The Energy to Come: Promises, Imaginaries and Ecology of Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is promised to be a clean, safe, abundant and almost inexhaustible energy source for the future: it is the promise of a “permanent fix” to the energy issue, of post-material decoupling and of a post-scarcity utopia, of an energy transition without sacrificing the way modern societies live and consume, of a last expansion forward for human civilisation to unlock today’s impossible possibilities. The promise of taming star energy could not be more appealing in a time of ecological crisis where no easy solutions appear to be available without compromises. And yet, despite its allure as the next “Promethean technology” to come and inaugurate a new cycle of human expansion, the quest for fusion energy has been around for so long now that critics consider it nothing more than a pipe dream. There are therefore a host of good reasons for a sociologist of science to get interested in nuclear fusion as a case study, especially in this present time of rapid transformations in the research landscape and once-again rising expectations of near-term success. Among the questions that recursively appear in public discourses about fusion, this research focuses on three main puzzles: comparing to other energy-technologies, why has fusion energy so long eluded us? Why is research in the field going private right now, if it is still scientifically and financially risky? And after all, why is that the quest for fusion has endured for seven decades to date, despite setbacks and broken promises? To answer the three questions, this research maps out the public discourses about fusion research by its insiders through the qualitative analysis of a constellation of different sources. What such an analysis displays is the collapse of multiple temporalities shaping the past, the present and the future of fusion research. In the first section of this research (“Fusion Barriers”), the literature on path dependence and lock-ins is used to show how the trajectories of other energy sources and past decisions in the politics of fusion have been influencing its present as a research field and its future as a viable energy source. The second section (“Fusion Fever”) leverages on the theory of sociotechnical imaginaries to interpret today’s changing political economy of fusion research from publicly to privately led. The third section (“Fusion Promises”) mobilizes the sociology of expectation to describe instead the rhetorical work carried out by the fusion community to rewrite the past and make the preset of research last. The temporal entanglement of past failures, present achievements and future expectations has always been a major challenge for the fusion community and is the main source of today’s controversies surrounding the field. This research thus reveals the implicit assumptions of fusion promoters as well as those of its critics, to make clear what ideas of social order hide behind discussions on fusion technicalities. Drawing from alternative paths elaborated during the “Energy Wars” in the 1970s, controversies about fusion are here interpreted by means of the distinction between “hard ecology”, in favour of material growth and increased energy consumption, and “soft ecology”, more prone to post-growth and energy conservation. Such a distinction seems to be key in polarising the current ecological debate and the different approaches put forward to cope with the energy transition.