USA, Japan announce a partnership to accelerate developing nuclear fusion

The United States and Japan on Wednesday announced a partnership to accelerate efforts to develop nuclear fusion and commercialize the technology.

According to Reuters, the partnership was announced during Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Washington to attend a summit with President Joe Biden.

US Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk met with Japanese Minister of Education, Sports, Science and Technology Masahito Moriyama in Washington on Tuesday to discuss nuclear fusion.

The US Department of Energy said that the partnership will focus on the scientific and technical challenges of achieving nuclear fusion at a commercial level and expanding work between universities, national laboratories and private companies in the two countries.

Scientists, governments and companies have been trying for decades to harness nuclear fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, to provide carbon-free electricity. This reaction can be simulated on Earth by using heat and pressure with lasers or magnetic poles to fuse two light atoms into one denser atom, releasing large amounts of energy.

Unlike plants that operate with nuclear fission, or the splitting of atoms, if commercial nuclear fusion plants were built, they would produce only a small amount of long-lasting radioactive waste.

Last year, scientists repeated the achievement by achieving fusion using laser beams at a US national laboratory in California.

But scientists estimated the net energy production of that experiment to be only about 0.5% of the energy used to fire the laser. Even if science eventually achieves a breakthrough, there are regulatory, construction and siting hurdles before creating new fleets of power plants to replace segments of existing energy systems.

Late last year, Japan formed a nuclear fusion industry forum to commercialize the technology with participants from engineering and energy companies. The forum is expected to provide recommendations to the Japanese government on safety and technology standards and serve as a link for projects abroad.

Last December in Dubai, John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate at the time, launched an international plan involving 35 countries to support nuclear fusion.

Two sources familiar with the talks between the two countries said that Japan and the United States will also agree at the summit to support sustainable aviation fuel.