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
It is a clear winter day in Cadarache, in southern France. The dry mistral wind from Africa has blown away the morning’s lingering clouds and the afternoon sun has brought a glow to the gold and red leaves of the valley’s trees. In the nearby pine forest, wild boar, mouflon sheep and deer are grazing. When it comes to rustic tranquillity, this is hard to beat.
But dramatic changes are heading for this tranquil corner of Provence. Fleets of cranes, dump trucks, earth-moving equipment and concrete mixers are about to turn it into a massive construction site. This rural backwater is to become home to one of the world’s most important scientific projects: ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – a machine designed to recreate the energy that powers the stars.
A total of €10 billion (about A$16.7 billion) has been earmarked for the construction and initial operation of ITER, a giant fusion reactor. It will generate a cloud of super-hot plasma in which isotopes of hydrogen will fuse to form helium, releasing vast amounts of energy.
If successful, the project will realise a dream that has preoccupied physicists for many decades: the harnessing of the power that drives the Sun. The potential is, to say the least, immense.
Fusion plants could one day generate billions of watts of power, entirely replacing 19th century coal and 20th century gas, oil and nuclear fission, and all without producing any carbon dioxide or long-lived radioactive waste. Advocates of fusion imagine a future where power is cheaper, cleaner and more plentiful than ever before. It’s the ultimate power panacea for a warming world.
And it is at Cadarache that fusion power’s supporters will learn whether the idea is a pipe dream or a real contender for the future. If successful, it could lead to the development, by around 2035, of huge electric generators powered by fusion. If it fails, humanity may be faced with the reality that there are few quick fixes to the problems of energy generation in an overheating world.
In preparation for the forthcoming construction work, a 300-strong team has taken up residence in a cluster of pre-fabricated huts at the site, 35 km from Aix-en-Provence. These scientists, engineers and administrators have been recruited from the project’s backers: the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the USA. Half the population of the world is represented by the staff of ITER, and although its official language is English, it is spoken here in all sorts of accents and inflections. There is a real United Nations feel to the place.
The director general, Kaname Ikeda, is Japanese, while his deputy, and head of construction, Norbert Holtkamp, is a German who worked for several years at America’s Oak Ridge particle physics laboratory. ‘‘Working with a truly international staff does present problems: you have to be very sure that we are all singing from the same song sheet and that nothing is taken for granted,” admits Holtkamp. “On the other hand, it does mean we will be sharing knowledge in an unprecedented way.”
Sometime early in 2008 the ITER team is expected to begin their construction work in earnest. The first trees and earth will be levelled at the 70-hectare site in readiness for the construction of the vast concrete platforms on which the great device will rest. Slowly, over the coming decade, ITER will take shape here – the final outcome of a half century-old dream that has seen fusion reactors being built across the world with increasing size and ambition.
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.