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
Even then, there was fierce disagreement about the device, particularly over the site of its construction. The United States, Japan and South Korea wanted it to be built at Rokkasho, where Japan has a major nuclear fission facility, while Russia, China and the European Union (EU) championed the case for Provence, which has several nuclear research facilities. When a final vote was taken by ITER’s council in December 2003, the outcome was a three-to-three deadlock that required a further 18 months of negotiation, and construction delay, before the issue was resolved in favour of France.
Superficially it looked like a straightforward victory for European diplomats. However, the EU has had to pay a steep price for the privilege of having ITER in its backyard. No less than 45 per cent of its €10 billion bill will be picked up the European Union. By comparison, the other six members of the ITER club will each have to pay only nine per cent. On the other hand, industry in the EU is going to be well-placed should fusion prove to be a winner.
In any case, the decision to go ahead with ITER was an important and historic one. Two decades after Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, and U.S. president Ronald Reagan first tentatively agreed to discuss plans to build an international fusion reactor in the mid-1980s, approval for this grand vision was granted and preliminary work has now begun. “We have set up ITER as an organisation, so we can hire employees, and order equipment, and we have begun preparing the site,” says Holtkamp. “We are ready to go.”
However, I should note at this point that ITER itself will not be an electricity-producing device. It will merely demonstrate that fusion energy is a practicality. It will be up to individual nations, or groups of nations, to use the technology perfected at Cadarache to build plants fitted with turbines that can then make electricity. To do that, a primary cooling circuit – most likely one that uses water or liquid sodium – will transfer heat from the reactor wall to a secondary circuit that will pass it on to the turbines that will make electricity. It is standard technology and no one foresees problems with this part of the program.
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.