Sun-in-a-box: The shiny heat-resistant beryllium-coated interior of the JET (Joint European Torus) fusion reactor in Oxfordshire, England. Temperatures within the plasma can reach up to 100 million ºC - hotter than the core of the Sun.
Credit: JET/EFDA
THE SOMEWHAT GRANDIOSE idea of building fusion power plants is not without its critics of course. As one French scientist remarked: “They say that they will put the Sun in a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to build the box.”
ITER’s engineers and scientists would beg to disagree. They are very confident that they know precisely how to build that box and are going to do so right here in Cadarache. Not everyone is convinced, however. Some query the costs involved and the practicality of the project. Others have complained that ITER is risky. Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace dismisses the reactor as “a dangerous toy, which will never deliver any useful energy”. Instead, the world should invest in other renewable forms of energy generation, he argues.
And there are other criticisms. Journalists who have been following the fusion saga for decades (myself included) have noted that, when pressed about the prospects of building commercially viable reactors, supporters of the idea have made the constant, unchanging claim that “fusion power is only 30 years away”. They were making that promise 30 years ago and they are still making it today, a point I raised with Llewellyn-Smith, who – as the newly appointed chairman of ITER’s ruling council – has an unrivalled knowledge of fusion research.
Lean, with a distinctive mop of a white hair, and crisply dressed in a white shirt and dark blue tie, Llewellyn-Smith comes across as an effortlessly effective spokesman for the cause of fusion power. So why, I asked him, have scientists been promising for so long to deliver fusion power, yet it still remains locked in an experimental phase? Money – not surprisingly – has been the main stumbling block, he replies.
“The fundamental problem with fusion is that you cannot demonstrate it on a small scale. If I wanted to convince you of the worth of steam power I could boil a kettle full of water, and we could have a little steam-power plant to experiment with. But I cannot do that with fusion power. The only way to show its potential is to build a full-size plant – because it is only when you reach a certain size that a fusion reactor starts to produce more power than it consumes.”
In other words, you have to start at a fairly ambitious level, which costs billions. Llewellyn-Smith’s own machine, JET, required backing from the whole European Union. Its far larger successor, ITER, is funded by most of the developed world and was only given the go-ahead because the problem of climate change – and the need to secure carbon-free energy sources – was becoming so urgent.
And other approaches to fusion?
Fascinating article and it's nice to renew the feeling of optimism that has characterized the fusion program for so long. I do hope it works if for no other reason than to act as a step towards what will ultimately be the most widespread source of non-solar derived energy on the planet, doing for energy what the micro-processing and the silicon chip did for computational memory; making it, at long last, almost too cheap to meter.
I would have appreciated hearing a little bit about the burgeoning research in Inertial Electrodynamic Confinement (IEC) fusion which is being carried out now at many locations both academic and private research. The issues of containment of hot plasma seem to be bringing into focus the meaning of "hot" when describing velocities that approach the speed of light, which some thin IEC fusion may be effective at addressing whereas the large Tokomaks will not.
One researcher speculated that the reason the old USSR researchers gave the west the key elements of their research was not to further the research but to permanently hobble the west's research in fusion which up until that time had been through the work of Philo T. Farnsworth and Robert Hisch using high speed electron guns and magnets and a still rudimentary understanding of the problems they were encountering.
Even the rosiest estimates to break even still leave a lot of progress to be made before the Tokomak can ever be made even as portable as a modern day large scale electrical generator, and will initially require a huge outlay in infrastructure to apply its output. The IEC's approach forsees smaller and more ubiquitous, and non-radioactive, processes. Worth looking up the term Polywell Fusion for those interested.
Another alternative
Take a look at another alternative approach to fusion, which might prove cheaper, cleaner, more efficient, simple and easilly reachable.
At http://www.focusfusion.org
Same thing but cleaner !
So, what happens once you have fused all the Hydrogen on the planet to Helium ? Does not seem renewable in the long term. But maybe that will be the next generations problem .....
not really a concern
Since Hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in the universe, can be produced from water, and only small amounts are needed to fuse in order to release large amounts of energy; there no risk of running out of hydrogen within the lifetime of the planet.
Society
The problem with our society is that we spend trillions on wars, financial schemes, websites, lawyers, and other crap. There's no resources left to advance science. If we spent on science half of what we spent on sports or religion or politics, we'd solved sustainable nuclear fusion a long time ago.
Hell, we do everything we can to discourage people from entering sciences and engineering. From outsourcing jobs to arresting paleontologists for discovering a T-Rex skeleton.