British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close

sh00z writes: "The article quotes a leading scientist saying that Fusion power is 'within reach' in the next decade, with commercial plants to follow within another 10 or so years. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone at Texas A&M. They might just jump the starting gun again."

Comments

ten years == we don't really know

[byoung]

I think that fusion research is great and all, and I do think that it has potential. But I'm tired of hearing scientists say, "we're only a decade away!"

Note to future readers of ambitious scientists: ten years means, "we don't really have any idea where we are, but we're getting really close!"

I guess that I kind of feel for them (the scientists), since the public is really unwilling to fund "blue sky" research, but to keep prognosticating like this is irresponsible. Predicting timelines is best left to engineers.

Re:ten years == we don't really know

[MrBlack]

Predicting timelines is best left to engineers

Just not software engineers! ;^)

Re:ten years == we don't really know

[dragons_flight]

I recently earned a BS in physics and am now taking a year off before going to grad school (deferred admission to Berkeley). Fusion research is not my specialty, but I do know people that work in this area, and I think I can offer some insight into the issue.

Let me start by saying that cold fusion != fusion research. Cold fusion as popularly described has been debunked. The researchers in question were good people who were mistaken about what they observed, unfortunately when they were given proof of their mistake they chose to disappear from the public eye rather than admit their mistake. No low temperature fusion has ever been verified, though occasionally you will see new proposals for how it might be possible.

Now the real stuff. This means high temperature, high pressures, and almost exclusively isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium). There are three successful ways that man has produced fusion: Hydrogen bombs which are heated by one or more fission bombs, confined plasma (ie. tokomaks), and pulsed laser pellet experiments.

H-bombs are pretty useless because there is no way to make a small controllable explosion. All you can ever get is really big ones that would be impractical as a power source.

Pulsed laser experiments experiments involve using arrays of uber lasers to heat and compress solid hydrogen pellets so fast that they reach the point of fusion before the gas can dissipate. People in the physics community generally see this tech as a dead end because the technical requirements seem to scale exponentially with linear increases in power output. There is still research being done, but the power consumption of the lasers is orders of magnitude more than what little energy the fusion generates right now, so it's unlikely to see this being practical in the next half century.

Tokomaks are the standard in confined plasma fusion, though there are a couple alternatives that have some physicists excited. Tokomaks work; they just don't work very well. Right now we have machines that about break even, ie. they generate enough energy to run themselves. Given how much energy is involved just running the machine, if you can get another factor of 10 out of the best machines of today, you'd have enough for a useful small-medium scale power plant.

Confined plasma fusion is alluring for a number of reasons. The source hydrogen is easy to obtain or make (tritium is often created in fission reactors by exposing deuterium to nuetrons). The radiation is very safe compared to fission reactions. In both fission and fusion the components of the reactor itself will pick up some radioactivity, but the real concern in fission is all the spent fuel. You can't keep it where it is because it's no good as a fuel source and you don't want to dump it anywhere else either. In fusion reactors, the spent fuel is typically less rather than more dangerous when compared to the fuel itself, and contains no mid-range decay lifetime isotopes of the type which are most troublesome in fission reactors. Lastly, confined plasma can't have a "melt down", if the plasma gets too hot or electricity is turned off, the fusion reaction stops itself.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not just output that's a problem, the things are very large and complicated. I remember a story I heard about a group who spent 2 months taking apart, fixing, and putting their machine back together again, despite knowing at the start what piece had broken. If it's going to be profitable you need technology that is stable, long-term and easily repairable. Right now, fusion is none of these. Part of the drive for smaller machines is that they should be easier to maintain and less prone to fail. The trade off is that smaller machines need tighter confinement than their large cousins and thus are harder to engineer.

Two decades is somewhat optimistic for commercial appliations, but the state of technology is such that the next generation machines by the end of the decade should be a good 20% or so above break even (not wide scale useful but something to notice). If we can keep progressing at the current rate (and there is enough inventiveness and creativity in the field to suggest that's possible) then I would think prototypes for small power plant type models might be ready by 2040 or so.

Of course then again I'm a physicist and we have a horrible track record in predicting the rise of fusion technology.

Re:ten years == we don't really know

[leucadiadude]

"Contrary to popular belief, it's not just output that's a problem, the things are very large and complicated. I remember a story I heard about a group who spent 2 months taking apart, fixing, and putting their machine back together again, despite knowing at the start what piece had broken. If it's going to be profitable you need technology that is stable, long-term and easily repairable."

Well, I work at a nuclear power plant and sometimes it can take two weeks to dissassemble the systems enough to "get at" the faulty part. And any well designed power plant (of any energy source) well have sufficient monitoring and analysis systems to allow you to diagnose an impending failure and to know the exact (or very close) cause of the problem before you begin the expensive process of shutdown and dissassembly. So two weeks wouldn't be out of line with current large baseloaded power plants. It's not good by any means, but not excessive compared to whats out there right now.

Re:ten years == we don't really know

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, still there are alteratives in fusion research that have been ignored since virtually all grant money goes into Tokomaks (university funded) and Inertial Confinement(DOD funded)

Each camp is entrenched and there is little money left over for persuing alterative machine designs. For one thing, plasma-shock approaches have been totally ignored.

