The United States is slated to outline the first global strategy for commercializing nuclear fusion power at this year’s COP28 summit in Dubai in what could be a major milestone in scientists’ decadeslong quest to achieve and deploy the carbon-free source of electricity.
U.S. special envoy for climate change John Kerry plans to announce the news on Monday during a tour of the Commonwealth Fusion Systems facility near Boston, according to Reuters.
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Sources said the COP28 summit will serve as the “starting gun for international cooperation” on nuclear fusion.
"I will have much more to say on the United States’s vision for international partnerships for an inclusive fusion energy future at COP28," Kerry said in a statement on Monday.
Decades of U.S. investment have been key in transforming nuclear fusion from an experiment to "an emerging climate solution," Kerry said.
The former secretary of state will be joined on his tour of the Commonwealth facility by Claudio Descalzi, the CEO of Italian energy giant Eni, which Reuters reports is pursuing four fusion power pilot projects of its own.
The State Department did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on Kerry’s announcement, or on the fusion commercialization strategy slated to be outlined at this year’s COP28 summit, which starts on Nov. 30.
The U.S. effort comes less than a year after scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility in California used fusion to achieve “net energy gain” for the first time — a major breakthrough that demonstrated fusion ignition is attainable in a controlled environment.
Unlike existing nuclear fission technology, which splits heavy atoms apart to create energy, nuclear fusion does the opposite, uniting the atoms together through either internal confinement or magnetic confinement technology. (Commonwealth utilizes magnetic confinement technology.)
Many hurdles remain. To scale up the technology, scientists must be able to use fusion to generate greater than 100% of the energy of the ignition reaction — a ratio known as the “Q” value.
DOE’s experiment last year, which used laser energy, generated 120% of the ignition reaction value, a net gain, but one that experts noted at the time is not nearly high enough to produce commercial fusion. Getting there could take years, as well as billions of dollars in international investment.
Scientists have also achieved only scattered instances of fusion ignition — far from the many continuous ignitions per minute that would be needed to generate sufficient commercial-scale fusion power.
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Still, the breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility has helped spark international momentum for fusion technology.
The number of companies that received investments for fusion technology increased from 33 to 43 in the last year, according to recent data from the Fusion Industry Association, with efforts spanning more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Japan, China, and Australia.