The Nuclear Fusion supply chain is worth $7 billion
Companies looking to harness the process that powers the sun and stars to generate electricity expect to spend about $7 billion before the first nuclear fusion plants are operational, according to a survey released Wednesday. So the logistics chain of these plants promises to be quite rich.
Fusion occurs when the nuclei of two light atoms, such as hydrogen, heated to extreme temperatures, fuse into a single heavier nucleus releasing large amounts of energy.
In an effort to master the fusion process using lasers or magnets, private companies and government labs spent $500 million on their supply chains last year, according to the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) survey.
According to the survey of nearly two dozen developers, this spending is set to explode to $7 billion as the merger companies develop their first power plant and
A large part of supply chain spending is expected to go to high-quality steel and concrete and superconducting materials to build plants where fuels will be heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius in special chambers. The money will also go towards super magnets, lasers and power supplies.
Andrew Holland, head of AIF, said the geopolitical risk in the supply chain is of little concern, as no critical components or materials are subject to global supply shortages or come only from unstable countries.
“The biggest challenge, honestly, is scale,” Holland said. “We want to make sure companies in the supply chain are aware that the merger is coming, so they can make the necessary investments to scale.”
While there is a global shortage of tritium, a fuel that many companies plan to use to ignite fusion plants, Holland said that's not a problem because companies plan to produce tritium in fusion plants with the use of lithium. .
According to his estimates, a fusion plant would need only the amount of lithium found in about four electric vehicles.
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The article The Nuclear Fusion Supply Chain is Worth $7 Billion comes from Scenarios Economics .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-catena-logistica-della-fusione-nucleare-vale-7-miliardi-di-dollari/ on Fri, 19 May 2023 12:00:09 +0000.