Nuclear fusion (including

21
safety, impact on the
environment, and potential
capacity in 2030 and 2050)
Richard Kembleton
Gauss Fusion, Garching, Germany

21.1 What is nuclear fusion?

Nuclear fusion is the combination of light elements into heavier
ones, such as the burning of hydrogen in the sun to form helium
and then heavier elements. Due to the change in nuclear binding
energy among different weights of atomic nuclei, this can release
large amounts of energy (Fig. 21.1). The forces involved are much
stronger than the electromagnetic forces that drive chemical reac-
tions such as burning coal or wood, and so the amount of energy
released per atomic reaction is much greater. This allows a compar-
atively small amount of nuclear fuel to replace large amounts of

Figure 21.1 Binding energies

of different atomic nuclei as a
function of number of nucleons
(protons and neutrons). Heavy
elements release energy
(moving up the curve) by
radioactive decay and light
elements by fusion. The most
stable atomic nucleus is Fe-56.
Image source: Wikimedia
Commons.

Energy and Climate Change. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-21927-6.00008-8

© 2025 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. 525
526 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

fossil fuels, so long as the power plant can be constructed to oper-

ate continuously and safely.
To overcome the forces that hold atomic nuclei apart, such
reactions require high temperatures or pressures. If you have
about 2 3 1030 kg of hydrogen, the gravitational pressure in the
core is enough to create fusion and form the sun. However, on
earth, we need to find other ways to create the right conditions
for fusion to take place. Here, we use magnetic fields and heat-
ing to create and confine a fusion plasma (magnetic confine-
ment fusion, MCF) or heat a solid with powerful lasers so fast
that it implodes and becomes a plasma with a higher density
than the original solid and the nuclei have a good chance to
react before it explodes again (inertial confinement fusion, ICF).
Arthur Eddington postulated that fusion was the process that
powered the sun in 1920, and in the time since then we have made
impressive progress at mastering it ourselves, with the NIF
(National Ignition Facility) ICF experiment managing to create
more energy than was put into the plasma in 2022 [1] and the Joint
European Torus (JET) experiment setting new records for total
energy released from MCF right up until its final shutdown at the
end of 2023 [2]. The sun burns hydrogen, a very slow reaction with
a small cross-section. Fusion experiments on earth target other
reactions that are much easier to achieve (Fig. 21.2):
D 1 T 5 21 H 1 31 H-42 He ð3:5MeVÞ 1 n ð14:1MeV Þ

Figure 21.2 Fusion reactivities for common reactions. The fusion power is then given by Pfus 5 nx ny σνEfus where
nx, ny are the densities of the reactants, and Efus is the energy released per reaction. The DT reaction has a higher
peak at a lower temperature than the alternatives, making it the most achievable option. The fully aneutronic
hydrogen (proton)-boron (p-B) reaction requires very high temperatures. p-p fusion, of the type that powers the
sun, is off the bottom of this chart by many orders of magnitude [3]. DT, Deuteriumtritium. Data from H.-S. Bosch, G.
M. Hale, Improved formulas for fusion cross-sections and thermal reactivities, Nuclear Fusion, Bd. 32, pp. 611-631, 1992.
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 527

D 1 D-T ð1:0MeVÞ 1 p ð3:0MeV Þ

D 1 D-32 He ð0:8MeVÞ 1 n ð2:45MeV Þ

D 1 32 He-42 He ð3:7MeVÞ 1 p ð14:7MeV Þ

where D indicates deuterium (heavy hydrogen, 2H), an isotope
of hydrogen with an extra neutron. T indicates tritium (super-
heavy hydrogen, 3H), which has two extra neutrons. 3He is
helium-3, an isotope of helium with one fewer neutron than
normal helium. n and p denote a neutron and a proton (which
is a hydrogen nucleus), respectively. The values in brackets are
the energy released in mega-electron volts, MeV. One MeV is a
small amount of energy, 1.602 3 10213 J, but it does not take an
enormous number of reactions to start producing real energy.
An amount of 2 g of D reacting completely with 3 g of T would
produce 1,700 GJ of energy, producing 4 g of helium “ash” and
1 g of neutrons which would be absorbed by the reactor struc-
ture. To generate the same energy, it would require about 70
tonnes of coal and produce about 250 tonnes of CO2.

