Does Nuclear Energy Remain Viable in Our Pursuit of a Low Carbon Future?

December 26, 2017 – Peter Diamandis has shared his latest thoughts on the future of nuclear energy in a Christmas Eve message to his email subscribers. In it he talks about rising entrepreneurial investment in commercial nuclear fusion technology. 

Why are billionaires putting their dollars into nuclear fusion now? Because world population is expected to hit 9 billion by 2040 and where the bulk of the energy demand needed to address this population increase, coal-fired power today is king. Nuclear, solar, wind, biomass, and net-zero emission energy generation options need to supplant coal if we are to stabilize global climate to not exceed a mean temperature rise of 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). Coal will blow us past what scientists deem an upper limit before we put much of the planet in peril from the consequences of climate change-driven damaging trends and extreme weather events.

The 2017 U.S. EIA International Energy Outlook, predicts that the world of 2040 will need to see electricity generation increase by 48% to meet projected global population demand. Diamandis sees nuclear as a necessary component in the global energy mix along with solar, as he states “to rid us, once and for all, of all fossil fuels.”

The following is an interesting take on where nuclear stands right now. Enjoy the read and please feel free to send us your comments.

With the existential threat of climate change ever looming, now is the time to start considering, and investing, in alternative energy sources, like nuclear. Tech billionaires are investing (a lot) in entrepreneurial nuclear power startups.

Why?

These are tough times for nuclear power. Many plants under construction are facing serious delays, halts, cost overruns and public safety concerns, particularly since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Despite these problems, in the last 5 years, some 55 nuclear entrepreneurial startups have cropped up with a total of $1.6 billion in funding (amazing!)

Billionaires Investing in Nuclear

Today, nuclear power generates 13 % of the world’s electricity, with 30 countries worldwide operating 449 nuclear reactors for electricity generation.

This old-school industry is now undergoing a period of rare entrepreneurial innovation.

As I review the 55 “startups” garnering the majority of the $1.6 billion in funding, the following four companies (IMHO) represent the most impressive attempts at making a nuclear future a reality:

1. Terra Power: Terra Power describes itself as “an incubator and developer of technologies that offer energy independence, environmental sustainability, medical advancement and other cutting-edge opportunities.” As chairman of the board, Bill Gates has invested a large sum of his wealth to developing the company’s Travel Wave Reactor, an energy system that uses depleted uranium and only needs to be refueled every 40 to 60 years.
2. General Fusion: This Vancouver-based company has raised $94 million and is backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The company uses high-tech hammers to trigger nuclear fusion, a process called “magnetized target fusion.” A brief video shows how this reactor will work.
3. Tri Alpha Energy: Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, has invested heavily in this California-based company. Tri Alpha is pursuing what it calls “friendly fusion” with a combination of particle accelerators and plasma physics. They even have an operational generator named Norman that I’m confident we will see in action in the next decade.
4. Helion Energy: Helion is developing the “Fusion Engine,” which the company states is 1,000 times smaller and 500 times cheaper than the competition. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has invested in the endeavor, along with NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. The company hopes to have a working reactor by 2019.

With such high-profile investments and exciting cutting-edge technology, the future of nuclear is looking bright.

The Promise of Fusion

Nuclear fusion reactors, if they can work outside laboratories, and if they can scale, promise virtually unlimited power to the planet for the indefinite future. In fact, one tablespoon of liquid hydrogen fuel can produce the same amount of energy as 28 tons of coal, and isotopes of hydrogen are essentially unlimited here on our planet.

Efforts to control the fusion process and harness it to produce power have been underway for more than 40 years. In the United States, three top institutions are attempting to harness fusion energy. They include:

1. Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL): Princeton has focused its efforts on plasma-based nuclear fusion. Future experiments will attempt to maintain a high-performance plasma under conditions of extreme heat and pull electricity from the fields the plasma emits. They hope that the research will assist in the development of the world’s largest magnetically confined fusion energy system, ITER, currently under construction in France.
2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab: This laboratory is heavily into alternative energ­y research. It was the first laboratory in the world to produce a fusion reaction that released more energy than it takes in. This is the major roadblock that impedes the development of commercial fusion. Its Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) technology is experimenting with deuterium and tritium fuels.
3. University of Washington: Researchers at this university are striving to create a plasma nuclear reactor with a design that to significantly reduce the cost of generating electricity. They believe their reactor can produce 1 billion watts of power for $2.7 billion. That would be $100 million less than the same amount of power produced in a coal-fired power plant.

Diamandis has forgotten another U.S. institution that is working on nuclear fusion. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created the Alcator C-Mod reactor, a multinational project involving the assistance of laboratories in Belgium and the United Kingdom. Its fuel mix is 95% deuterium, 5% hydrogen and a dash of helium-3. If there is an excuse to go to the Moon, helium-3 is it because it exists in lunar regolith in sufficient quantities to make it worth the effort to go get it. On Earth helium-3 can only be produced by nuclear fission reactors and is currently needed for medical diagnostic imaging technology, in particular, MRIs. 

And even more promising is the effort by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics who have been experimenting with a device they call the stellarator, a bizarre looking twisted set of coils that has led to the creation of the Wendelstein 7-X. In the race to produce the first commercial nuclear fusion reactor, I’d place my bets on what these German scientists have produced.