular construction, and sophisticated balance-of-plant engineering. Zap’s goal is to build reactors in factories and transport them to sites where they will operate safely for decades, following the expected regulatory revisions at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Johal says that artificial intelligence is driving demand and helping technology develop faster. AI also enables a greater focus on deep tech ideas and concepts because of its expedited computing and modeling capabilities. This enables running thousands of experiments in real time and picking those with the best results for further study– dramatically cutting the time to get new technologies to market.
Johal says that, rather than pursue fusion in isolation, Zap’s integrated platform is designed to deliver near-term, bankable power through compact, modular fission systems and exploit deep technology overlaps between fission and fusion, particularly in liquid-metal power systems (where Zap has developed world-leading expertise), neutron environments, and high power density design that can speed progress across both technologies.
In a Z-pinch system, plasma is produced by applying a high-voltage pulse across an anode-cathode gap of cylindrical geometry that is either pre-filled with gas or bridged by an array of (typically tungsten) wires. The plasma is imploded by the azimuthal magnetic field produced by the axially flowing discharge current, and the kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy and radiation as a hot, dense core is formed at the center.
The Japanese abandoned research on the Z-pinch process after the Fukushima incident. The chief obstacle to the technology was that the Z-pinch plasma would become unstable and thus uneconomic. Shumiak and Nelson, during their research at the University of Washington, developed the sheared-flow stabilization technique in which the plasma particles are made to move at different velocities and cannot “change lanes.”
Johal’s work has primarily focused on fission technologies, most recently AtkinsRéalis’ CANDU (Canada deuterium uranium) heavy-water reactor, but in her earlier work at General Atomics she was involved with fusion from a government program perspective. Like Zap’s founders, she too had long seen the many parallels between the two technologies.
Both, she says, share the concept of a core technology focused on high power density, similar materials, liquid metal cooling, and many business-related similarities. With the growing energy demands of data centers, AI, electrified transport, advanced manufacturing, and national energy security, the need for nuclear energy is escalating rapidly. Meeting that demand requires an expansion of nuclear energy at a scale not seen in generations.
Given the potential for both technologies to supply much needed electricity, it makes so much sense to do both. Zap chose to integrate fusion and fission into a single business, so when its fission reactors go commercial they will pull fusion closer to commercial deployment. Johal says Zap is looking to commercialize fission in the early 2030s – thanks in part to the coming Nuclear Regulatory Commission reforms — and fusion a few years later.
Longer term, working with both technologies places Zap Energy in the pole position for hybrid systems. This can involve fusion-driven neutron sources supporting advanced fission fuel cycles or waste reduction (utilizing rather than storing spent nuclear fuel), both of which have been studied in the scientific community. The Chinese have already been investing in hybrid fission-fusion systems as part of their long-term strategy.
Responding to the ETH Zurich study, Johal says she hopes all the fusion designs become commercially successful – but believes that Zap’s design will produce economies of scale thanks to their modular design.
This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy
No NO NOOOO!
The BELIEF is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Fusion has FAILED FAILED FAILED swallowing fortunes.
But it’s only another 30 years away … honest !! (:-))
No need to be sarcastic.
It’ll happen just the day after lower Manhattan drowns and Artic Ice disappears.
That is absolutely brilliant. fission and fusion simultaneously, easy peasy. if unobtainium nuclei are oscillated on the ylem axis you will get a circular nuclear reaction that goes on forever. Oh wait for the IPO.
Fission – Fusion is just a logical continuency of the Schroedinger world we live in.
A place where we have more and less snow at the same time,
as result of an ice age turned global warming,
where men are women,
where Hormuz is closed and open at the same time while blockaded by both parties,,
where Germany gives Ukraine billions for bombing their pipeline
and where totally incompetent Russians with no ammo fighting the best army in the world will take over all of Europe any second.
And all of this because of a cat, a butterfly flap and a politician who got an Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize for getting all of his predictions wrong.
A non-solution to a non-problem.
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere/water vapor/30% albedo not warmer. Near Earth outer space is 394 K, 121 C, 250 F. 288 K w – 255 K w/o = 33 C cooler -18 C Earth is just flat wrong. Dividing 1,368 by 4 to average 342 over Spherical ToA is wrong.
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics don’t balance and violate LoT. Refer to TFK_bams09.
Solar balance 1: 160 in = 17 + 80 + 63 out. Balance complete.