21.2 How can we use fusion for energy?

In a MCF reactor, the role of the magnetic field is to confine
the plasma and hold it away from the reactor first wall, which pro-
vides protection to the structures behind it from direct radiation
and particle loads. A toroidal geometry is required, as this allows
the magnetic field lines, along which the trapped particles travel,
to wrap completely around the machine without cusps, which
would allow rapid energy loss. Usually, in considering a power
plant, steady-state operation is targeted to allow continuous power
output and reduce cyclic loads on components, but this is not a
fundamental requirement. However, the auxiliary systems that
allow steady-state operation of a tokamak, for example, consume
large amounts of power and so reduce the overall plant efficiency.
A toroidal magnetic field alone does not provide stable plasma
confinement, and it is necessary to add a poloidal (around the
small perimeter of the toroid) component to make the field “twist”
around the plasma. In a tokamak, this component is provided by
a current in the plasma, and maintaining this current is one of the
biggest challenges in engineering a steady-state tokamak power
plant. In a stellarator, the twist is elegantly generated by distorting
the main magnets. As the magnets are pushed further from the
528 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

plasma by the need to include a breeder blanket and shielding,

this distortion increases. Engineering large, complex, supercon-
ducting magnets is a serious challenge for stellarators, as is
designing access between these coils for efficient replacement of
blanket and divertor segments. In recent years, enormous progress
has been made on designing and building magnets using high-
temperature superconductor (HTS) materials, the main benefit of
which for fusion is not the “high temperature” bit (these magnets
still operate at temperatures close to absolute zero) but the higher
magnetic fields they can access, theoretically permitting the same
fusion power in smaller plasmas [4].
The plasma in a spherical tokamak is shaped more like a
cored apple than the “classic” doughnut shape, and the magnetic
field varies much more across the plasma in such a machine
than in a conventional tokamak. This leads to the potential for
improved plasma physics, not least very high bootstrap current
enabling easier steady-state operation. The bootstrap current is a
self-driven plasma current arising from pressure and magnetic
field gradients and reduces the need for additional current drive
power from outside the plasma [5]. However, the limited room
on the inboard side of the plasma can make it hard to both
shield the center column and magnets from neutron radiation
and capture enough neutrons to breed fuel.
A simple estimate of the size and requirements for perfor-
mance of a magnetic confinement-based fusion power plant can
be made. If the plasma-facing components can handle a maxi-
mum neutron flux of 4 MW/m2, and a 1 GW (electrical) plant
requires 3 GW (fusion) to generate that output (based on consid-
erations of thermal efficiency and the power required to run
plant systems) [6], then that means the wall area of the reactor
cannot be smaller than 600 m2. For a conventional tokamak of
aspect ratio A 5 3 and modest elongation (κ 5 1.6), this means
that the major radius R0 . 6 m. Similar approaches applied to the
plasma physics performance, divertor (plasma exhaust) power
loading, etc. tend to lead to slightly larger machines than this,
usually with R0 about 89 m [7]. To achieve significant reduc-
tions in reactor size, one needs assumptions of advances in avail-
able material performance or plasma performance which, while
potentially possible in theory, are often not well experimentally
demonstrated. Stellarators tend to have larger aspect ratios,
meaning with similar considerations the major radius looks a lot
bigger, but the cross section of the device is smaller.
When fusion releases its energy, it emerges as kinetic
energy—that is, atomic fragments moving very fast. If these par-
ticles have a charge—such as an alpha particle, which is just a
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 529

