The United States and Japan are reaching for the power of the stars, announcing a joint partnership to accelerate development and commercialisation of nuclear fusion.
The cooperation agreement was unveiled as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was in Washington for a summit with President Joe Biden. The partnership will focus on the scientific and technical challenges of delivering commercial fusion and expand work between U.S. and Japanese universities, national laboratories and private companies, the U.S. Department of Energy said on Wednesday.
Nuclear fusion is viewed as the Holy Grail of the energy world, and scientists, government and companies have tried for decades to harness the nuclear process that powers stars such as the sun. The goal is to provide carbon-free electricity at a low cost. It can be replicated on Earth with heat and pressure using lasers or magnets to fuse two light atoms into a denser one, releasing large amounts of energy.
Unlike plants that run on fission, or splitting atoms, commercial fusion plants, if ever built, would produce little long-lasting radioactive waste. Last year, scientists using laser beams at a U.S. national lab 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.
Scientists estimated, however, that the net energy output of that experiment was only about 0.5% of the energy that went in to firing up the lasers. Even if the science is eventually worked out, there are regulatory, construction and siting hurdles in creating new fleets of power plants to replace parts of existing energy systems.
Last December in Dubai, then-U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry launched an international plan involving 35 countries to boost fusion.