Unlocking Latin America and the Caribbean’s clean energy future “SMRs are compact, reliable, versatile, require minimal land and have potential for standardized mass-manufacture production that can achieve the scale of deployment required to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centres and transport.” Emissions-free nuclear fusion technology could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change, if it can be scaled up. The buzz around fusion energy as a way to reduce emissions keeps building. The global impact of electricity from fusion will be huge.
- Inexpensive, plentiful power derived from a nuclear fusion-fueled grid could spell the end of heating-season chaos like we’re seeing this winter.
- Fusion energy projects and start-ups around the world may pursue the goal of fusion energy in different ways by playing to their distinctive strengths.
- The breakthrough came after the final experiment at the UK’s JET fusion laboratory in Oxford produced a new world record for fusion power generation.
- That ability could come from commercial fusion energy, creating a game changer for desalination by taking the energy overhead costs of desal and cutting them to nearly zero.
- More recently, factories still need some proximity to high-wattage transmission lines that can supply large quantities of electricity.
In the rural northeast, heat pumps, in combination with rooftop solar, are increasingly common, moving residents away from burning fuel and firewood. Right up against the arctic circle in Norway, nearly two thirds of homes rely on heat pumps to stay warm, and just over 40% have them in Sweden and Finland. But, as widespread adoption in Scandinavia over the last ten to fifteen years has shown, heat pumps can operate in frigid temperatures. In the past, the biggest hurdle to actually getting a heat pump has been cost. During the summer, the process can be reversed, moving heat out of the house in order to cool it.
How is the World Economic Forum facilitating the transition to clean energy? But bringing them to market will require new policies and regulations, and the nuclear industry must win public trust by addressing concerns over cost, safety, and waste. The amount of waste is relatively small because nuclear fuel is very dense and very little of it is required to produce immense amounts of electricity.
As fusion power transforms the economics and geopolitics of energy, it will reshape industries and regions that need it most. Effective policies, private-sector action and public-private cooperation are needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable, affordable and secure global energy system. Moving to clean energy is key to combating climate change, yet in the past five years, the energy transition has stagnated.
Not a drop to drink: water
The KSTAR nuclear fusion reactor is known as South Korea’s “artificial sun”. According to The Global Fusion Industry in 2022 report, 93% of companies believe that fusion electricity will be on the grid in the 2030s or before (up from 83% in 2021). The difficulties in designing current-carrying coils to produce the magnetic fields required for confining plasmas to create fusion energy have been critical since the beginning of research into magnetically-confined plasmas in the 1950s. The jump from fossil fuels to fusion energy will inevitably be more profound than the jump from burning wood to burning fossil fuels. From there, fusion will naturally expand to markets where consumers need constant power and lack affordable clean alternatives — or where leaders have made ambitious climate commitments. Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation.
The home-heating chaos makes it abundantly clear that the inefficient and highly polluting systems we have need to be relegated to the past. This rather tiny difference in mass drives a tremendous release of energy. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. The UAE’s experience in energy efficiency initiatives offers an example to other emerging markets and the wider world.
Future of the Environment
Energy-related emissions are poised for a prolonged period of decline for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. These critical pillars of economic growth account for around a third of the country’s total carbon emissions. As global concern about climate change intensifies, China is undertaking significant measures to move its industrial sectors, including chemicals, steel and cement, towards sustainable development. Norway’s government has reached a $1.6 billion deal with seven private investors to take over much of the country’s gas export network. Drought and floods are causing problems for hydropower production across Latin America.
So instead of building ever larger tokamak devices, with huge costs and long timescales, we can see a way forward by increasing the magnetic field in more compact devices. The second tackled one of the toughest of the engineering challenges of a compact spherical tokamak – the shielding of the centre. Start-ups are also rising to the challenge – each with new, smaller solutions to the fusion problem. Lockheed Martin aims to build a compact fusion reactor in 10 years using a cylindrical design with magnets at each end. In recent years, some have been questioning the possibility of a smaller way to fusion. The magnetic fusion approach uses strong magnetic fields to pressurize and trap the hot plasma fuel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says that over 80 SMR designs are in development worldwide, targeting electricity, heating, water desalination and industrial steam. Unlike traditional nuclear power (fission), which splits atoms, fusion joins smaller atoms to make heavier ones. According to the World Nuclear Association, fusion offers a nearly endless energy source with close to zero emissions. Surging power demand from AI and other applications for carbon-free energy sources that operate 24/7 are steeply increasing levels of interest in nuclear energy.
