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The partnership was unveiled as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio
Kishida was in Washington for a summit with President Joe Biden.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk and Japan's minister
of education, sports, science and technology, Masahito Moriyama,
met in Washington on Tuesday to discuss fusion.
The partnership will focus on the scientific and technical
challenges of delivering commercial fusion and expand work
between U.S. and Japanese universities, national laboratories
and private companies, the U.S. Department of Energy said.
Scientists, governments and companies have been trying for
decades to harness fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the
sun, to provide carbon-free electricity. It can be replicated on
Earth with heat and pressure using lasers or magnets to fuse two
light atoms into a denser one, releasing large amounts of
energy.
Unlike plants that run on fission, or splitting atoms,
commercial fusion plants, if ever built, would produce little
long-lasting radioactive waste.
Last year, scientists using laser beams at a U.S. national lab
in California repeated a fusion breakthrough called ignition
where for an instant the amount of energy coming from the fusion
reaction surpassed that concentrated on the target.
Scientists estimated, however, that the net energy output of
that experiment was only about 0.5% of the energy that went in
to firing up the lasers. Even if the science is eventually
worked out, there are regulatory, construction and siting
hurdles in creating new fleets of power plants to replace parts
of existing energy systems.
Late last year, Japan set up a fusion industry forum to
commercialize the technology, with participants in engineering
and energy companies. The forum is expected to make
recommendations to Japan's government about safety and
technology standards and serve as a liaison for overseas
projects.
A fusion industry group praised the partnership. "Fusion is too
important for needless competition: like-minded countries should
work together towards the common goal," said Andrew Holland, the
head of the Fusion Industry Association based in Washington.
Last December in Dubai, then-U.S. special climate envoy John
Kerry launched an international plan involving 35 countries to
boost fusion.
Japan and the U.S. will also agree during the summit to support
sustainable aviation fuel, two sources with knowledge of the
talks between the countries said.
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in Philadelphia and Timothy
Gardner in WashingtonEditing by Franklin Paul and Matthew Lewis)
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