Why is it important?
Fusion power could be a limitless source of clean and dispatchable energy. It is expected that remaining engineering challenges will be resolved in next 5-10 years and then fusion power will become an essential part of energy mix. The benefits of fusion power are numerous: it needs very small amounts of fuel to operate, it is intrinsically safe, it doesn’t produce long-living radioactive waste, and it is dispatchable on demand.
Superconductors enable high-field magnets of magnetic confinement fusion devices – tokamaks, stellarators, magnetic mirrors, and levitating dipoles. Superconductors are also used in some auxiliary equipment of fusion devices like gyrotrones or current leads.
Superconductor-based fusion concepts have attracted the largest part of private investment in fusion recently because of the shorter path to power plant that these concepts create.
What's holding us back?
The emerging fusion industry is rather capital-intensive. It has been reported that a billion-dollar-sized investment is needed for a single company to prove a viability of its fusion power concept. Although there has been billion-sized investments recently, there’s still a need for more capital to reach breakthrough.
There’s also a need for further significant technological development. More than dozen companies and organizations worldwide are working hard to de-risk remaining challenges by rapid prototyping.
The regulations in geographies like UK, US, and Germany keep improving towards fusion, and that reduces regulatory barriers for future implementation of fusion power. However, there’s still a lot to be done to reduce this risk.
Another important risk is the projected supply shortage of HTS tape for fusion devices. Namely, current production capabilities do not match projected demand by various fusion startups and research organizations.