Hold the Fusion Hype

"The news Tuesday that U.S. scientists have performed the world's first controlled nuclear fusion reaction that generates a net energy gain is a refutation of American declinism. But don't believe the hype that a fossil-fuel free world is near if only the government spends more.

Scientists have spent decades studying how to replicate in labs the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun and stars. The fission reactions that power today's nuclear plants involve splitting atoms and result in radioactive waste. Fusion entails combining atoms and theoretically could provide abundant, clean energy with no hazardous waste.

Hydrogen, fusion's input, is the most abundant element in the universe, and no country dominates its supply, unlike some minerals used in lithium-ion batteries and wind turbines. The reactions also don't generate CO2. But a stumbling block has long been figuring out how to generate more energy from the fusion reactions than is used to ignite them.

In the experiment that resulted in Tuesday's breakthrough, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used 192 lasers to heat and compress hydrogen atoms at more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The reaction released 3.15 megajoules of energy for every 2.05 megajoules of input -- with some major caveats.

The lasers are less than 1% efficient and used about 300 megajoules. As Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil put it: "300 megajoules at the wall [socket], two megajoules at the laser." Generating electricity from fusion would require such reactions to be performed every second of the day, a vast increase in laser efficiency and reduction in their size.

There's good reason to be excited about the breakthrough, but the Biden Administration is overselling its immediate impact. "This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.

What the experiment proved is that scientists can recreate the physical reactions in stars. But scaling the technology and making it commercially viable by most scientists' accounts will likely take another few decades.

It's also important to distinguish between basic and applied research. Government's proper role is to fund basic research of the sort that produced Tuesday's breakthrough and which businesses have little incentive to do. Private companies do a far better job of taking discoveries out of the lab to the market.

A bipartisan complaint is that the U.S. spends too little on research and development, which has the country trailing China. That's not true. U.S. businesses in 2019 spent nearly eight times more on R&D than the federal government. The U.S. as a whole spent a third more as a share of GDP on R&D than China.

China spends more subsidizing politically favored companies, but its industrial policy has reduced productivity, as a new study in the National Bureau of Economic Research shows. The fusion breakthrough shows that America still leads the world in innovation, and that what the government does best is basic research, not picking winners and losers." [1]

1. Hold the Fusion Hype
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 Dec 2022: A.16.