COP28 came out supporting Nuclear Fission, and the White House is supporting Nuclear Fusion. For over 60 years, fusion researchers have been promising energy "too cheap to meter" real soon now, but have yet to produce a Watt into the grid, but the White House is all in. Back in 2022, they committed $6 Billion to keep existing fission plants going until fusion comes through, even though in many cases have exceeded their design life by decades. No new plants. Meanwhile in the UAE, they seem to have realized that wind and solar won't cut it, and they can't wait for fusion so they Commit to tripling nuclear plants:
- to work together to advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050, recognizing the different domestic circumstances of each Participant;
- to take domestic actions to ensure nuclear power plants are operated responsibly and in line with the highest standards of safety, sustainability, security, and non-proliferation, and that fuel waste is responsibly managed for the long term;
- to mobilize investments in nuclear power, including through innovative financing mechanisms;
- to supporting the development and construction of nuclear reactors, such as small modular and other advanced reactors for power generation as well as wider industrial applications for decarbonization, such as for hydrogen or synthetic fuels production;
International Partnerships in a New Era of Fusion Energy Development | OSTP | The White House
President Biden has taken tremendous action to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad. The United States is expanding domestic and global efforts to leverage market forces, inclusive technological innovation, and investments to accelerate the next generation of clean energy technology breakthroughs, including fusion energy. These technologies will help us meet our individual and collective carbon reduction goals, ensure energy security and resilience, and advance economic development.
For more than 60 years, the international fusion research and development (R&D) community has enjoyed a strong collaborative tradition that has advanced the science and technology of fusion. International cooperation is critical for fusion energy to reach its potential as an abundant source of sustainable clean energy, potentially lifting more than a billion people out of energy poverty. In March 2022, the United States announced a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy that recognized fusion energy’s increasing technical readiness and strong market interest and included a direction to explore new international collaborations to accelerate the development of fusion energy.
Private investments in fusion companies around the world have totaled $6 billion to-date. The rise in private fusion investments and growing interest in fusion commercialization reinforce the need for global engagement to resolve research challenges and develop international supply chains and workforces. International engagements promote and facilitate effective public-private partnerships around the world. In addition, timely commercial fusion deployment will benefit from early international coordination on regulatory frameworks and policy implementation to facilitate fusion’s market entry. As we continue to engage in scientific R&D and progress toward demonstration and commercialization, we are entering a new era in which open scientific research is crucial alongside strong intellectual property protections and enforcement.
The United States has identified the following five overarching goals where we invite international engagement and partnerships:
Identify and pursue opportunities for international cooperation or partnerships on fusion R&D, and enable access to or shared development of key infrastructure
International collaborations foster innovation and advance fusion science and supporting technologies. These technologies accelerate efforts toward fusion demonstration and commercialization. Accordingly, we plan to build upon our existing bilateral partnerships and multilateral projects, such as ITER, while exploring new cooperative opportunities to accelerate commercial fusion goals, protect joint innovations, and impart equitable benefits to collaborators. In addition, the United States intends to engage with global partners to help resolve remaining research challenges through collective action that includes:
- Promoting cooperation and competition with strong intellectual property protections and enforcement for international bilateral, multilateral, and/or public-private partnerships;
- Opening access or sharing development of costly experimental fusion and test facilities to address critical scientific and technological gaps while accelerating progress toward fusion demonstration and commercialization;
- Adopting appropriate technology protection and incentives to safeguard against predatory economic practices; and
- Sharing data frameworks that leverage advanced data science which can also serve as key enabling infrastructure for advancing fusion science and technology.
Grow the future global marketplace
Realizing fusion as a global clean energy source depends on our ability to translate decades of investments in fusion R&D into deployed commercial technologies. Fusion developers intend to export fusion facilities globally. Global engagement is necessary to understand different commercial landscapes. The United States intends to work with global partners to facilitate fusion’s market entry across these different landscapes by:
- Identifying supporting technologies, manufacturing capabilities, and infrastructure that are essential for fusion energy development including mapping current and anticipated global supply chains to identify and access high-value first markets;
- Exploring common frameworks for benchmarks and standards;
- Building engagements with relevant industry bodies, consortia, and non-governmental organizations that can help us understand and respond to commercial and community engagement needs; and
- Enabling multinational companies to benefit and develop positive applications from key technologies developed outside their home country.