helium nucleus—it can be confined with a magnetic field until

it has given up most of this energy by colliding with other
plasma particles and heating up the plasma. If uncharged, such
as a neutron, it leaves the plasma and must be slowed down by
much denser materials—the walls of the reactor itself. Once
again, it gives up the extra energy as heat. If we are pursuing
D-T fusion, this also allows us to use the neutrons, through a
reaction with lithium in a breeder blanket, to make more tritium
to use as fuel. Since one D-T reaction produces one neutron,
and we cannot guarantee every neutron makes one new tritium
atom, the blanket also contains a neutron multiplier such as
beryllium or lead to ensure that more tritium is made than con-
sumed. This balance—the tritium breeding ratio (TBR)—needs
to be enough above 1.0 that the reactor is self-sustaining in
making its own fuel, allowing for radiative decay of the tritium
and adsorption into plant materials, and also so that enough
additional supply can be built up so that the next generation of
fusion reactors can be fueled for start-up.
The heat in the blanket is extracted via a coolant fluid such
as water or helium, and this in turn is passed through a steam
generator which drives a turbine, like other thermal energy
sources. The efficiency of the system is limited by the achiev-
able temperatures in the coolant, and this is set by the material
properties of the blanket. The fusion environment is very chal-
lenging, and materials that are used need to be able to handle
not only high temperatures and stresses but also radiation dam-
age. To avoid generating long-lived radioactive waste, certain
alloying elements and potential impurities must be avoided
close to plasma. Fortunately, iron itself can be used, and so
steels are acceptable, but scaling-up the manufacture of these
reduced-activation materials and qualifying them and joining
techniques such as welding for use in nuclear environments
remains an ongoing process.

21.3 Impacts of fusion

21.3.1 Safety
The intrinsic safety of fusion is very high: maintaining the
reaction conditions is a continuous process, so if there is any
kind of failure, the process stops automatically with no chance
of a runaway reaction. Radioactive isotopes are created in the
wall of the reactor, but the decay heat these produce is not con-
centrated enough to cause damage if cooling fails.
530 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

However, a fusion system often contains a lot of stored

energy, for example, in the magnetic fields of the magnets and
the plasma, and as these collapse during either a plasma dis-
ruption or an emergency shutdown, large forces and inductive
currents can be generated and plasma particles can be acceler-
ated toward the wall, causing localized melting. If enough dam-
age is caused, high-pressure coolant might be released into the
vessel, causing a pressure pulse that must be handled by burst
valves and an expansion system to ensure that nothing is
released to the environment or endangers on-site staff.
The main risk to the public is the potential for release of tri-
tium, and this drives the safety design for conceptual plant lay-
outs. Tritium is a beta (electron) radiation emitter and readily
combines with oxygen to form water, which is easily absorbed by
biological organisms if it escapes to the environment. As a small
atom, it is also very mobile and can diffuse through materials.
Components exposed to tritium must be detritiated before they
can be recycled. A significant area of research is into ways to limit
the amount of tritium on-site and to monitor its movement from
system to system so that there is a constant record of inventory.
The safety design goal for a fusion power plant is that even in
the worst accident case, there should be no requirement for evac-
uation beyond the site boundary, since large-scale evacuation of
the public in response to an incident is known to be high risk
(e.g., as observed for Fukushima [8]). This means a “defense in
depth” approach with multiple levels of confinement to ensure
that, for example, a coolant leak leading to a generation of steam
in the reactor vessel that exceeds the pressure limits of the vessel
must be dealt with through rupture discs and an expansion and
recondensation volume to ensure there are no leaks from this pri-
mary containment system, with the building acting as a second-
ary containment structure in case the primary containment fails.
There is currently a lot of discussion, at local and international
levels, of the right regulatory approach for fusion. It seems most
likely that the overall approach of fission regulation will be followed,
with the principal safety objectives being adopted from fission [9]:
1. To control the radiation exposure of people and the release
of radioactive material to the environment;
2. To restrict the likelihood of events that might lead to a loss
of control over a nuclear reactor core, nuclear chain reaction,
radioactive source, or any other source of radiation;
3. To mitigate the consequences of such events if they were to
occur.
However, the detailed interpretation of these principles will
be adapted to fusion’s specific qualities and requirements.
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 531

