How Donald Trump Pushed Fusion Energy Forward as President

In the wake of a major nuclear fusion milestone being announced on Tuesday, excitement about the energy source has soared.

The announcement came from scientists at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who have achieved a "net energy gain" from nuclear fusion for the first time. In an experiment using lasers, scientists produced more energy from the reaction than they put in to make it happen.

While the Biden Administration has expressed interest in the field, providing $50 million in funding to advance research, the Trump presidency also invested large amounts of money in the burgeoning technology. The 2021 budget proposal by the Trump administration allocated $1.2 billion for "nuclear energy research and development and related programs," the Verge reported in 2020.

Additionally, during Trumps' tenure, the White House had given $165 million in funding each year to a global effort to build the largest fusion experiment ever in France, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun. While traditional nuclear energy involves fission, or the splitting of heavy elements like uranium, to generate energy, fusion is the collision of hydrogen nuclei at high speeds fusing to form a helium atom.

Only heavy hydrogen isotopes named deuterium and tritium, each with one and two neutrons in their nucleus respectively, are needed to achieve this. When these nuclei fuse, they release huge amounts of energy, which can then be used to generate electricity. However, managing and containing the reaction, which can reach a temperature of up to 270 million degrees, is very difficult, and has so far required decades of research.

While Trump did make some strides in fusion development, it seems that nuclear fission energy was a greater priority during his presidency. The United States had given about $1 billion to ITER as of 2018, and had been planning to contribute an additional $500 million through to 2025, but Trump slashed the funding to $75 million for 2019. The 2018 grant also fell short by around $40 million, Reuters reported at the time.

This led to fears the project would be delayed. The U.S. eventually reversed this budget cut, and in 2021, it was announced that America would continue to fund ITER for a further decade.

"Reducing annual funding will only delay ITER instruments being built here in the U.S. and cause construction delays that increase overall project cost," White House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith said in a statement in 2018.

In light of the recent announcement, nuclear fusion is seizing the limelight, with the promise of clean, limitless energy attractive to both sides of the political spectrum.

"Fusion seems to be something that appeals broadly to both [political] parties—it could provide firm power for manufacturing and urban centers, and it is safe, carbon-free, and environmentally sustainable," Nathaniel Ferraro, a research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, previously told Newsweek.

"Both the Trump and Biden administrations were and are looking to leverage private investment in fusion research as a way to accelerate the national program, and this has been reflected in an increase in funding to public-private partnership programs."

Nuclear fusion, if successfully harnessed to generate electricity, could revolutionize the energy sector, as it requires no fossil fuels to run, and produces no CO2. The hydrogen fuel to make it work can be harvested from seawater using simple electrolysis. And the only byproduct from the process, helium, can be used in coolants and in arc welding.

Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, who is a member of Congress' bipartisan Fusion Energy Caucus, previously said in a statement: "We need a bicameral, bipartisan–in fact, I would argue non-partisan–effort on fusion energy. We can work together to get this done."

The milestone reached this week was the second major breakthrough in recent months. In August this year, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also announced that they had achieved "ignition" for the first time in 2021, which is when the reaction produces enough energy to keep itself going.

A lot more time, effort and money is required to get nuclear fusion to the point where it could power cities and countries. At the moment, the challenges include containing the hot hydrogen plasma needed for the reaction.

"We're still a little while off practical fusion energy rolling out to the grid. The main challenge for us at this stage is to keep pushing along the path of improving how we heat up, pressurize and contain the hot, dense plasmas that nurture the fusion reactions to happen," Nathan Garland, a lecturer in applied mathematics and physics at Australia's Griffith University, previously told Newsweek.

"As we build better magnets, bigger lasers, stronger materials to withstand the immense temperatures and energies required to contain these fusion plasmas—think trying to bottle the core of our sun—we'll get closer to our eventual goal of generating enough energy out of the fusion reactions that we can harness it into a source suitable for powering our electricity grid."

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