Fusion has long been considered the “Holy Grail” of energy, able to potentially supply boundless electricity without producing climate-warming emissions or leaving behind radioactive waste.
It’s a nuclear reaction that powers the sun. It’s the opposite of fission, which powers traditional nuclear plants. Those plants split atoms apart to create energy, whereas fusion combines atoms.
But it’s proven incredibly difficult to achieve on Earth.
Scientists, students, government officials and local leaders are gathering at William & Mary Friday to discuss how to bring the industry closer to reality.
WHRO spoke with organizers of the Virginia Fusion Symposium: Saskia Mordijck, associate physics professor at William & Mary; Lane Carasik, associate professor of nuclear engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University; and Sean Agnew, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Virginia.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WHRO: How did the idea for this symposium come about and what are you hoping to achieve?
Saskia Mordijck: A few years back, I was traveling with the federal government, the Department of Energy, and there were discussions getting started on how, if we wanted to really tackle fusion energy and commercialize it, we needed to move away from single units, universities, institutions, and figure out how to build larger collaborative groups and prospects. I started thinking about kind of what it would take to actually make something happen. So we're trying to introduce all the different institutions to the amazing capabilities that we actually have in the state, and to start thinking about how we could better work together to actually help make fusion a commercial reality.
WHRO: Why is Virginia the place to have conversations about fusion right now? What’s happening here?
Sean Agnew: There are a couple of states in the union that are the most energy-hungry, and we are among them, and are most heavily importing electricity from outside. And the growth here in Virginia is primarily associated with the growth of the data center industry. So I think the fact that we have the data center capital of the world is driving the interest here in Virginia in the whole energy portfolio: Hydro, wind, solar, fuel cells, batteries, gas, fission, fusion. The whole package is of great interest here.
There's one big company out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that made a really important announcement a few years ago that they would have the world's first commercial fusion power plant in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That event also sparked a great deal of interest in our state.
WHRO: Fusion has often been thought of as sort of a distant, sci-fi concept. What have the traditional challenges been and what’s changing now that makes it more feasible?
Lane Carasik: Fusion, I would say, suffers the problem where, because it seems like some of the goals are so far away, we're not willing to invest the resources in it now. From a pure physics standpoint, specifically the plasma side of things, of how do we get not an equal amount of energy coming out or more energy, but 10 times the energy we're putting into these fusion reactions to occur, that makes it viable and at least worth having the conversation of implementing it in our energy grid.
Now that we're getting very close to that, the question is all these enabling technologies on the engineering side of things, and how does that relate to the political environment? How do we justify supporting it if we can't get the cost of energy production for this down? How does it relate to developing the workforce? All these other factors.
We're pretty confident we can get the physics to work, but it's these engineering challenges of how do we get materials that can survive these very extreme environments for long enough. Fusion is probably one of the great, grand challenges of the 21st century.
SM: People thought it would be easy, because in some sense fission was really easy. But then again, we all know that smashing and breaking something is easy. Gluing it back together is the difficult part. What makes me hopeful right now is that there is a lot of technological development that is what I would call adjacent to fusion, like the materials for better magnets. That could be laser development, performance computing, or AI models going forward. There is so much going on that suddenly allows us to tackle this project at a scale that we weren't able to do five, 10 or even 20 years ago.
The benefit is in the sense of less carbon dioxide exhaust, so it could be helping climate change, and another one is unlimited fuel. The type of fuel that you need for fusion can typically be extracted from seawater. So that means that you also have benefits when it comes to geopolitics, because if you look at our world, the majority of our conflicts are typically about energy and water. If you're able to reduce your dependence on foreign energy sources, whether that's oil, coal, natural gas, as we're experiencing right now with a large major conflict in the Middle East, that suddenly makes this a very exciting and interesting energy source.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided to not regulate fusion the same way they do fission. So that kind of barrier has been removed. There are certain things that make this technology more challenging to build than I would say a traditional nuclear power plant. But at least regulation-wise, that is not going to be the hurdle.
SA: The end products (of fusion) are not highly radioactive, whereas they are in the case of fission. So we're not generating a lot of fuel-based waste with fusion energy, and that excites a lot of people.
WHRO: How do you see fusion fitting into the future energy mix here in Virginia, especially with lots of concern about high power bills?
SM: If you look at (Gov. Spanberger’s recently released) Energy Plan, fusion is part of that portfolio. So the state recognizes that there is a need to develop new energy sources in order to continue on this path that they've set, focused on partially data centers. Even if we don't do data centers, it would help other high-tech industries as well. So this is now part of the plan for Virginia. Exactly where it's going and how big it's going to be in the plan, that I don't know.
LC: We've got to be building everything that is not going to be massive carbon-emitting sources right now, and again, the work in fusion will help benefit those other sources. A lot of the crossover technology will help benefit concentrated solar or thermal battery storage or any of these technologies.
I don't want my power bill to be $1,000 per month, and I don't think anyone else wants that. So we've got to be thinking five years, six years down the line.