21.3.2 Environment
Although fusion is a carbon-free energy source, the building
of a fusion power station will involve large quantities of carbon-
intensive concrete and steel—although with recent advances
reducing the carbon concentration of these processes [10,11]—
and many of the technologies requiring elements that must be
mined, not least lithium, as the major input fuel. Lifecycle stud-
ies for fission, taken as a representative technology, show that
overall, the carbon intensity of such technologies is low [12],
and lithium mining is not as environmentally damaging as ura-
nium mining.
The high power density of a fusion power plant limits the
land occupied for energy generation (a 1 GW net electric fusion
power plant would occupy a site of around 60 hectares, with an
equivalent generating capacity requiring about 25 times this
area in solar panels or 250 times this area in onshore wind tur-
bines [13]), but the coolant requirements mean that water
sources—river or ocean—will be warmed through discarded
heat. This can be offset if the regulatory and social environment
allows fusion plants to be built close to centers of habitation
and allow the waste heat to be used for district heating.
Alternatively, waste heat could be used as process input to
chemical or food processing plants.
Materials inside and around the reactor will be exposed to tri-
tium and neutron irradiation, making them radioactive. Bulk
structural materials are designed so that no long-lived nuclides
are formed, and with tritium decay, the intention is that they are
safe for recycling within 100 years, although this relies on careful
design to make the removed components deconstructable so
that waste can be separated and more readily recycled. The issue
is that even very small amounts of impurities in these compo-
nents might form enough fissile elements to leave the waste
unrecyclable, leading to stringent manufacturing limits on struc-
tural alloys and the need for dedicated manufacturing lines. The
greatest production of long-lived nuclear material in common
concepts is carbon-14, produced by neutron radiation of nitro-
gen, found in water (used as a coolant in many concepts), and as
a common alloying element in steel. The lifetime production of
14
C by a fusion power plant must be limited, leading to stringent
manufacturing limits on structural alloys.
Finally, although fusion is inherently very energy-dense in
fuel terms within the reactor itself, there are inevitable impacts
from the extraction of necessary materials. The amount of lith-
ium in the blanket is not enormous in global demand terms,
532 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

but to achieve the tritium breeding rates required, it must be

enriched in Li6. The best known current process for this enrich-
ment requires large amounts of mercury, and while engineers
are confident that it can be done without polluting the environ-
ment, mercury production is itself a potentially environmentally
damaging process. In the same way, large amounts of beryllium
may be required with similar impacts. Alternatives to both these
options are available but require more technological develop-
ment. As a high-tech construct, fusion will also require large
amounts of copper and other elements for much of the engi-
neering, and rare earth and trace elements for the computing
and control systems. Of course, all electricity-generating sys-
tems require similar inputs, but we should not neglect these
wider impacts of large-scale engineering works.
A fusion power plant will also produce considerable waste
heat, which in standard designs must be rejected by the envi-
ronment. It would be beneficial to find ways to use this, and
this will be discussed more in the next section.

21.3.3 Social
Social studies on attitudes to fusion are generally positive
[14,15], and the fusion community has worked hard to empha-
size the favorable inherent safety and environmental characteris-
tics. However, these features must be deliberately engineered
into a future power plant to realize them. Broadly, this manifests
as safety requirements being based around a goal of never
requiring evacuation of spaces outside the site boundary, and
almost all waste materials being recyclable through normal (non-
radioactive) routes within timescales of the order of 100 years.
However, fusion is fundamentally a nuclear technology, and
while enormous advances have been made in the physics and
technology base, as seen from outside, it appears to have
repeatedly missed the claimed development goals. In recent
years, this has led to a wide interest from investors in private
fusion development companies, with pitches at various levels of
believability, which have in turn been treated with various levels
of skepticism. Recent results from JET [2] and NIF [1] have
helped to keep fusion progress in the public mind but it falls to
the fusion community to show similar technological progress to
match. If only everyone could tour the ITER site [16] and see
the scale and precision of engineering required!
At the time of writing, one of the leading US private compa-
nies, CFS, is engaged in building its SPARC device [17]. This is
an experimental high-magnetic-field machine aimed at
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 533

achieving a burning plasma (a plasma that creates more energy

than it takes to heat it). It is both a magnet test and a public
relations project, in which success in these goals will provide a
wide public boost to faith in fusion development. A public fail-
ure may well have the opposite effect.
If ways could be found to make use of the waste heat from a
fusion plant, this would be economically helpful all around.
There are a range of ways the heat can be used [18] although
broadly this requires the plant to be colocated with industry
and/or domestic housing. This requires the plant to ideally be
placed near cities for access to labor, industry, and consumers
of district heating. While a fusion plant should be clean in
everyday operation with no particulate emissions, there is no
denying that there are frequently civil society objections to
large-scale building works of this type in such locations, and
this may well be made worse by fear of radiological hazards, no
matter the actual safety level of the plant itself.