Coordinate on regulatory frameworks that create a secure environment for fusion energy
For fusion to be a global commercial industry, it must be possible for companies to export fusion technologies and fuel supplies. It will be beneficial to coordinate internationally as individual nations develop their domestic fusion regulatory frameworks, consistent with the highest standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation. The United States intends to promote early international coordination on regulatory frameworks and policy implementation to pave the way for timely commercial fusion deployment through:
- Comparing experiences with key partner countries and international organizations to establish common positions on technical and policy issues to support the harmonization of fusion-regulatory and export-control frameworks;
- Developing capacity building efforts to potential newcomers through workshops, webinars, technical consultancies, and site visits. Competencies may include security, safety, licensing, regulation, site selection and characterization expertise; workforce development; stakeholder engagement; and planning for waste management; and
- Coordinating internationally on appropriate security and nonproliferation frameworks for fusion energy, commensurate with the prospect of large-scale, global, commercial deployment of a diverse set of fusion energy technologies.
Foster and strengthen a diverse and global workforce pipeline
Building a strong and diverse fusion technical workforce is required to accelerate fusion research, development, demonstration, and commercial deployment on an aggressive timescale. The global nature of knowledge and talent in R&D for fusion requires developing and expanding pathways to strengthen the global talent pipeline and to support pathways that enable talent mobility and flow into nations aspiring to deploy fusion energy. The United States intends to work with global partners on workforce needs by:
- Sharing knowledge on best practices, educational resources, and methods to monitor and assess outcomes—at international conferences, workshops, and other venues—that can help countries build a strong fusion energy talent base;
- Facilitating student and professional exchanges to enable mutual learning from different and complementary fusion ecosystems;
- Building a diverse and inclusive fusion workforce to enable broad participation in this emerging field; and
- Deploying modern training programs through public-private partnerships that support both short-term and long-term talent development.
Improve public education and engagement in fusion energy
As fusion is a new, complex technology still in the development phase, proactive public engagement will be essential to build public understanding, trust, and a social license for fusion development, demonstration, and deployment as a clean and abundant energy source. Developing, demonstrating, and deploying fusion energy must center on the core goals of protecting public health, safety, and the environment. The United States intends to work with partner countries to share public engagement activities and identify best practices for discussing both the benefits and risks of fusion energy including:
- Leveraging international bodies and multi-country meetings, such as the annual UN Climate Change Conference, ITER, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Energy Agency, and burgeoning grassroots activities as venues for positive public engagement and to frame fusion energy as a climate and energy security solution;
- Engaging public and private stakeholders to build understanding of the unique benefits and risks of fusion technology; and
- Engaging energy and environmental justice organizations around the world to advance inclusive innovation throughout the development process to ensure that fusion benefits all communities.
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San Diego’s General Atomics Praises U.S. Plan to Speed Commercialization of Nuclear Fusion
San Diego-based General Atomics applauded a White House plan unveiled Tuesday to encourage global commercialization of nuclear fusion to produce clean electricity.
U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry announced the international engagement plan to boost nuclear fusion, saying the emissions-free technology could become a vital tool in the fight against climate change.
Kerry said the plan involved 35 nations and would focus on research and development, supply chain issues, regulation and safety.
“The world is increasingly recognizing the transformative potential of fusion energy,” said Dr. Anantha Krishnan, senior vice president of the General Atomics Energy Group, after the announcement.
“International collaborations have played an important role in advancing fusion, and this strategy will ensure we continue to marshal the very best talent and capabilities across the globe as we address the remaining science and engineering challenges for commercializing fusion,” Krishnan said. “As a longstanding partner of the U.S. Department of Energy, we look forward to continuing to support this effort as we work together to make fusion energy a reality.”
Fusion, which powers the sun and other stars, can be replicated on Earth with heat and pressure using lasers or magnets to fuse hydrogen atoms into denser ones of helium, converting matter into energy.
