Bill Gates-Backed Nuclear Fusion Developer Wants to Deploy a Reactor in Japan (japantimes.co.jp) 70
"A U.S.-based nuclear fusion developer wants to deploy a reactor in Japan in the late 2030s or early 2040s," reports Bloomberg, "in line with the Asian country's broader plans to adopt the potent, low-carbon energy source."
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which last week announced it raised $863 million from investors including Nvidia, has been in dialogue with Japanese government officials on the use of its technology, CEO Bob Mumgaard said in an interview in Tokyo on Wednesday... Several countries are eyeing the technology for its climate and energy security benefits but only some, like China, the U.S., Russia and South Korea have managed to crack the basics. Japan revised its national strategy in June to support fusion deployment and build a demonstration plant in the 2030s.
The article notes that Commonwealth "does not currently have any reactors in operation" — but that Mitsubishi this week invested in the company, in collaboration with a consortium of 12 Japanese companies. From Mitsubishi's announcement: The Japanese Consortium will acquire technical and commercial expertise in policy, regulatory, and the development, construction, operation, and maintenance of ARC [power plant] from CFS's commercialization projects in the United States. In addition, each consortium company will bring together its know-how and expertise and aspire to expedite the commercialization and industrialization of fusion energy power generation in Japan.
The article notes that Commonwealth "does not currently have any reactors in operation" — but that Mitsubishi this week invested in the company, in collaboration with a consortium of 12 Japanese companies. From Mitsubishi's announcement: The Japanese Consortium will acquire technical and commercial expertise in policy, regulatory, and the development, construction, operation, and maintenance of ARC [power plant] from CFS's commercialization projects in the United States. In addition, each consortium company will bring together its know-how and expertise and aspire to expedite the commercialization and industrialization of fusion energy power generation in Japan.
Finally! (Score:2)
Oh..... wait... wut?
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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I think they have to be nuked 20 times for Godzilla to emerge. What are they up to so far?
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Late 2030s/2040s basically means it's too late to be of much use addressing climate change. We need to be fixing it as fast as possible, today. We have proven technologies to do it. China is deploying them on a massive scale, more than the rest of the world combined. They aren't idiots, they aren't crashing their economy, their lights are staying on. They are doing it because it's a massive economic opportunity for them - lots of industrial output and jobs, lots of cheap energy.
Japan has been really lagging
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Late 2030s/2040s basically means it's too late to be of much use addressing climate change.
Worst case scenario it can be a replacement for their nuke plants. As I'm not terribly optimistic in humanity solving global warming by the 2040's I do think fusion plants would come in handy towards that as well though.
That's all assuming they can deliver in the time frame they're laying out which is a truly massive "if".
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Oddly they've been announcing that we're out of time since a long time ago. It's a chief marker that whatever the science says, no government nor people nor the UN have ever believed it to be real. Nations go to war and mobilise vast resources and impose martial law and so on, over far smaller threats than what's supposed to be a planet ending scenario. Nobody, nobody actually takes climate change like it's reality. So if we look and judge them not by what they say but by what they do, it's obvious that man
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Nobody, nobody actually takes climate change like it's reality.
That couldn't be more false. Many, many, many people take it very seriously and do everything they can to fight it. Unfortunately, they're opposed by people like you who try to claim it's not really a problem. Many of them do it for their personal benefit, because addressing the problems would cost them money or cut their profits, and they expect to be dead before the worst problems hit. Some do it simply out of wishful thinking: believing the situation is that bad would be intolerable, so they take the
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Bongo didn't say it wasn't a problem. Go reread that post. He said that no one is treating this like the existential crisis that it is being portrayed as.
I'm in the it's happening camp but instead of trying to prevent it, we need to adapt to it. You aren't going to stop lower income countries from wanting to catchup and if they think using fossil fuels will help them improve the lives of their people, they will do it.
I don't think humanity has the capacity to deal with such a big, long term problem.
If peopl
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Bongo didn't say it wasn't a problem. Go reread that post.
