The next crucial step in the evolution of global energy supply

By Moritz von der Linden, Co-Founder & CEO Marvel Fusion

Climate change is rapidly becoming a substantial threat to humanity. At the same time, global energy demand is rising. Fusion energy could be the clean, safe and limitless way to solve our energy dilemma.

The history of progress is a history of energy.

The control of fire at approx. 700,000 BC was an inflection point for the technological evolution of the human being. It provided a permanent source of warmth and light, protection from predators, a way to create better tools for hunting and a method for cooking food. Most importantly, this new energy source was the catalyst to untether humans from the cave to start exploring the world.

It took hundreds of thousands of years for homo sapiens to discover a much denser energy solution, steam engines powered by coal. The invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen and James Watt in the mid-1700s opened the floodgates to the industrial age. A single steam engine could do the work of dozens of horses and was more convenient and reliable than wind and water. The dramatic increase in productivity meant that individuals could benefit from higher quality goods, better nutrition, modern sanitation and accessible medicine, and led to great economic prosperity and to a greater sense of a shared human identity.

In 1880, a coal powered steam engine was attached to the world’s first electric generator. At the same time, Thomas Edison invented the first electric light, making reading possible at all times of the day and boosting access to education.

Yet the core energy source that catapulted humankind into the modern industrialized age is almost exclusively based on coal and petroleum. This extensive use of fossil fuel for 250 years continues to release enormous amounts of toxic carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere and has now brought our world to the brink of disaster.

Climate change is already a threat to the health and well-being of humankind across the planet. In parallel, a sharply rising global demand for energy is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Energy consumption will triple globally until 2050. Behind these numbers are human lives and maintaining a humane standard of living for a planetary population of eight billion people. Access to energy is a matter of human dignity. Every human should be able to benefit from heating and refrigeration, modern sanitation, mobility, education and the collective knowledge accessible through the internet.

Moreover, the tripling of global energy demand does not yet include the critically needed decarbonization of industrial processes, which will require even more electric power generation. The chemical industry in Germany alone will require 630 TWh of energy to fully decarbonize its production processes — this is the equivalent of Germany building 70 new conventional nuclear fission plants — an endeavor that is highly unlikely. And despite incredible progress, wind, solar and hydro even in optimistic projections are not capable of supplying even half of that demand. Irrespective of decreasing prices for solar and storage, the welcome expansion of renewable sources cannot reach the scale required to power a near-future world of over ten billion people and the unrelenting industrialization in emerging countries.

So it is no secret that humankind requires a new, denser source of energy to master our next evolutionary jump. Fusion energy, the power of the stars, could be the key to providing a new civilization-scale energy in a sustainable way. Yet the physics of fusion is extreme in almost every regard — and the system engineering equally challenging. Decades of research, billions of dollars and the brightest minds on this planet have not yet cracked one the most challenging problems of our time.

We believe that technological convergence will more quickly enable the long-sought dream of fusion energy. New technologies, enabled by latest breakthroughs in laser and nano sciences, have drastically increased the chances of reaching net energy gain from fusion reactions.

At Marvel Fusion, we utilize ultra-short-pulse, ultra-intense lasers to create a degenerate plasma assisted by nanostructured targets to reach fusion conditions for the pB11 (Proton Boron11) fuel configuration. This largely aneutronic fusion reaction is free of nuclear waste and melt-down risk; it is carbon-free, the reactants are available for tens of thousands of years and it has an extremely high energy density — only 400 kg of fuel generates approx. 8 TWh energy output (equivalent to a 1.3 GW power plant running for 6,000 hours of operation per year).

In the past, it took humans roughly a million years to transition from one form of globally-accepted energy to the next denser source, from taming fire to inventing the steam engine. We are very hopeful that, by leveraging rapid interdisciplinary advancements in physics, technology and computing, we can, in only a few more years, achieve a breakthrough in demonstrating the feasibility of fusion for commercial global energy production.

We must try as hard as we can to not only make fusion energy happen but also achieve a rapid entry into the energy marketplace with the ultimate goal of displacing fossil fuel production of CO₂ in our lifetimes — for humanity and for our planet.

Learn more about us at: marvelfusion.io