When considering a topic as complex and futuristic as nuclear fusion, at some point you have to step back and ask: Could this be a technology that changes the world within our lifetimes?
Venkat Selvamanickam, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston and the director of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute, doesn’t hesitate in response to this question. Scientists and engineers have been chipping away at research that could unlock the promise of nuclear fusion for a century now — and for the past 40 years or so, Selvamanickam has been among them.
Progress in the field of fusion energy is admittedly slow. But manufacturing advances in the past decade have made the notion of a practical fusion reactor a dream that the world could see before long.
“The companies that are actually developing [fusion reactors] want to get fusion power into the grid in about 10 years, in the 2030s,” Selvamanickam says. “The impact of this is really clean energy.”
He goes on to explain, “Fusion just uses hydrogen isotopes as fuel. You’re not using any hydrocarbons, any fossil fuels. We don’t have any nuclear waste we have to dispose of. Even compared to other clean energies, which require storage and only work when the sun is shining or wind is blowing, fusion is like a sun that’s pretty much on all the time.”
Selvamanickam and his colleagues at UH and around the world are about to take another step closer to that goal. This past fall, he learned that a bid he led for an $8 million federal grant to fund fusion research at UH was successful. Selvamanickam and his collaborators will share in a $134 million Department of Energy grant going to 23 institutions to advance the science of fusion reactors — a pursuit with the potential to shape the future as broadly as nuclear fission shaped the 20th century.
Recognized for Transformative Breakthroughs
Professor Venkat Selvamanickam was named to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering’s Class of 2026, joining 130 U.S. and 28 international members. With his election, he becomes the 29th NAE member from the University of Houston. The honor represents one of the most distinguished recognitions an engineer can receive globally.
Learn more about how Professor Selvamanickam’s groundbreaking work contributed to this accomplishment.
As the lead of the Applied Superconductivity Hub at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, Selvamanickam’s area of pursuit will be superconducting magnets, a component of fusion reactors.
He and his partners will pursue a four-year project within an initiative the government calls the FIRE (Fusion Innovation Research Engine) Collaboratives, which are set up to conduct basic science to further the larger aim of making fusion power viable. Selvamanickam, his team at UH and their partner institutions will seek to better understand the breakdown of superconducting magnets in fusion reactors to discover ways to make them more resilient.
The study of this essential component of fusion reactors furthers UH’s bona fides as The Energy University and bolsters an area of discovery that could nudge the world toward safer, cheaper, cleaner ways of producing electricity than burning fossil fuels. UH is the lone institution in the state of Texas to share in the Department of Energy grant.
After nearly four decades of studying the high-temperature semiconductive materials that hold so much promise for fusion, Selvamanickam still finds them awe-inspiring.
“Frankly, it’s still a magical phenomenon to me,” Selvamanickam says. “Superconductivity itself is similar to perpetual motion — essentially something that can keep spinning without any decay.”
Star Power
The potential of fusion goes far beyond that of fission, the more common nuclear reaction. In the roughly 80 years since Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project split the atom, the world’s governments have dropped two nuclear weapons on cities and tested another 2,000 on land, at sea and in the atmosphere. Today, 440 nuclear power plants are operating in 31 countries, providing about 10% of the world’s (and about 20% of the United States’) power supply.
Each of those fission bombs and power plants rely on the same essential physical phenomenon: slamming a subatomic particle into an unstable atom to break it apart and set off a chain reaction of atom-splitting that releases extraordinary amounts of energy.
While bombs disperse that energy all at once, power plants control nuclear reactions to heat water and create steam that spins turbines, generating electricity. Modern reactors are safe and release no carbon in the process of manufacturing electricity.
Yet those fission reactors carry drawbacks. They produce radioactive waste byproducts that remain dangerous for thousands of years. And because the underlying science can be applied to bomb-building, countries that have the technology often guard it closely.
Fusion is a fundamentally different reaction. Rather than shattering atoms in a cascading domino effect, fusion pushes atoms together, fusing their nuclei — specifically, hydrogen isotopes called deuterium and tritium. The process requires tremendous energy to accomplish, but once it’s done, it also releases tremendous energy.
