Idaho National Lab studies fusion safety, tritium supply chain

Masashi Shimada has been researching nuclear fusion since 2000, when he joined the graduate program at University of California San Diego. He’s currently the lead scientist at the Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) facility in Idaho National Laboratory, one of the federal government’s premier scientific research laboratories.

The field has changed a lot.

Early on in his career, fusion was often the butt of jokes, if it was discussed at all. “Fusion is the energy of future and always will be” was the crack Shimada heard all the time.

But that’s changing. Dozens of start-ups have raised almost $4 billion in private funding, according to the Fusion Industry Association, an industry trade group.

Investors and Secretary of the Department of Energy Jennifer Granholm have called fusion energy the “holy grail” of clean energy, with the potential to provide nearly limitless energy without releasing any greenhouse gasses and without the same kind of long-lasting radioactive waste that nuclear fission has.

There’s a whole bumper crop of new, young scientists working in fusion, and they’re inspired.

“If you talk to young people, they believe in fusion. They are going to make it. They have a very positive, optimistic mindset,” Shimada said.

For his part, Shimada and his team are doing research now into the management of tritium, a popular fuel that many fusion start-ups are pursuing, in hopes of setting up the U.S. for a bold new fusion industry.

“As part of the government’s new ‘bold vision’ for fusion commercialization, tritium handling and production will be a key part of their scientific research,” Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC.

Fusion is a nuclear reaction when two lighter atomic nuclei are pushed together to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing “massive amounts of energy.” It’s how the sun is powered. But controlling fusion reactions on Earth is a complicated and delicate process.

In many cases, the fuels for a fusion reaction are deuterium and tritium, which are both forms of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.

Deuterium is very common and can be found in sea water. If fusion is achieved at scale on Earth, one gallon of sea water would have enough deuterium to make as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline, according to the Department of Energy.

Tritium, however, is not common on Earth and has to be produced. Shimada and his team of researchers at the Idaho National Lab have a small tritium lab 55 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho, where they study how to produce the isotope.

“Since tritium is not available in nature, we have to create it,” Shimada told CNBC.

Currently, most of the tritium the United…