Calculated balance 2: 396 S-B BB at 16 C / 333 “back” radiation cold to warm w/o work violates Lot 2. 63 LWIR net duplicates balance 1 violating GAAP.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of contiguous atmospheric molecules render surface BB impossible. By definition all energy entering and leaving a BB must do so by radiation. Entering: 30% albedo = not BB. OLR: 17sensible & 80 latent = not BB. TFK_bams09: 97 out of 160 leave by kinetic processes, 63 by LWIR = not BB. As demonstrated by experiment, the gold standard of classical science.
For the experimental write up see:
https://principia-scientific.org/debunking-the-greenhouse-gas-theory-with-a-boiling-water-pot/
Search: Bruges group “boiling water pot” Schroeder
RGHE theory is as much a failure as caloric, phlogiston, luminiferous ether, spontaneous generation and several others.
When GHE fails the entire CAGW house of cards implodes like the Titan submersible.
A better link:
https://principia-scientific.com/debunking-the-greenhouse-gas-theory-with-a-boiling-water-pot/
(.com instead of .org)
I’m afraid that is a crackpot site.
I have no idea what kind of link it is. I was correcting the link that Nicholas Schroeder provided, that didn’t work
Link corrected. Link goes to site of chronically paranoid ideosyncratic theorist who thinks that a waterless rocky planet without an atmosphere would be hotter while in the earth’s Goldilocks zone.
70 years ago, on my first day as an undergraduate at Sydney University, at the top of the stairs to the entrance to the campus there was a man set up with a stand proving that the earth was actually flat.
Ed was telling you the author is a crackpot! 🙂
There is a greenhouse effect due only to water. There is too little CO2 in the air to have any effect on weather and climate.
In a desert the air and surface heats up after sunrise, and by late afternoon the air can become quite hot. After sunset, the surface and air cool very rapidly because there is very water in the air to absorb out-going long wavelength IR light emanating from the surface. Some heat is initially removed from the surface by conduction and convection In some deserts the air temperature can drop to freezing temperatures.
In the hot topical jungles, there is very little cooling at night due to high humidity.
No scientist worth the name considers Earth to be a black body (BB) in terms of incoming solar radiation being absorbed by the atmosphere, clouds and surface, or in terms of emissions of radiation from the surface, clouds and atmospher to deep space.
A grey body? . . . yes, OK, but calculating such gets very complicated very quickly. A black body? . . . not even a good approximation, given an average albedo of around 0.30 and an existing atmosphere with clouds and variable water vapor content.
Assuming the value of 1368 represents the magnitude of incoming, essentially-planar flux of TOA solar radiation power at Earth’s average orbital distance from the Sun (1 AU) in W/m^2, division by 4 is NOT WRONG for calculating the total amount of solar radiation power flux intercepted by the cross-sectional area of the Earth. This is “Geometry 101” and there is no need to elaborate further on this.
“ the total amount of solar radiation power flux intercepted by the cross-sectional area of the Earth.”
Intercepted and absorbed are two different things. If the intercepting area is not normal to the flux then not all of the intercepted flux will be absorbed. According to the divergence theory F · N –> Fcos(θ)
Ho hum. Since the Earth has an “average” albedo of about 0.30, as I previously stated, even if the “intercepting area” IS normal to the solar flux, not all of that normal flux will be absorbed.
That is fact, not theory.
Of course “intercepted” and “absorbed” are two different things . . . I never claimed differently.
Another copy/paste troll.
If you were as old as I am, you would know that the thought experiment in astrophysical thinking about the influence of atmosphere on surface climate of planets was:
Treat the earth as if it were a black-body radiator without an atmosphere in the Goldilocks zone distance from the sun and it would be too cold to begin or support life.
As the ocean floors are basalt, a very dark rock, that was reasonable as a hypothetical model.
It was a useful mind experiment and provoked the beginning of a whole branch of planetary geophysics.
Nick, do you have cat? You obviously have an equation.
when its fission reactors go commercial they will pull fusion closer to commercial deployment
I like the idea that a modular unknown is the way to go. I think of Kamala.
When you see naval vessels able to run 20 years without refuelling, you have to think that a strategy connecting fission and fusion is a good idea.
Then bring in directed energy weapons all running on gobs of electricity you have to think there is a solid future for fission energy at least at military level. Commercial applications inevitably get spun off these technologies.
I expect there is more value in perfecting scalable fission power plants that building the perfect wind turbine or even solar panel.
