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DUBAI:

Special US climate envoy John Kerry on Tuesday launched an international pledge to boost nuclear fusion, saying the emission-free technology could become a vital tool in the fight against climate change.

Kerry said the plan includes 35 nations and will focus on research and development, supply chain issues and regulations and security.

“Fusion has the potential to revolutionize our world,” Kerry said at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.

Fusion, which powers the sun and other stars, can be reproduced on Earth with heat and pressure using lasers or magnets to crush two light atoms into a denser one, releasing large amounts of energy.

The nascent technology could have a significant advantage over today’s nuclear fission plants, producing vast amounts of unlimited energy without long-lived radioactive waste.

Reading: US commits $3bn to Green Climate Fund at COP28 sources

But there are major obstacles to producing electricity from fusion. First, scientists have so far only achieved scattered cases where fusion experiments produce more energy than is required to carry them out.

There are also regulatory, construction and spatial barriers to creating new fleets of power plants to replace parts of existing energy systems.

Britain and the United States signed a fusion cooperation agreement on November 8. Other countries pursuing fusion include Australia, China, Germany and Japan.

In August, scientists using laser beams at a US national laboratory in California repeated a breakthrough fusion breakthrough called ignition where for a moment the amount of energy coming from the fusion reaction exceeded that concentrated on the target.

The scientists estimated, however, that the net energy output of this experiment was only about 0.5% of the energy used to fire the lasers.

Of the two main types of fusion, one uses a laser to focus energy on a gold pellet containing hydrogen.

The other uses powerful magnets to trap plasma or hydrogen gas heated to about 100 million degrees Fahrenheit (55 million degrees Celsius).