• Question: If we could get nuclear fusion to work, would we be able to implement it quickly enough to reach global climate goals and if so, would everyone be able to access the new clean energy?

    Asked by Annabel on 10 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Charlie Boswell

      Charlie Boswell answered on 29 Nov 2021:

      No. Fusion is only part of the solution to climate change, because fusion power plants are big, complicated and expensive to build. Making enough to meet our climate goals would take a bit too long.

      We will get better at it, and in the future we will get more and more of our electricity through fusion. And this is great, because in the future we will probably be using a lot more electricity than we do now to do all kinds of amazing things. We might need more electricity than we can make with things like solar and wind farms, which is where fusion comes in.

      But until we have a bit more time to get fusion just right, we should keep building more renewable energy centres to meet our climate goals. If we can get that right now, then in the future we will be able to give everyone access to clean energy with fusion.

    • Photo: Hermione Salter

      Hermione Salter answered on 7 Dec 2021:

      Currently our energy mix, consists of fossil fuels and renewables (wind solar and hydroelectric). Renewables are really great in terms of low emissions, however they require specific circumstances to work at their full power (the sun needs to shine or the wind to blow). Because of this they don’t provide a constant and reliable energy source to meet our energy demands. At the moment we don’t have good enough solutions for energy storage to balance out the fact that sometimes renewables produce too much energy and at other times they don’t produce enough.

      Because of this we need a technology that replaces fossil fuels in providing a base load of energy (base load meaning a consistent amount being produced 24/7 to cover ups and downs in demand). Fission can provide an answer to this, however due to past incidents fission has quite a bad public reputation which means lots of people don’t want us to build more fission machines. Fusion is therefore the ideal technology to fill that gap.

      Even with all of this it can’t be denied that fusion won’t be ready to meet the aggressive zero emission timelines necessary to fight climate change. In the interim it will be important to increase use of renewable energy, to decrease Carbon emissions. This could make it look like there isn’t much point investing so much time and money into fusion, however, net-zero is not the end of the story.

      Globally populations continue to rise and so our energy requirements will rise also. That and the fact that we grow to rely on more and more technology means that we need to work on increasing our energy output going forwards, rather than just focusing on decarbonising our current energy mix. This is the role that fusion can play from the 2040s and beyond.

      As for the accessibility of this as an energy source there is a huge benefit to the fact our energy mix will be moving towards using more renewable and sustainable fuels. Currently fossil fuels are a finite resource that a small handful of countries are able to control and set the price of as demand outstrips supply. As we develop our technologies for breeding new fusion fuel hopefully this scenario could not be repeated for fusion as everyone would have their own source of the fuel.

      Like all energy sources fusion will still be a commercial product, however we can hope that in future this will be far more accessible to all as the world continues to grow and develop. 🙂

Comments