The world has wasted vast sums on wind energy. It was a good technology for expanding the then known world in centuries long past. Does not make any sense now.
Whereas, no sums have been wasted on pursuit of commercial energy from controlled fusion???
A pittance compared to the amount spent on wind energy.
At least with fusion, there’s a chance we could learn something about high energy physics with fusion research. No chance of learning anything useful from spending on wind.
About a chance of learning:
Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,”
Did you consider that wind energy has actually fed commercial-scale electricity into grids worlwide? Controlled fusion, not even 0.000001 MWh.
Now let’s apply your word “pittance” in an equitable manner.
Well, many did learn—from spending to emplace and operate numerous wind farms—that there is an very good chance that the total life-cycle earnings from such will not exceed the total life-cycle costs of such. That is useful to current and future investors.
Do you really expect to improve and expand technology without investing money in research?
No.
But then again, there are wise investments in research and there are un-wise investments in research . . . most often distinguished by hindsight.
Yes, hindsight is invaluable. However, lacking hindsight, as most mortals do, the next best thing is to follow various reasonable lines of research in the hopes of finding at least one acceptable solution. I say at least one because it is a given that most will be failures. Edison understood that.
Please define “reasonable” and who determines the applicability of that term.
The successful control of fusion is proven. H-bombs work.
I am not sure if they are available commercially but I think not.
I’m not aware that anyone considers mankind to have “controlled” nuclear fusion bombs: limited their energy output (“yield”),and thereby the damage done within a certain radius of the bomb’s explosion, yes . . . but controlled that energy to the extent of being able to convert it into commercial electricity to feed into a grid, NO!
Teller seemed to think he had “controlled” fusion until the largest US nuclear accident of all time happened… Castle Bravo.
If that gas happened in the USA it would have screwed most of the country with fallout
The Castle Bravo yield was more than twice the design yield because of an unexamined assumption. That assumption was that Lithium-7 would not fuse nor would it react in unexpected ways — only Lithium-6 would partake in the fusion reaction. However, when Lithium-7 was converted to tritium by neutron capture, it created additional fusion fuel that fused with deuterium. The lesson that was learned was that unstated assumptions need to be verified. That means that money has to be spent on research.
and then you realise that having a bottle of solar flames on the surface of the earth might not be such a good idea. That is why we had a season of ‘mad scientists’ talking about “cold” fusion
From the above article:
“In a recent interview, Johal said that she and Zap’s founders had been in discussions for months since they realized they all see fission and fusion as ‘two sides of the same coin’.”
Absolutely. It’s been well-known for many decades that a nuclear fission bomb (the “primary”) is needed to “ignite” a nuclear fusion bomb (the “secondary”).
Be careful out there!
/sarc
That is a detonation, not a controlled release of energy on demand.
I see this as progress, not in the sense that fusion is the future so much as fusion hasn’t worked out the way we had hoped but that we can use some of the stuff we learned from our work with fusion to apply to fission. We know how to make fission work, get busy building fission plants.
Let me ask again: Would you build a house to live in if you didn’t have a reasonable expectation of being able to connect to a sewage line to process your wastes?
Yes, because there are plenty of ways to process waste without putting it down a sewer – here are a few … Aerobic/Anaerobic Digestion, Composting, Gasification, UV irradiation, Reverse Osmosis, Septic Tank; there are loads more systems available.
We have a Septic Tank seeded with aerobic Bacillus microbes (Muck Munchers). The tank only needs de-slugging every ~20 years (that goes in the compost heap), plus a reed bed.
You are taking the analogy too literally. However, depending on the location and local conditions, one might not have a choice of all your alternatives because of things like local ordinances, thin to non-existent soil, or prohibitive capital costs for your budget.
Let me re-phrase my question. Wouldn’t you explore all those options and be sure that an affordable solution was available before committing to have a contractor build your house?
Nuclear waste disposal is similar in that there are several different ways of handling the waste. Some are legislatively off limits, some encounter geological barriers, others would negatively impact the profit margin that is one of the advantages of fission reactors.
In summary, a prudent person would explore all the available options of dealing the the unique properties of fission waste, and be certain that at least one of them is practical, before advocating for a wholesale commitment to the technology.
I’m not making the connection, help me out.
