US to announce nuclear fusion strategy at UAE COP28

The US will lay out the first international strategy for commercialising nuclear fusion power at the upcoming UN climate summit in Dubai, US Special Envoy on Climate Change John Kerry will announce on Monday, two sources familiar with the announcement said.

Fusion could have an important advantage over today's nuclear fission plants that split atoms, as it does not produce long-lasting radioactive waste. If deployed successfully, it could one day could provide a cheap source of carbon-free electricity.

The former secretary of state will announce his plan to lay out the strategy - which foresees commercialisation within years, not decades - on Monday on a tour of fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston.

Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars to generate electricity, can be replicated on Earth with heat and pressure using lasers or magnets to smash two light atoms into a denser one, releasing large amounts of energy.

In August, scientists using laser beams at a national lab in California repeated a fusion breakthrough called ignition where for a brief instant the amount of energy coming from the fusion reaction surpassed that which was concentrated on the target.

Kerry, who as a U.S. senator more than a decade ago backed legislation that would fund fusion research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will tour Commonwealth with Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Italian energy firm Eni, which is working on four fusion pilot projects.

"I will have much more to say on the United States’ vision for international partnerships for an inclusive fusion energy future at COP28," Kerry said in a statement.

Decades of federal investment is transforming fusion from an experiment to "an emerging climate solution", he added.

But there are hurdles to fusion's producing commercial electricity. The energy output of last year's fusion experiment at the U.S. National Ignition Facility was only about 0.5% of the energy that went into firing up the lasers, some scientist estimate.

Scientists have so far only reached scattered instances of ignition, not the many continuous ignition events per minute needed to generate electricity to power homes and industries.

There are also regulatory, construction and siting hurdles in creating new fleets of power plants to replace parts of existing energy systems.

Some critics say fusion will be too expensive and take too long to develop to help in the fight against climate change in the foreseeable future.

A source familiar with the planned announcement said the fusion strategy will be a framework that lays out plans for the global deployment of the technology that could gain support from international partners.

The source said COP28, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, will "be the starting gun for international cooperation" on nuclear fusion, which Kerry will tout as a climate "solution, not a science experiment".

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