Actually what he said was, "no government nor people nor the UN have ever believed it to be real." So yeah, he actually did say that.
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Ok, sorry, it's an ambiguous word, and I do mean, if people really believed there was a tiger about to eat them, they would run for their lives, not just sit and polish their shoes. I mean, judge what people really believe by what they do, not what they say. It's not a comfortable conclusion for me, as I remember how shocking it was when I first heard about global warming. But here we are 40 years later. And there's no second planet right? This is it. And yet there have been enormous mobilisations over comp
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The rich and powerful are treating it like a tiger running after them. They know that they don't have to be faster than the tiger, just faster than other running from the tiger.
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We've never really had a problem like this before. You compared it to the Manhattan Project, but that was on a totally different scale: organized by just a few countries, lasting just a few years, only involving ~100k people. This problem requires sustained effort by the whole human race over decades. And it turns out humans aren't well suited to deal with problems like that. There's no central authority that can make everyone do it, and any attempt quickly makes people rebel against it. And too many p
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I think it is quite likely that the world will spend about a century running carbon capture on a vast scale, as it did carbon extraction and dispersal for the last 100. Of course that would be wealth-consuming, whereas dispersing it was wealth-creating...
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in the it's happening camp but instead of trying to prevent it, we need to adapt to it.
We'll have to do that also, and if the problem was just a single, one-time step-change (i.e. "we'll have to live in temperature range B from now on, instead of traditional temperature range A"), that would be sufficient.
But it's not that easy, is it? The climate changes, and as long as we keep increasing the CO2 content of the amosphere, the climate keeps changing more.
So we could adapt to the climate we expect to be living in 20 years from now, but without also solving the emissions problem, that won't be enough: we'll have to adapt again some years after that, to a climate that's even worse. And again, some years after that, and so on, likely until our only remaining way to "adapt" is through mass die-offs.
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We were out of time long ago. At this point it's going to be bad. All we can do is try to limit just how bad it's going to get.
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And I guess it will be interesting how the world does that. In the last 50 years world population has gone up and up, and fossil fuel consumption has continued to increase in absolute terms, rising higher and higher. I remember about 10 or 20 years ago there was a paper written by mathematician who explained that, essentially, the environmental movement refuses to understand basic math. It's all these notions about how we all make a small change and that will add up to a big change and so we all have to do
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That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.
The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not h
China is growing both renewables and coal (Score:1)
Late 2030s/2040s basically means it's too late to be of much use addressing climate change. We need to be fixing it as fast as possible, today. We have proven technologies to do it. China is deploying them on a massive scale, more than the rest of the world combined. They aren't idiots, they aren't crashing their economy, their lights are staying on.
Because of their ever increasing use of coal. Renewable are not displacing coal in China. Both are growing in use. People get confused because the percentage of power generated by coal is decreasing, but that is because renewables are growing faster than coal is growing. It also ignores all the other uses of coal.
They are doing it because it's a massive economic opportunity for them - lots of industrial output and jobs, lots of cheap energy.
That is their rationalization for increased coal usage, cost and jobs. With respect to fossil fuels, China chooses the lower cost coal, where the west often chooses the lower polluting natural gas.
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https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-solar-growth-keeps-chinas-co2-falling-in-first-half-of-2025/
Quotes:
Coal use in the power industry fell by 3.4% compared with the same period a year earlier, while gas use increased by 6%, resulting in a 3.2% drop in emissions for the sector overall.
The reduction in CO2 emissions from coal use in the power sector is shown at the bottom of the figure below, along with the small rise due to higher gas-fired electricity generation.
So no renewables have started displac
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Coal use in the power industry ...
Your citation only mentions two sector. Mentioning a decline in coal use in one and an increase in coal use in another. It actually refers to overall coal consumption growth:
"Even if its emissions fall in 2025 as expected, however, China is bound to miss multiple important climate targets this year. This includes targets to reduce its carbon intensity – the emissions per unit of GDP – to strictly control coal consumption growth and new coal-power capacity, as well as to increase the share of
CCP orders building of new coal power capacity (Score:2)
why are you still bothering to lie about this drnb?