The fusion reactor of the future could be much smaller than the fission plants of today. (A compact fusion reactor might be about the length of a bus.) Once they’re capable of producing more energy than they require to run, they promise cheap, abundant, clean electricity. In fact, nearly all the chemical energy in the world derives from a fusion reaction: Stars, including our sun, release energy via fusion.
But creating the sun-like conditions to smash atoms together requires preposterously hot temperatures — on the order of 300 million degrees Fahrenheit — amid a superheated gas-plasma that exists for the tiniest of moments and has to be housed inside a most extraordinary container.
“Pretty much there’s no material that’s going to withstand that heat,” Selvamanickam says. Keeping the heated plasma away from the container walls is where his research comes into play.
Understanding Superconductivity
Scientists have been studying fusion for a century, chipping away at the many challenges inherent in creating and harnessing a pocket-sized sun. In 1987, when Selvamanickam was a young doctoral student at UH, a professor named Paul C.W. Chu and other researchers first demonstrated the existence of high-temperature superconductors. (Chu still works at UH — as a physics professor, the T. L. L. Temple Chair of Science and the founding director and chief scientist of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH.)
In the realm of conductivity, “high-temperature” is relative. Previously known superconducting materials — materials capable of holding an electrical charge indefinitely, without resistance and without dissipating energy, while also expelling magnetic fields — needed to be near absolute zero to display the properties of superconductivity.
The 1987 discovery of materials that display superconductive properties at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (about minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit) made possible a range of new superconductor uses: in levitating high-speed trains, in MRI machines, in digital circuits, in power-transmission cables — and in magnets capable of corralling the sun-hot plasma of fusion reactors.
For years, researchers have keyed on a signature trait of superconductive materials. At sufficiently cold temperatures, electrons in these materials pair off in a peculiar, synchronized fashion. It’s a phenomenon that has long captured Selvamanickam’s imagination.
He compares the mechanism to dancers who pair off in a ballroom. No matter how crowded the dance floor appears, the couples remain locked into one another, never bumping into other dancers and never leaving each other’s gaze.
Selvamanickam says the materials exhibit a remarkable behavior within their atomic structure. Pairs of electrons move around without any interference — even at relatively higher temperatures, when the atoms are warm enough to vibrate.
“The electrons are not really right next to each other,” he says. “They could be pretty far apart, but they can feel each other and they can move together through the material without scattering.”
This novel state gives these porcelain-like materials extraordinary qualities. When conducting electricity, they don’t lose energy. And when used to build magnets, they support much stronger magnetic fields. It’s those stronger magnetic fields that offer the potential for more compact, cheaper-to-build fusion reactors.
But a significant byproduct of fusion reactions is neutrons, a chargeless subatomic particle that can degrade the magnets. The effects that neutron radiation have on high-temperature superconductors aren’t well understood, Selvamanickam says. After years of use, that radiation could shorten the lifespan of these powerful magnets — and limit the life of the reactor itself.
Building A Fusion Force
Selvamanickam’s project seeks to learn how neutron radiation degrades superconducting magnets. Furthermore, it asks what modifications to superconductive tape-like wire in the magnets could make them more resilient. Pursuing answers to those questions will require key capacities from several different partner institutions.
UH, the main institution on the project, is the rare nonindustrial entity with the capacity to manufacture these superconductive wires, Selvamanickam says, allowing him to build the wires using different materials with different properties.
Labs at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the TU Wien and Italy’s ENEA will each hit those wires with radiation at different energy levels and study those effects on the wires. The University of California at Irvine and Politecnico di Torino, Italy, will provide simulation modeling of radiation damage.
“One thing we realized: Because this problem is so big, there’s no one institution or even two institutions that could attack it,” Selvamanickam says. In his view, fusion companies understand that the wire needs further research, but they’re focused on building fusion reactors with existing materials. Meanwhile, the tape wire manufacturing companies are still trying to build up their manufacturing capacity rather than researching more suitable materials.
The gap is one that UH and Selvamanickam are in a prime position to fill.
“Everybody realizes this is an important problem, and the expertise is so spread out,” Selvamanickam says. “But somebody has to put together this team, and that’s what we did.”
It’s a team that could unravel a mystery that could change how we create and harvest energy forever.