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accompanying technology programs for a complete power plant design. Nevertheless,
the exploration of wider conceptual space is welcome and may result in the discovery
of new and useful regimes of operation, which can be adopted by the mainstream
fusion program; alternatively, they will make use of the technologies and materials
developed by national research programs in their own development.
Is enough being done to secure alternative, clean sources of energy, including
fusion? Using figures available from the IEA on energy research, we can estimate
9
that global public spending on R&D for fusion is currently around $2 10 a 1
($2 bn per year), including ITER construction [43]. This is similar to the expenditure
on renewables, and much less than that spent on fission. The global energy market is
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worth around $2 10 a 1 ($6 tn per year) [44] and total public-sector spending on
energy R&D is around 0.15% of this, with fusion spend around 0.03%. Given the scale
of the energy challenge faced in the immediate as well as the long-term future, it seems
that not enough is being spent on energy research of any kind.

5.6 Summary

Fusion has a number of attractive properties, particularly in terms of resource avail-
ability, generation of waste and emissions, and low external costs, but has consistently
proven to be technically challenging. Even the most well-developed current research
programs do not lead to commercial fusion energy being widely available before the
end of the century, meaning it is a long-term low-carbon solution not a near-term fix
for current climate change issues. However, even with high use of renewables inter-
mittency of generation leads to challenging requirements for energy storage, and it
seems likely that there will always be a need for forms of baseload electricity gener-
ation in an optimized system; a need to which fusion is well suited. Enormous progress
has been made in understanding the physics, technology, and materials problems in
recent decades and, within the next 20years, ITER and IFMIF should provide the final
tokamak burning plasma physics and radiation-resistant materials basis allowing the
next steps to be taken toward an electricity-producing reactor prototype around the
middle of the century.

References

[1] Wesson J. Tokamaks. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2011.
[2] Statista. Countries with the largest lithium reserves worldwide as of 2016. Available from:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-the-largest-lithium-reserves-
worldwide/ (Accessed 3 December 2017).
[3] Hoshino T. Innovative lithium recovery technique from seawater by using world-first
dialysis with a lithium ionic superconductor. Desalination 2015;359:59–63.
[4] Zheng S, King DB, et al. Fusion reactor start-up without an external tritium source. Fusion
Eng Des 2015;103:13–20.
[5] Kovari M, Coleman M, Cristescu I, Smith R. Tritium resources available for fusion
reactors. Nucl Fusion 2017;58(2):026010.