The Federal Ministry for Science and Research has announced the first details of what the program should look like. Three large centers to deal with fusion energy are to be established on German territory with state aid. It is said that the selection of the first such place should not take long – the ministry wants to do it within six months.
“That’s a very tight schedule in any case. But of course it fits,” the Handelblatt daily quotes an unnamed manager who is already active in the industry. In Germany, there are four different companies that are trying to develop a fusion reactor. Until now, they had to rely mainly on private investors.
Fusion energy can be attractive – in theory it promises essentially inexhaustible sources of clean energy. The principle is based on the processes that take place in the stars. Scientists are trying to imitate them, and a few years ago they briefly succeeded in doing so in laboratory conditions.
Now they need to make the process in the reactor permanent and also pay off economically. That is, to generate a sufficient multiple of the energy that is put into it.
If the scientists succeed, then even part of the nuclear waste could be processed in fusion energy. However, its implementation is still uncertain and development requires further investment.
Technology development is being worked on practically everywhere – the United States supports promising start-ups, China is betting on a controlled program, and teams from the Czech Republic are also involved in research within the EU.
Germany turned away from nuclear power for good years ago and has no plans to restart the reactors that are still standing. Their further operation is prevented not only by politics, but also purely by business interests. Owners would have to invest heavily in these devices to bring them back into the game. And even during non-binding discussions, none of them wanted to.
The situation is different with fusion energy. RWE, Siemens Energy or the advanced materials manufacturer Schott are already helping German scientists with its development. Now the state wants to join them.
Looking for a suitable location
Germany will support the development of three innovation centers. Each will have a different task. Two of them will work on two different solutions to achieve the merger. One works on the principle of magnets, the other uses lasers. Another center is to be devoted to the development of materials and the fuel cycle.
The ministry wants to decide on the first of these locations ideally already in the first six months of this year. But it has several conditions. First of all, he does not want the state to subsidize the majority of the new campuses. Only projects that rely on large private investors will receive support.
This request is receiving positive reactions among interested companies, because the government is clearly targeting promising development paths. Each location could receive approximately 730 million crowns from the state, with the fact that the amount may increase in the future.
“These innovation centers should not serve to subsidize established actors or existing technologies. Rather, we understand them as a sort of German Apollo program for fusion energy,” Jakob Fiedler of Proxima Fusion told Handelsblatt. He alluded to the former connection between the American state and companies when sending a man to the moon.
How to achieve fusion
The principle of merging atomic nuclei, i.e. nuclear fusion, is not complicated: in a reactor, two nuclei of atoms merge into one nucleus of a heavier atom. In practice, however, this is a very complex problem, because merging nuclei can be partially compared to trying to bring two magnets with the same poles closer to each other.
Two nuclei with a positive charge repel each other, and only after the repulsive force is overcome and the nuclei approach each other to a very small distance, the attractive force prevails and the nuclei can merge into a heavier nucleus (e.g. a helium nucleus) with the production of a large amount of energy.
In order to achieve this reaction, it is necessary to heat the matter to extreme temperatures, where it turns into a so-called plasma. In the Sun, the hot plasma is helped to be held by the gravitational force, which ensures a suitable combination of extreme density (fusion takes place in its center, not at the surface) and high temperatures, i.e. the energy of the cores themselves.
Gravitational force cannot be used for this purpose on Earth, so a strong magnetic field is used to maintain and isolate the plasma, but it cannot provide such high densities as the center of the Sun. Today, the most available option to achieve fusion in our conditions is to reach for a different fusion reaction than on the Sun (that is, specifically the reaction of deuterium and tritium) and increase the reaction temperature. In the under construction ITER tokamak, the temperature of the plasma should reach up to 150 million degrees, which is ten times the value in the center of the Sun.
The centers are supposed to bring together a number of companies that will work towards a common goal. The Federal Ministry for Science and Research emphasizes that some players may be involved in the work there even remotely. This would make decision-making easier, for example, even for larger companies, which could participate in projects directly from their headquarters.
The selection of possible locations for the centers can also be based on a study by the Technical University of Munich, which prepared the relevant analysis on behalf of Gauss Fusion.
In Germany, independently of the planned program, an innovation center is already being established south of Frankfurt am Main, specifically in the former nuclear power plant near the village of Biblis. The work on the fusion reactor there is supported not only by the site’s owner, the RWE concern, but also by the regional government of Hesse. It contributed about half a billion crowns to the development of the place.
According to the Technical University of Munich, companies focused on fusion energy pay off when they use the sites of closed power plants. Either nuclear or coal. Among the selected areas are also regions close to the Czech Republic, for example around Leipzig in Saxony or in the Danube basin downstream from Regensburg.
However, the development of the fusion reactor still carries with it uncertainties – it is still not certain that the use of this resource could be put into practice in the foreseeable future.
And according to many, humanity will have to wait for a real breakthrough in this area. Physicist Steven Koonin wrote in a commentary for the Wall Street Journal that it could take another 15 to 20 years. Thanks to increasing investments, however, development could be significantly accelerated.
It is said that the technology will only pay off when fusion reactors produce 20 to 60 times the energy used. Koonin said he believes this goal is achievable.
