The United States and Japan announced this Wednesday (10) a partnership to accelerate the development and commercialization of nuclear fusion.
With this, the partnership was revealed with Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, in Washington for a summit with North American President, Joe Biden.
US Deputy Secretary of Energy, David Turk, and Minister of Education, Sports, Science and Technology, Masahito Moriyama, met in Washington on Tuesday (9) to discuss the merger.
The partnership will focus on the scientific and technical challenges of delivering commercial fusion and expand cooperation between universities, national laboratories and private companies in the US and Japan, the US Department of Energy said.
Scientists, governments and companies have been trying for decades to use 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 of atoms, commercial fusion plants, if they are ever built, would produce little long-lived radioactive waste.