Because the citations below are still the reality of today. Note the Aug 2025 citation shows a coal first fossil fuel policy to cover the gap between renewables and demand.
"[21 August 2025] Coal-power capacity could surge by as much as 80-100GW this year, potentially setting a new annual record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declines."
"A former senior official at one of China’s largest power firms stated in an interview in June 2025 that companies are building coal power capacity due t
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Coal is falling as a percentage of energy production in China, mostly displaced by renewables.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org]
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Coal is falling as a percentage of energy production in China, mostly displaced by renewables.
You are making the mistake I referred to in my previous post. Looking at one sector, energy production, while I am referring to total use across all sectors. You are also confusing a drop in the percentage, "drop in coal’s share of the mix" as your citations says, with use. Your citation actually refers to increased coal use: "Coal-fired generation capacity increased by 3%" Renewables and hydro simply increased by much greater amounts, lowering coal's percentage despite the increase in use.
The amou
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It's more complicated than that: https://cleantechnica.com/2025... [cleantechnica.com]
Energy demand is up, but the total amount generated by coal is down. Not the proportion, the actual GWh output. It's unlikely to ever reach the peak again I think, as the pace of renewable growth makes it impossible.
Steel production consumed a bit more coal as output increased, but that is now switching over to arc furnaces, i.e. electric, and much of that power is coming from renewables.
Overall, China's emissions declined slightly, and it's
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It's more complicated than that ...
Your citation mentions that there is a goal to reach peak coal mid decade (about now), but then we have Xi signaling potentially backing off such agreements.
"[Jul 26, 2023 } It was a bad week for anyone who thought China would cooperate on emissions reduction. President Xi Jinping reiterated that his country would set its own path on the issue and not be influenced by outside factors, according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg. This contradicts Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to reduce its ca
Just shifting coal to different sectors. (Score:2)
Coal is falling as a percentage of energy production in China, mostly displaced by renewables.
Again, you are looking only at energy production, a single isolated sector. As your citation showed, coal is down in one sector and up in different sectors (steel, chemical industry). Overall, renewables are supplementing coal, not displacing it. China continues to burn coal as fast as they can dig it up or import it. It is the first choice with respect to using fossil fuels to fill the gap between demand and renewables.
Am I discussing overall, total use, not isolated use in one sector. Given that China
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We need to be fixing it as fast as possible, today. We have proven technologies to do it. China is deploying them on a massive scale, more than the rest of the world combined.
China is also deploying more nuclear, hydro, and coal than the rest of the world combined. They are not doing this out of magnanimity. They are doing it because they need every additional energy source they can get. We apparently don't, so whatever.
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They are developing a major Hydro setup but it's got India very nervous about the downstream affects. A lot like what is happening in Ethiopia with regards to their dam, which is negatively downstream neighbors in Sudan and Egypt.
https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
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They are doing it because they need every additional energy source they can get. We apparently don't, so whatever.
Sir, you are mistaken. All those Bitcoins aren't going to mine themselves!
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The coal plants are mostly replacing older ones, that are either end of life much more polluting. Their emissions have peaked already.
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We need to be fixing it as fast as possible, today. We have proven technologies to do it. China is deploying them on a massive scale, more than the rest of the world combined.
China is also deploying more nuclear, hydro, and coal than the rest of the world combined. They are not doing this out of magnanimity. They are doing it because they need every additional energy source they can get. We apparently don't, so whatever.
We need it, but for far more bullshit reasons. Like mining fucking crypto and AI.
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Late 2030s/2040s basically means it's too late to be of much use addressing climate change.
You realize that warnings like that are becoming a joke, right? Algore made predictions on global warming in 2006 with his movie and nearly 20 years later that movie hasn't aged well. It was apparently shown in many American schools for years. It was well received at first but now it's a punchline.
