We’re making headway, in the scientific world, on a powerful form of energy generation. It’s called fusion, and it seems, more than ever, that sort of thing is almost within humanity’s grasp.
For one thing, scientists have been making great advances in plasma containment. That’s important, because one of the abiding challenges in the fusion puzzle is keeping the superheated plasma in place long enough to allow hydrogen nuclei to fuse, and get net energy outputs.
That’s why it’s called “fusion” – the general idea is that two light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus. That releases energy – a whole lot of it.
“The closer we get to realizing commercial fusion power for electricity generation, the more we see records and barriers broken around the world,” writes Kevin Zondervan at Promethean Action, chronicling the efforts of a startup called Avalanche in designing small fusion reactors for vehicles. “Breakeven plasma confinement times of up to 22 minutes, contracts to buy fusion power, plans for siting commercial fusion plants, etc. All of those plans are for electrical power plants. What about cars, trucks, planes, ships, and spaceships? What about your little reactor for your farm in the middle of nowhere?”
Before that happens, though, we’ll need the less sexy process of building basic fusion technology and proving the theory to a high level, and there’s a general consensus that we wouldn’t be doing all of this unless AI was “the first customer” for this type of energy generation.
Thoughts from a Leader in Fusion
I was talking recently to Dennis Whyte about all of this at a TED Talk event in June. Whyte has both the corporate and the academic credentials to speak with authority: he has started multiple companies, and is also a member of MIT faculty on energy.
Whyte stressed that all of this is, essentially, in its infancy.
“You actually have to do it at a scale and a cost that would eventually make fusion practical,” he said.
With that in mind, he described a project that is currently underway in Devens, Mass. (See more about this type of thing here.)
“Its purpose is to not only demonstrate energy gain, namely that you get more energy out of fusion plasma than you started with, but it’s also doing that at an obviously commercial scale,” Whyte said.
A Timeline
“It should be developed according to plan,” Whyte said of related efforts, “that by 2030 we’ll see a demonstration of something that starts to look like what a fusion power plant would be, and we’re actually starting to see the commitments, both financially and locally, about actually constructing these so that they would start to put power on the grid.”
What does AI have to do with it?
Whyte explained:
“AI is a particularly interesting and very recent advancement in this,” he said, “because AI will almost certainly be the first customer for fusion. (see my reference above) Because it’s almost exactly tuned up for what AI needs, namely, local high power density sources that also don’t have vulnerability to (certain) supply chains.”
Work on fusion, Whyte suggested compounds as new ideas come along. He described that process this way:
“That often happens in technology: innovations that come in from the outside actually start amplifying what is established science elsewhere.”
Like the Stars
Thinking about the origin of fusion, Whyte pointed out that the process is responsible, in some ways, for all life. He called it “the fire of the stars.”
“This has always been a dream of humanity,” he continued, “to bring fusion to Earth. But the reality of fusion on Earth, the way that I describe it is: it changes our relationship with energy.”
I want to add the next two bits, too, because I think that the way Whyte says these things is profound. The first one characterizes our perception of energy:
“You probably don’t think that much about energy, because it’s a silent thing, it’s a very hard to describe thing, actually, because it’s abstract and surrounds you.”
Then he noted:
“One of the most convincing (correlations in this area of science) is that the use of energy has the strongest correlation to human well-being and humanity’s well-being.”
I found that to be really interesting.
“Every time we’ve unlocked a fundamentally, particularly expandable source of energy, it has just changed our society so fundamentally,” Whyte said. He shared his vision of a future where no one is hungry, and where people don’t fight over energy anymore.
“I’ve seen enough about human history to think that we’ll probably find something to fight over,” he said, “but maybe it isn’t about access to one of the most important fundamental resources that we need to all have great lives.”
So hopefully, that’s the direction that humankind goes in.
My overall point here, ruminating on this discussion and think about this Promethean concept of fusion, is that we shouldn’t just write off this kind of research, just because it has proven impractical in the past. We’re in a new age now. We see it every day.
