U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Monday that the Biden administration hopes to build a commercial nuclear fusion facility within 10 years as part of the U.S. transition to clean energy.Granholm said fusion is a groundbreaking technology that President Biden hopes to harness as a carbon-free energy source that can power homes and businesses.
Granholm mentioned in an interview with the media in Vienna,
Nuclear fusion is the source of energy for the sun and stars. Under the immense heat and gravity of these stars' cores, hydrogen nuclei collide with each other and coalesce into heavier helium atoms, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Unlike other nuclear reactions, nuclear fusion does not produce radioactive waste.
Proponents of nuclear fusion have long hoped that it could one day replace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. But harnessing nuclear fusion to produce carbon-free energy that can power homes and businesses is thought to be decades away.
In December last year, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California successfully achieved a net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the first time, that is, the energy generated by the controlled nuclear fusion reaction exceeds the energy of the laser driving the reaction. This is a "milestone" breakthrough in the world's controllable nuclear fusion research.
Currently, the Biden administration aims to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050, and nuclear energy is an important part of achieving this goal.
Regarding the Biden administration’s current nuclear fusion plan, Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Center for Plasma Science and Fusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the United States has taken a wise approach to the issue of nuclear fusion, which is to promote research and design by a series of companies and strive to conduct pilot-scale demonstrations within ten years.
"There's no guarantee that a company will hit the target, but we have multiple opportunities to do so," he said of the Department of Energy's milestone-based fusion development plan. "This is the right thing to do and supports what we all want to see: commercial fusion powering our society without producing greenhouse gas emissions."
Asked about the difficulty of finding storage sites for radioactive waste, Granholm said the United States has launched a process to identify communities across the country that might be willing to host temporary storage sites. Currently, most spent fuel (used nuclear fuel that has been exposed to radiation) is stored in nuclear reactors across the United States.
"We have identified 12 organizations that will be talking to communities across the country about their interest in (hosting temporary storage sites)," she said.
The United States does not currently recycle spent fuel, but other countries, including France, have experience in this area. Spent nuclear fuel can be recycled by making new fuel. But critics of the process argue it is not cost-effective and could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The Washington-based Arms Control Association says there are two proliferation-related problems with recycling: The recycling process increases the risk of plutonium being stolen by terrorists, and second, countries with separated plutonium could produce their own nuclear weapons.
"This has to be done very carefully with all those non-proliferation safeguards in place," Granholm said.