Million degree plasmas are terribly unstable for a whole assortment of reasons (magnetic, viscous, chemical, thermal, etc.) and yet the goal of Tokamaks is to run the plamsa hot continuously, all kinds of bandaids have been applied to 'smooth' out the plasma, and it STILL doesn't work. Look at Tokamak articles from the 70's and they will say the same thing we read now: "Fusion is expected to viable in a decade. We have learned so much about plasmas that we are sure to succeed... "

Maybe it will be possible eventually, but I just don't see it as a reliable method. (I wouldn't bet on this horse!) Predictions of success in a decade are intended to secure another 5 years of funding for this pipe dream. Unfortunately the hardware and computing power required for these machines soak up most of the fusion research money.

Inertial confinement is used to get around nuclear test-ban treaties. It is not intended to be a renewable energy source.

Another approach is the Farnsworth fusor. A table-top fusion machine that works by electron bombardment. VERY little research money has done to this to try to figure out better designs for this inovative approach. (less than a hundred people are involved with Farnsworth Reactors, compared to 1000's on tokamaks:

http://www.richmond.infi.net/~rhull/highenergy00 2. htm

Perhaps a combination of a Farnsworth electron bombardment with a shocked plasma core would work? (I don't have a clue) All I know is that such ideas won't see the light of day.

Definition of "Real Soon"

[PD]

For years, fusion has been 50 years away. To find out what date most people think fusion will become practical, all you need to do is add 50 to the current year. That means that fusion will be practical in 2051.

Of course in 2051, fusion will still be 50 years away.

Amazingly, by calculating the density and power requirements of the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel, we get the same number. By Moore's law of fusion, the heat and energy available to start a fusion reaction in a typical Intel processor doubles each year. By a simple formula, you can determine that in the year 2051 Intel CPU's will be so hot they can fuse hydrogen! This amazing calculation through two independent means confirms the majority opinion: fusion is still 50 years off.

I'm sure there's somebody out there trying to imagine a Beowulf cluser of fusion processors.

Re:Definition of "Real Soon"

[Goonie]

Instead, we're wasting billions on fusion research welfare for a few academics who spend entire careers doing it, and retire handsomely with no useful results!

Compared to the total amount of money governments around the world piss away on totally useless pork-barrels, the amount of money spent on fusion research is trivial, and the payoffs potentially huge.

Re:Definition of "Real Soon"

[DarkMan]

Fusion is not a funding machine for science. Did you know that most of the fusion reactors output more energy than it takes to initiate + run? The only problem they're working on is stability. I'm sure your well aware of a time when computers worked, just were not very reliable, only of use to a few people, and very expensive.

I'm surprised that you think that research money funds an extravagant lifestyle for academics. As someone who is in reasearch, I'd like to point out that I've had job offers in industry, paying double what I currently get. My friends in accounting and managment couldn't belive how little I was offered, never mind how little I get at the moment. If you want to look how the money is spent, don't claim it goes to all to the academics.

Oh, and how much interest do you think there is in sodium ion desnsity in the upper atmosphere? Or electron interaction with air? Pretty useless, right?

Excpet that the first led to radar, and the second was the work the was pivotal in electron microscopes.

summary of article

[pussycat]

- a cool picture of a pink torus of plasma

- commercial fusion may be possible in "a few decades"

- that is all

Fusion within a realistic timeframe

[hillct]

These seem like reasonable goals. Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago? I wonder if the scientists in this article took their circumstances into consideration when setting out the timeframe in the article... The thing was remarkably light on details...

Pollution-free?

[MadDog Bob-2]

IIRC, these folks are all using a tritium-deuterium reaction, which yields helium and a neutron. For one thing, it's a much easier reaction than, for instance, deuterium-deuterium, and, for another, the neutrons give you a way to extract the energy and manufacture tritium. Of course, the other thing the neutrons do is irradiate the structure of the reactor, which ends up leaving you with all sort of fun radioisotopes to dispose of later.

Of course, that probably pales by comparison to the amount of waste generated while refining fissile fuels, and you completely avoid the possibility of a meltdown, but still, I might not go so far as to claim it's 'pollution free.'

Re:Pollution-free?

[armb]

Clocks used to use luminous paint containing radium. The numbers were painted by hand. The workers used to lick the paintbrushes to keep a fine point. http://www.semcosh.org/radium.htm

The tritium in modern watches is much safer
http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/phb/hprot/rsu/pubs/tri ti um.html
Typical annual dose from wearing a plastic watch containing tritium - 4 microsieverts
Average annual dose from natural background radiation - 2100 microsieverts

Efficiency vs. Sustainability

[GospelHead821]

What needs to be understood is that they've managed to use a fusion generator to generate electricity. However, they've never managed to create electricity in a useful fashion.

As it stands, they can create an efficient reactor that is not self-sustaining or a self-sustaining reactor that is not efficient. In other words, the former uses very little outside power, but isn't stable and ceases to function. The latter is more stable, but uses more fuel than conventional means.