Heat pumps are already gathering momentum
We will deliver net energy conditions well before the end of the decade and commercial net energy by the early 2030s. For example, two hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, releasing far more energy than fission. Given the difference in the maturity and level of development of these technologies, let’s unpack the status of each and the expected outlook. Without that, future winters will be just as chaotic and damaging, from both a social and climate perspective, as this year’s already is — if not worse. As more cities follow San Francisco and San Jose in banning gas hookups for new construction, heat pumps will be the de facto replacement system.
‘Make or break’ moment for renewables targets, and other top energy stories
China has entered the nuclear fusion race, according to reports in Nature and the Financial Times in August and September 2024. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and stars, merges two atomic nuclei into a larger one, releasing energy. And, can we go on from that to build reliable, economic, fusion power plants? General Fusion in Canada, Helion Energy in the United States and others are investigating new approaches to fusion energy. Different approaches to fusion energy are being pursued – from cold fusion, which still lacks evidence and may never work, to inertial fusion, which could work, to magnetic fusion, which really does work. The world needs abundant, clean energy.
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about the transition to clean energy? Modelling the impact of fusion power — which has been compared to the discovery of fire and called “the last energy source humanity will ever need” — is challenging. DeepMind is also developing an AI pilot to control magnetic configurations, optimize fusion power and manage heat load for CFS’s SPARC reactor outside Boston. Early power-purchase agreements from end users such as Google, global energy company Eni and Microsoft signal rising industry confidence. Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-lived waste, which has excited scientists since the 1950s.
But what’s next for this vital technology in the age of power-hungry AI systems? US electric utilities are predicting a surge of new demand from data centres, with some companies forecasting electricity sales growth several times higher than just a few months ago, Reuters reports. While the research on tokamaks surged globally, a handful of projects kept exploring the stellarator design. After confirming these initial results, the PPPL decided in 1969 to move from the stellarator to a tokamak design – an important decision followed by other scientists working on fusion projects worldwide. The same resurgence can be seen with the origins of fusion research in the stellarator, replaced with the tokamak due to seemingly insurmountable difficulties at the time. The resurgence of the electric vehicle could prove similar to another source of innovation, this time in fusion science.
More on Energy TransitionSee all
- Fusion is the future of the global energy sector — the near future.
- It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it proved fusion could be a power source, rather than a power drain.
- That’s a huge step forward for the decades-long global mission of fusion scientists, providing humanity with a cheap, limitless and carbon-free source of electricity.
- Back in January 2023 at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, nuclear scientist and Director of the lab, Kim Budil, spoke on a panel, a month after her team made the original breakthrough.
- The result of the US presidential election has had a negative impact on the country’s clean energy sector, according to the FT, with some developers putting projects on hold and investors dumping shares.
That’s what the MIT Energy Initiative did using New England’s electrical grid as its case study. Benchmarking progress is essential to a successful transition. In 2018 energy intensity improved by 1.2%, the slowest rate since 2010. Commonwealth Fusion Systems will turn on a demonstration power plant, called SPARC, in 2027. More than 40 fusion startups are speeding towards this goal.
‘Unconventional reactor’ hits nuclear fusion milestone
Nuclear energy’s role in achieving a net-zero future, amongst other clean energy sources, has been a contentious issue. If we as a society are going to electrify home heating and other residential appliances, we need affordable, carbon-free electricity to power them. The transition fusion markets review to nuclear fusion in the coming decade could provide just that. The US Department of Energy has announced a breakthrough on nuclear fusion, achieving a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers.
Scientists have been conducting fusion reactions since 1952, but these reactions always consumed more energy than they produced. With fusion, our oceans contain enough energy for billions of years. And it will be the cheapest reliable power, and incidentally, the cleanest power too. By the time their children retire, fusion may be the world’s dominant energy source, ushering in an era of energy abundance, not scarcity. 4 ways the private sector can empower utility resilience amid severe climate risks
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In addition, fast neutron reactors can utilize spent fuel from existing power plants and provide a sustainable solution to the issue of waste. They use fission technology, so they’re not as frontier as fusion, but they’re closer to becoming a reality. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are another promising area of advanced nuclear energy. According to the US Department of Energy, fusion reactions are hard to sustain due to the extreme heat and pressure needed to fuse atoms. Currently, however, the main hurdle is making fusion produce more energy than it consumes.
A number of clean and important inventions have lagged because of high energy costs. No single technology will solve the energy crisis on its own; it will take a mix of solutions. The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Energy and Materials is driving the transition to a “fit for 2050” energy system. Investors are pouring money into these advanced nuclear technologies, and they’re progressing quickly. Innovative start-ups are developing ways to shrink the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste. But even with its small footprint, waste remains a key concern for the public, as it can take thousands of years to decay.