Promising Power? Future-Oriented Representations of Nuclear Fusion Energy Research

• In Event: Performing Socio-Technical Imaginaries - I

Abstract

For nearly seven decades, some physicists have touted nuclear fusion as the answer to many global issues: fusion promises to provide abundant, cheap, low-carbon electricity, if they can get it to happen under controlled laboratory conditions. Unfortunately, that is a very significant ‘if.’ While advocates prophesy impending success, other experts criticize the endeavor as impossible and misguided. Advocates and critics of fusion research often support their positions by creating, enacting, and mobilizing imagined futures. The government projects and private companies engaged in fusion research often, and unsurprisingly, claim that their specific technologies offer the quickest route to realize the utopic future that fusion promises (or to avoid the dystopic future that continued fossil-fuel dependence would bring about). I study the case of a technology which has existed more in various futures than in any given present, thus which has been seen as a failure. I use the case of fusion research to respond to Borup et al.’s (2006) recognition that “it has become increasingly important to develop a vocabulary and analytical perspectives with which to make sense of the promissory and future-oriented properties of innovation networks, especially given the highly contested character of expectations and futures” (p. 287). Taking up Messeri and Vertesi's (2015) concept of "sociotechnical projectories" I studied the concrete material and discursive manifestations of advocates' and critics' imagined futures—committee reports, talks, patents, peer-reviewed papers, websites, and other materials. Through iterative document analysis of such texts from both United States government-funded projects and the five most active venture-capital-funded fusion companies, I have sought to answer the question: how has fusion research persisted despite the decades of uncertainty and ostensible failure? Based on this initial research, it seems likely that the interplay of two processes is responsible for this persistence: first, comparing private fusion companies’ self-representations to literature on other failed technologies, it seems likely that fusion advocates have been able to successfully build strong networks of support of the idea that, regardless of its odds, the payoffs of achieving fusion energy would be sufficiently great to warrant support; and second, my analysis of the (scant) data on what these private companies actually sell suggests a much more complex relationship between private and public fusion energy research, the mutualistic benefits of which may support the otherwise “failing” technology.

Author

• Derek Taylor Parrott, Cornell University STS