Unlike fusion, fission reactors produce a large amount of waste products that is not only highly radioactive, but literally hot. When the first reactors were built, they included cooling ponds to let the most radioactive elements decay into more easily handled isotopes before being transferred to ‘permanent’ storage. The operating companies were even taxed to fund the creation of the storage sites. The expectation was that while the USA did not have any certified long-term geological storage, they would find them and develop the necessary infrastructure by the time the spent fuel and its by-products were ready to come out of the cooling ponds. While political pressure put what might have been unrealistic limits on the siting, what killed the plan was that neither of the two most promising sites that were explored could offer the safety desired. As I recollect, the one in Kansas was interspersed salt beds and shale. To their surprise, the impervious shale also had coarser layers with considerable water, the universal solvent. To skip to the conclusion, despite decades of research and an unknown amount of money, the US government was not able to find even one site that met the requirements for long-term storage. As a consequence, all of the working nuclear reactors have filled their ‘temporary’ cooling ponds and have run out of places to put the waste. Thanks to President Gerald Ford, re-processing of spent fuel, as is done in France, was taken off the table. Alternative reactor designs that ‘burn’ everything have been proposed, but because of the political atmosphere, no commercial reactors have been built and unless we are willing to take the risk of an untried technology, and have another Chernobyl event, we don’t have a lot of options.
The French developed a solution decades ago. All of their used power reactor fuel is dissolved in acids, the usable U235 and Pu239 is recovered and made into new fuel. The leftovers are turned into glass and stored in a room. It’s a small room. The US was developing such an approach as well until Carter, not Ford, turned it off. We were also developing an unprocessed-fuel site in Nevada, proven quite acceptable, until Nevada politicians turned it off. In the US, the disposal issue is political, not technical.
Hmm…I somehow smell the scent of uselessly burned cash and wasted time
Witty opinions are not a substitute for hard facts and calculations.
“Witty opinions are not a substitute for hard facts and calculations.”
Speaking for myself, I’ll take witty opinions any day over patently absurd claims that fusion-based power generation will reach commercial scale within a decade or less.
At least with witty opinions, we get some entertainment value out of the discussion topic.
If we don’t continue to research the problem, it may be the most expensive entertainment you have ever paid for. The alternatives that are being pushed are slowly destabilizing our grids and increasing the cost of energy. The existing fission reactors have run out of storage space for the waste products. We are between the classic ‘rock and a hard spot.’
Hmmm . . . how to distinguish between the two in this matter?
varg could have perhaps mentioned the “sight of smoke from uselessly burned cash in addition to the smell and wasted time”.
They want to integrate fission and fusion into the same BUSINESS.
Not the same TECHNOLOGY.
IOW our fusion technology has failed so we’re going to distract our funders and investors with some fanciful story about integrating two processes that are polar opposites.
This is scam. A brazen, shameless, scam.
This is Learing Center level of scam.
Or as someone suggested upthread, preparation for an IPO.
An IPO that is a scam.
It may very well be. So, caveat emptor.
If you look at the picture at the top of the article, it appears that instead of imitating the sun and fusing hydrogen atoms, they are going to try to fuse Hydrogen-2 (Deuterium) with Lithium-6 to make Beryllium-8 which spontaneously fissions into two Helium nuclei and some energy (I’ve no clue how much) in about 10^-16 seconds. Skepticism about their ability to make it work is probably warranted. I’m not sure anybody has actually tried it before.
So, maybe not a scam exactly. Maybe more like a longshot gamble
Maybe. Might work, who knows?
Nope. Not my country’s treasure.
The sun is a fission – fusion reactor.
“Both [fission and fusion reactors] require high-temperature materials, nuclear-grade manufacturing, advanced heat-transfer systems, modular construction, and sophisticated balance-of-plant engineering.”
Lets see: 1) Water cooled and moderated reactors operate with neutron flux in the 10^12-13 neutrons per cm^2 at thermal energies (meaning very slow) causing manageable neutron embrittlement of metals of construction while fusion reactor neutron flux is on the order of 10^16 neutrons per cm^2 at near light speed energies (meaning really really peppy and really really damaging), 2) Fission reactors operate at temperatures of around 500 or 600F and somewhat higher for liquid metal or salt cooled reactors, while fusion reactors operate at temperatures around 300,000,000F and 3) Fission reactors do not require modular construction. All or nearly all operating today are assembled at the building site from thousands of parts made by thousands of companies.
Some think that small modular reactors will fix all that is wrong with fission reactors but so far, the only company that has designed one approved by the NRC is going bust because they are not cheap and seem not to fix anything except the income of the company officers, for a while at least.
They are about as alike as a lawn rake and an Artemis spaceship. Yeah, hardly any difference.