Nuclear Fusion: News, Analysis and Market Coverage

Nuclear fusion joins light atomic nuclei together to release energy, while nuclear fission splits heavy atoms such as uranium apart to release energy. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun, using hydrogen isotopes as fuel. Fusion produces no long-lived radioactive waste, uses fuel derived from seawater and lithium, and carries no risk of a runaway chain reaction. Fission currently powers all commercial nuclear reactors. Fusion has theoretically superior environmental and safety characteristics but has not yet been achieved at commercial scale.

Nuclear fusion has been achieved many times in laboratory and experimental settings. The challenge is achieving it at net energy gain, where more energy comes out than is put in to initiate and sustain the reaction. The US National Ignition Facility announced in December 2022 that it had achieved fusion ignition, producing more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to the fuel target. However, this result did not account for the total energy consumed by the laser system. True commercial-scale fusion, producing electricity at competitive cost, has not yet been demonstrated.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, backed by over USD 2 billion in investment, is developing the SPARC compact tokamak and ARC commercial reactor design. TAE Technologies is pursuing an alternative hydrogen-boron fuel cycle. Helion Energy, backed by notable investors including Microsoft with a power purchase agreement in place, is developing its field-reversed configuration approach. General Fusion uses a piston compression method. The ITER project in France represents the intergovernmental research track. The field spans multiple technical approaches, with commercial deployment targeted from the 2030s.

Commercial nuclear fusion, if achieved, would use deuterium from seawater and tritium bred from lithium as fuel, not uranium. A world powered substantially by fusion reactors would require significantly less uranium than the current nuclear fission sector. However, fusion is unlikely to reach commercial scale before the 2030s at the earliest, and a multi-decade transition from fission to fusion would unfold gradually even in an optimistic scenario. Near-term uranium demand is driven by the expanding fission reactor fleet, which remains the relevant investment thesis for uranium stocks today.

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is a large-scale international fusion research project under construction in southern France, jointly funded by the European Union, United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia. ITER is designed to demonstrate that a fusion reaction can produce ten times more energy than is required to heat the plasma. First plasma is currently targeted for the late 2020s, with full fusion experiments in the 2030s. ITER is a research project rather than a power plant, designed to prove fusion physics at scale rather than generate commercial electricity.