Fusion power
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Fusion power is the generation of electricity from the heat released by nuclear fusion. Grid-scale fusion power stations have operated in the European Federation since 2017, when the first tokamak plants were connected to the grid, and the Federation is the only state that generates a large share of its electricity by fusion. The best-known plant is the European Thermonuclear Energy Reactor (ETER), near Amsterdam. H&A built the first commercial fusion reactor offered for sale, in 2020.
Principle
In a fusion reactor, light atomic nuclei are heated to temperatures of over 100 million degrees, at which they fuse and release energy. Federation plants are tokamaks, in which the hot gas, a plasma, is held away from the walls of a ring-shaped chamber by magnetic fields. Most burn a mixture of deuterium, extracted from seawater, and tritium, produced from lithium in the reactor's own blanket. The heat is carried away by the blanket and drives steam turbines.
A fuel mixture of deuterium and helium-3 releases few neutrons and induces less radioactivity in the reactor structure. Helium-3 is rare on Earth and is mined on the Moon.
The magnets that confine the plasma are superconducting coils cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. The inner wall of the chamber is worn by the neutrons from the reaction and is replaced every few years by remote handling, and the replaced parts are stored as radioactive waste for several decades, far shorter than the waste of fission reactors.
History
The Federation and the United States both funded research into controlled fusion from the 1950s, as part of the competition of the Kaltkrieg. Federation research was concentrated from the 1960s in a joint programme of the member states, and an experimental tokamak near Amsterdam first produced more fusion energy than was used to heat its plasma in 2006.
ETER was built from 2009 as the Federation's first fusion power station, by a consortium of the member states' research institutes with H&A as lead industrial partner, and reached full power in 2017, the year the first plants were connected to the grid. A series of twelve power stations of about 1,500 megawatts each had been ordered from 2011, and most were connected between 2017 and 2019. By 2019 fusion supplied about 5% of the Federation's electricity. In 2020 H&A introduced the first fusion reactor sold commercially, a smaller design of about 150 megawatts for industrial sites, data centres and city heating networks. The Federation has not licensed its fusion technology to other states; China requested a licence in 2019.
Since 2020
Fusion plants need no shipped fuel beyond small quantities of lithium, and their output was unaffected by the collapse of shipping in 2021 and 2022. Construction of new plants continued through the infestation, and as of 2028 fusion supplies about 30% of the electricity in held territory. Pilot extraction of helium-3 on the Moon began in 2023 for the Federation's second-generation reactors.
Fusion plants are among the installations guarded under the highest defence priority.
As of 2028 about 34 large fusion power stations and about 60 of H&A's smaller reactors operate in held territory. Most of the smaller reactors supply data centres, including those of Frankfurt, and heat networks in cities whose gas supply was cut when imports by sea ended in 2021 and 2022. Their lithium comes from mines in the Ore Mountains on the German–Czechoslovak border and in northern Portugal and Cornwall.
Effects
Cheap and steady electricity from fusion changed the Federation's industry from the late 2010s. Electric heating, rail electrification and large data centres grew with it, and the Federation's imports of oil and gas fell by about a sixth between 2017 and 2020. During the infestation, fusion made the Federation's power supply independent of shipping, and its held cities have had electricity throughout, with rationing of power limited to the winter of 2022–2023.
Fusion does not produce the fissile material used in nuclear weapons and RTG ammunition, and the expansion of fusion did not ease the shortage of radioactive material that began in 2025.