21.4 Climate change and fusion’s place in a

future energy system
It is widely agreed that humans need to dramatically
decrease carbon dioxide emissions to counter climate change.
In parallel, energy demand is projected to rise as industrializa-
tion continues around the world, and in particular electricity
demand will rise. Electrification is vital to reduce dependence
on fossil fuels, which are not only associated with climate
change but also particulate emissions, which are very damaging
to health in their own right [19].
It is also clear that fusion will not be available at an appropri-
ate scale in time to be the chief driver for this change. A funda-
mental limit here is the tritium doubling time, the time taken to
breed sufficient extra tritium to start up a new fusion power
plant. In the best realistic scenarios, this can be around five
years, meaning that the fusion power plant fleet can double in
size every five years—assuming that we can build them that fast.
It would take ten doublings—50 years—to go from the first plant
to one thousand plants, assuming that everything goes perfectly.
We cannot wait for fusion to solve climate change for us.
However, there is a long-term role for fusion within a future
energy system driven mainly by renewables. Various studies
looking at modeling of energy storage and intermittent genera-
tion based on real data [2022] tend to show that, as expected,
a very large proportion of demand, varying seasonally, can be
534 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

met from renewables and energy storage. However, dealing with

the last 15%25% of energy demand without risking outages
becomes increasingly expensive unless a certain contribution
from baseload on-demand electricity generation is assumed to
help “trickle-charge” storage during low generation periods. In
addition, large-scale interconnections to transfer power across
continents are required to mitigate generation lapses across
weather-system scales and to move energy from generation-rich
regions to storage-rich regions [20]. All this infrastructure—the
energy storage required, the renewable generators for 80% elec-
tricity supply (currently around 5% of global generation [23]),
the interconnections—remains to be built and will immediately
contribute to combating climate change. There is still a good
deal of investment required here—recent calculations of the
cost of upgrading the grid for large-scale wind generation run
from more than d50bn for the United Kingdom alone [24] to
more than h500bn for the EU [25]. The ideal solution to elimi-
nate the final 20% does not yet exist in any technology, and it is
here that fusion can play a valuable role without being immedi-
ately required to be ready. It is a long-term solution that does
not necessarily need to compete directly on dispatchable elec-
tricity costs with renewables, because it lowers the overall sys-
tem costs and increases resilience and reliability.
In terms of compatibility with existing infrastructure, a
fusion power station is similar to a fission power station: It has
(probably) steady, substantial electrical output and will require
supplies of a secondary coolant such as river or seawater.
However, some concepts, such as the tokamak, require consid-
erable temporary power input to ramp up the magnet and
plasma currents, and heat the plasma to fusion conditions. This
power, which may be hundreds of MW, could be drawn directly
from the grid or could be spread over a greater time period
through the use of short-term energy storage such as flywheels.

21.5 Potential capacity of fusion

21.5.1 Timescales and build-out
The most well-developed option for fusion, magnetic-
confinement D-T, still requires some considerable technological
development to be commercially viable and self-sustaining, not
least the tritium breeding and handling systems. All other D-T
options also require similar technology. Inertial-confinement sys-
tems are hard to make efficient due to the demands of powering
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 535

