If knowledge is power, last month’s announcement of a breakthrough in harnessing the potential of nuclear fusion is a most literal example.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that they had achieved something decades in the making: a nuclear fusion reaction that generated a positive output of power. The excitement came with caveats, but also with the potential for a virtually limitless source of clean energy. By bombarding hydrogen pellets with powerful lasers, future fusion plants could heat up enough steam to power the world with emissions-free electricity.
But even enthusiastic clean energy advocates threw a dash of cold water on expectations: Powering homes and industry with the technology will require perhaps 50 years of development.
“I think it’s extremely interesting,” said Doug Hutchings, the University of Arkansas engineering Ph.D. who founded Picasolar of Fayetteville and is now CEO of Delta Solar of Little Rock. “Achieving positive net energy generation has been a target for many years and I think it sets the stage for many more ‘firsts’ moving forward.” But …
“It is important to note that this was achieved in a laboratory environment and the road to practical implementation is not trivial.” Hutchings said the achievement complements existing renewable energy efforts well because wind and solar sources are intermittent. Practical fusion energy could provide essential baseload power.
But even if practical applications are decades away, Hutchings said, “this breakthrough highlights that innovation in our energy grid is not slowing down.” In policy-making and grid planning, “we need to be forward-looking.”
The Livermore test required a laser and power plant system about the size of a sports stadium, according to Barry Cinnamon, a Silicon Valley renewable energy and storage developer whose focus on solar power dates back more than 40 years to his days at the MIT. He went on to get his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania and eventually founded Akeena Solar, a pioneering national company that put a solar array on the New Jersey home of Joe Bonanno Jr., son of the notorious New York crime family boss.
But that’s a whole other story.
Now Cinnamon is CEO of Cinnamon Energy Systems and past president of the California Solar Energy Industries Association. He has a daughter who works for his company in Fayetteville, so he often finds himself in Arkansas and monitors solar industry developments here.
He’s enthusiastic about the breakthrough at Livermore, truly, but after assessing the amount of energy the test created, he described some of the coverage as “hype.”
“Holy cow, this is a de minimis amount of energy from such a big project, and the prospects for scaling up are so far away,” he told Arkansas Business. Since the first reports, he said, more has been written on the real challenges ahead. His bottom line? The fusion breakthrough thrills physicists, but it’s not going to power your home. Perhaps it will for your children or grandchildren.
Cinnamon said that by blasting a small pellet of hydrogen with 192 of the world’s most powerful lasers, the test netted about 1 megajoule of energy. It was the first such experiment to yield a net gain, but “1 megajoule is equivalent to .27 megawatt hours” of electricity, Cinnamon said. “That’s enough to run a 100-watt lightbulb for 2.7 hours or enough to drive a standard electric vehicle 500 feet. … For comparison purposes, we already have a hydrogen fusion reactor, and it happens to be at a safe distance of 92 million miles from us.
“If you put a solar panel pretty much anywhere on earth for just an hour … you’re going to get the same amount of energy out of this fusion reactor that we saw from this great fusion experiment.”
Cinnamon said he champions further tests and development of controlled fusion power, but he believes its potential lies in the future. “The only reason I think the breakthrough is not necessarily that great is it distracts people from what’s really working now, and what can really solve this global energy problem quickly.”
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