How about we consider a date further in the future to be "too late" to act? 2035 is only 10 years away. That would be only... what? The end of Trump's fourth term as POTUS? (That's a joke by the way, calm d
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I seriously doubt Japan even has the landmass to support solar as a major power solution for their country. It's not even entirely flat and the major cities are very densely populated, so it's not like their is an abundance of single family homes with space for roof top solar. Nuclear makes much more sense for them.
P.S. Also, who wants to see the older traditional houses with solar panels on top? Pretty jarring and would definitely ruin the aesthetics some of those traditional villages are going for.
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Late 2030s/2040s basically means it's too late to be of much use addressing climate change.
Yes. Especially as this will take another 30-50 years to get ramped up after the prototype (!) performs well. (Which it might not do.) You cannot just build these things mass-scale when they are new.
Fully agree on China. Solar and cell-type batteries, they might dominate the market for a century. That is a huge opportunity and will be nice even when it goes back to replacement level. Europe will probably be dominating wind in the same way and might do so for flow-type and thermal batteries. This is really a
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Probably. There is currently one company that has a partially working prototype (the X-7 derived startup) and they will need several iteration before they have a functioning, energy-positive reactor that makes economic sense. But "investors" generally do not understand what they are investing in and only the smart ones make sure to get real engineers and scientists as advisors.
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The most severe climate issues are long term. Fusion won't have any impact in the next couple of decades, but what we do over the next hundred years also matters. If fusion power can be made economically viable, it solves the majority of the world's climate problems. Its far from a sure thing, but seems worth a several billion $ investment, 1% of the investment in solar, and similar I think to what is spent on each new model of phone.
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Japan has been really lagging on clean energy.
Japan was getting over 30% of their power from nuclear.
Then Fukushima happened, and usage dropped to 5%.
If they can drop usage like that within just a few years, perhaps their energy needs are still flexible enough to entertain other power sources. Their citizens merely stopped trusting nuclear.
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I don't think they were ever very keen on nuclear power, but when Fukushima happened it was quickly discovered that a lot of other plants were either on previously unknown fault lines, or were otherwise unsafe.
Re: Finally! (Score:2)
I mean, youâ(TM)re right that itâ(TM)s not here, but this is probably the safest fusion bet there is. We know really quite well how well Tokamaks scale. We have loads of examples of them, and we can predict really quite accurately how theyâ(TM)ll perform at this point. We know that there power density can be described as
(Beta_N ^ 2 R B^4) / q_* ^ 2
Beta_N and q_* are design features of the geometry etc of the tokamak, we know whatâ(TM)s achievable, and have plenty of examples already.
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Early 2040s means it's right on schedule. Only 20 years away, just like it's been for the last 70 years.
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Early 2040s means it's right on schedule. Only 20 years away, just like it's been for the last 70 years.
Yah. My concerns are that we are being fed an extraordinary lie about Fusion power, the idea that we've already achieved Q+
Sure, as long as we don't allow for the incredible amount of power to generate that. Qtot is the important critical number, without which this isn't going to happen. Right now, Qtot is something like .01. The Parasitic loads are immense. The tritium needed is in short supply. And unless the neutrons are special environeutrons, the radiation is impressive, and will produce waste. And
I want to have sex with fitness models (Score:3, Funny)
I plan to achieve this by the late 2030s, maybe 2040.
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I plan to achieve this by the late 2030s, maybe 2040.
You are going to need The Substance.
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If you have a few $1000, go to a country where it is legal and you can do it now. Not a great accomplishment.
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Location ? (Score:1)
Try Fukushima's fantastic waterfront ! Beautifull out there .. perfect place ..
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We have sustained nuclear fusion, the problem is it is not profitable energy wise. That is it costs more energy to start it up and keep it going than it puts out.
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Photons travel at lightspeed (Score:2)
thus is should be possible for us to travel at such speeds.
Godzilla welcomes you (Score:2)
Godzilla not have many food after Fukushima reactor blew up.