lasers, and other fusion reactions are less accessible than D-T. In
summary, there is no obvious rapid route to fusion power.
With that in mind, and taking account of the likely complex-
ity and scale of a fusion power plant, it seems like the most
aggressive timescale for engineering design (710 years) and
build (710 years) leads to 1520 years to the first full-scale
power plant—assuming that material and component supply
chains are ready or can be scaled up rapidly—which would be
followed by a period of commissioning and testing before full
power and tritium self-sufficiency was achieved. Alternative
concepts might individually be capable of faster build, but
more development would be required before.
Following the first full operation, as described above, there is a
period required to build up tritium before starting the next gener-
ation of fusion power plants. Assuming they can be built on a
production-line basis and do not require significant additional
engineering, it might be possible to achieve 1000 power plants
within fifty years, supplying total electricity generation of the
order of 1 TW and coming close to the 15%20% baseload power
supply required for grid stabilization and reliability by the year
2100. Such a program would require the commitment of enor-
mous national resources and seamless and problem-free engi-
neering, manufacturing, and project management, and so it must
be required as an optimistic lower bound on the time required.
However, in recent years, there has been a tremendous boom
in interest from private capital, and it is possible that the interest
in the development of a wide range of concepts, materials, and
technologies translates into much more rapid deployment than
the public programs envisage. Some of these concepts aim for
fusion reactions that do not produce neutrons and do not require
the manufacture of tritium: Although much more difficult to
access than D-T fusion, if realized, these approaches could use
more readily available materials and would side-step the tritium
doubling time limit on speed of deployment.

21.5.2 Resource availability

The principal fusion consumable inputs are deuterium and
lithium. Deuterium is a stable isotope of hydrogen and can be
readily extracted from water, where there is enough for millions
of years of global energy needs. The other fuel in plasma, tritium,
does not occur naturally and must be bred from lithium.
Because the D-T reaction is so energetic, it does not take much
lithium to supply the needs of a single individual: a laptop bat-
tery probably contains enough, if entirely converted into tritium
536 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion

and from there to energy, to supply the typical lifetime needs of

an average European. Currently known land-based resources of
lithium could provide around a thousand years of global energy
demand if entirely used for fusion [26], although this should be
regarded in the context of Li6 enrichment required—a process
that may require large amounts of mercury unless alternative
enrichment methods are developed. Although commercial meth-
ods do not yet exist, lithium is also extractable from seawater,
and, in total, the potential reserves from this source are orders of
magnitude higher [27]. In addition, a fusion power plant will
require several kilograms of tritium to start up and sustain opera-
tion until the breeder blanket is producing a sufficient supply for
self-sufficiency. This start-up inventory must be made, either in
fission reactors (as currently) or, later, in an existing fleet of
fusion reactors. While it would be possible (albeit slow) to start
up a reactor initially in D-D and “bootstrap” it up to D-T opera-
tion [28], tritium supplies may prove to be a bottleneck to the
rate at which fusion power plants could be deployed even once
the technology is proven to be successful [29].
While these basic fuel resources appear more or less unlim-
ited, there are other potentially scarce resources that must be
considered. Such elements include supplies of tantalum (an
alloying element in low-activation steels), beryllium, tungsten
(for plasma-facing surfaces), and helium. If beryllium is used as
the neutron multiplier, a reactor may contain around 300
tonnes of Be. This is a greater amount than annual global pro-
duction, and current known resources will limit the total num-
ber of fusion reactors and roll-out rate if this is the bottleneck
and alternatives are not developed [30]. Helium supplies are
technically limited, but the B25 tonnes required for the magnet
cryogenic systems and B25 tonnes required for blanket cooling
(if helium cooling is chosen) do not tax global supplies.
(Example quantities are for a 1 GW electric D-T reactor).

21.6 Conclusions
Fusion as a practical source of power now appears to be
much more of a technological and engineering problem than a
physics one, and with increased interest both from governments
and private enterprise, it genuinely seems possible that it might
be realized within the next thirty years. This timescale, restric-
tions on the rate of roll-out, and the large uncertainty on final
costs of electricity due to the need to develop new supply
chains for materials and components mean that fusion is
 Chapter 21 Nuclear fusion 537

unlikely to contribute to near-term solutions to the climate and

energy-supply crises, but the favorable long-term resource,
stable operating characteristics and output, and power density
mean that it remains attractive for development as a long-term
part of the energy mix. Projected costs of completing the devel-
opment of fusion remain comparable to investments required
for grid adaptations for large-scale renewable deployment in
single countries and lower than current renewable subsidies,
and so, given the potential benefits, working toward the fastest
possible safe deployment of fusion remains a convincing goal.

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