The nascent technology could have an important advantage over today’s nuclear fission plants by producing huge amounts of power without long-lasting radioactive waste.
In August, scientists using laser beams at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California repeated a fusion breakthrough called ignition where for an instant the amount of energy coming from the fusion reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target.
Of the two main types of fusion, one uses lasers to concentrate energy on a pellet containing hydrogen. The other uses powerful magnets to trap a plasma of hydrogen heated to 100 million degrees.
General Atomics is involved in both approaches, and manages the the DIII-D National Fusion Facility on the UC San Diego campus.
Reuters contributed to this article.
At COP28, Countries Launch Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050, Recognizing the Key Role of Nuclear Energy in Reaching Net Zero
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — During the World Climate Action Summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change today, more than 20 countries from four continents launched the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy. The Declaration recognizes the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keeping the 1.5-degree goal within reach. Core elements of the declaration include working together to advance a goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050 and inviting shareholders of international financial institutions to encourage the inclusion of nuclear energy in energy lending policies. Endorsing countries include the United States, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. The full text of the Declaration is below.
Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy
02 December 2023
Recognizing the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions / carbon neutrality by or around mid-century and in keeping a 1.5°C limit on temperature rise within reach and achieving Sustainable Development Goal 7;
Recognizing the importance of the applications of nuclear science and technology that contribute to monitoring climate change and tackling its impacts, and emphasizing the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in this regard;
Recognizing that nuclear energy is already the second-largest source of clean dispatchable baseload power, with benefits for energy security;
Recognizing that analyses from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association show that global installed nuclear energy capacity must triple by 2050 in order to reach global net-zero emissions by the same year;
Recognizing that analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows nuclear energy approximately tripling its global installed electrical capacity from 2020 to 2050 in the average 1.5°C scenario;
Recognizing that analysis from the International Energy Agency shows nuclear power more than doubling from 2020 to 2050 in global net-zero emissions by 2050 scenarios and shows that decreasing nuclear power would make reaching net zero more difficult and costly;
Recognizing that new nuclear technologies could occupy a small land footprint and can be sited where needed, partner well with renewable energy sources, and have additional flexibilities that support decarbonization beyond the power sector, including hard-to-abate industrial sectors;
Recognizing the IAEA’s activities in supporting its Member States, upon request, to include nuclear power in their national energy planning in a sustainable way that adheres to the highest standards of safety, security, and safeguards and its “Atoms4NetZero” initiative as an opportunity for stakeholders to exchange expertise;
Recognizing the importance of financing for the additional nuclear power capacity needed to keep a 1.5°C limit on temperature rise within reach;
Recognizing the need for high-level political engagement to spur further action on nuclear power;
The Participants in this pledge:
Commit to work together to advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050, recognizing the different domestic circumstances of each Participant;
Commit to take domestic actions to ensure nuclear power plants are operated responsibly and in line with the highest standards of safety, sustainability, security, and non-proliferation, and that fuel waste is responsibly managed for the long term;
Commit to mobilize investments in nuclear power, including through innovative financing mechanisms;
Invite shareholders of the World Bank, international financial institutions, and regional development banks to encourage the inclusion of nuclear energy in their organizations’ energy lending policies as needed, and to actively support nuclear power when they have such a mandate, and encourage regional bodies that have the mandate to do so to consider providing financial support to nuclear energy;
Commit to supporting the development and construction of nuclear reactors, such as small modular and other advanced reactors for power generation as well as wider industrial applications for decarbonization, such as for hydrogen or synthetic fuels production;
Recognize the importance of promoting resilient supply chains, including of fuel, for safe and secure technologies used by nuclear power plants over their full life cycles;
Recognize the importance, where technically feasible and economically efficient, of extending the lifetimes of nuclear power plants that operate in line with the highest standards of safety, sustainability, security, and non-proliferation, as appropriate;
Commit to supporting responsible nations looking to explore new civil nuclear deployment under the highest standards of safety, sustainability, security, and non-proliferation;
Welcome and encourage complementary commitments from the private sector, non-governmental organizations, development banks, and financial institutions;
Resolve to review progress towards these commitments on an annual basis on the margins of the COP;
Call on other countries to join this declaration.
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