Fusion power is not a pipe dream. Just as conventional power reactors have been improved over time to produce electricity more efficiently, so will fusion reactors eventually be improved to the point where they're useful. Will it be in the next decade? It may well be, but regardless of when it will happen, it will happen.

Fusion != Cold Fusion

[MikeyLikesIt!]

Fusion and Cold Fusion ARE NOT THE SAME THING!

I mean, really... What more can I say?

Re:Fusion != Cold Fusion

[jitenpai]

Well.... cold fusion is already commercially available

There are other ways to get fusion

[Rhinobird]

Cold fusion may or may not work, however there is more than magentic containment. Try electrostatic. You could build a small (very ineffcient) fusion reator in you garage. They do away with using 'hot' plamsa and just go for ionized hydrogen being accelerated towards the middle of the reator. It works like a champ. And depending on the design of the reactor you can directly convert the energy released by the fusion reactions to (high voltage) DC (electricity).

More info at fusor.net

Call me a cynic...

[marm]

...but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding. It seems that the main reason these stories appear is to drum up some public support for continued funding (as with all sorts of long-term science research that's mostly funded by public money).

It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society. This is one area where I have resigned myself to the fact that it's not worth trying to change the system - it's just not going to happen. At least a reasonable level of public funding is available for such research, even if it's never quite enough.

Anyway, fair play to the researchers, they've got their media coverage, their funding is assured for a little longer.

I hope that the great dream of widely-used fusion power is something I will see within my lifetime. Perhaps people in future centuries will then look back on our lifetimes and know that not everything that we did harmed ourselves, our rights and our planet.

Re:Call me a cynic...

[sigwinch]

Call me a cynic but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding.

Give me a break. Designing fusion reactors is a business just like any other: turn off the PR and the venture dies. It's just like tampons and beer, you have to keep it in view or people will forget about it. The only way it could be any different is to have total centralized economic control, which has historically proven inferior.

It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society.

Give me a break! Developing and productizing commercial fusion reactors takes an *enormous* amount of resources, comparable to the development of modern semiconductors. At the same time, petrofuels are so cheap that the incentive to perfect fusion is negative for even the largest corporations. The private money that's going into fusion right now is pretty much a gift, since there is no expectation of meaningful return on investment. Thus much of the effort is carried out by international programs and academic researchers.

Re:Call me a cynic...

[warmcat]

Tampons and Beer... that'll need a lot of marketing to overtake Gin and Tonic.

Re:Call me a cynic...

[marm]

Designing fusion reactors is a business just like any other: turn off the PR and the venture dies.

...which is precisely my point. We live in a world that has allowed PR to become the be-all and end-all of everything. If you don't look like a god, if you're not perfect at explaining things in terms understandable by the average Joe, if you do not make yourself heard forcefully, then people just ignore you and your ideas. I find that sad, because it means that all sorts of really interesting thoughts and ideas just get ignored, simply because the people who have come up with them aren't very good at PR.

This tendency to ignore people who aren't good at PR is, I think, just instinctive. However, we are sentient beings (most of us, anyway ;) and that means we have control over our instincts, at least to a certain extent. The fact that people seem so completely blinded by PR in modern society indicates to me that we are not teaching people to be critical of their instincts. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this that our instinctive reactions to things are often not the optimal course of action.

As I said in my original comment, I have resigned myself to not being able to change this, because society has developed another less-than-wonderful trait: people do not like to think for themselves. Again, this is probably instinctive, but we seem to do less to discourage it now than we ever have done in the past. If I could change it, I would, but it seems that this is a feedback loop that we are destined to stay stuck in. The less people want to think for themselves, the harder it is to make people think that they want to think for themselves.

Perhaps this is the kind of intellectual decadence that led to the fall of the Roman Empire and the entry of Europe into the Dark Ages, only writ on a global scale.

The only way it could be any different is to have total centralized economic control, which has historically proven inferior.

Nonsense. Do you only see black and white? Are there always right answers and wrong answers? Or are there shades inbetween?

It is perfectly possible to publicly-fund science in a free-market economy without forcing scientists to resort to PR shenanigans such as this. All it takes is a little vision and willpower amongst the bodies providing the funding. Of course the public should know what the scientists are up to and what their taxes are paying for, but sensationalism and claims without substance help no-one in the long run.

I should point out that your trolling here becomes painfully obvious, as you have used an unrelated argument (free-market vs command economies) to attempt to justify your first position (the requirement for good PR in modern society). I believe that this what's commonly known as a strawman argument.

The rest of your comment I don't disagree with. You're not actually disagreeing with anything I have said. There is indeed little commercial incentive to invest in fusion research, because there is no expectation of return on investment within a reasonable timeframe, and yes, publicly-funded research takes up the slack. But this is a good thing, and precisely why we need publicly-funded science in the first place: to fund things that may be vitally important in the future, but which corporate R&D departments won't touch with a bargepole. Not to mention areas of research where keeping the science public makes sure of certain ethical standards, or where the science is of vital interest to the public.

Re:what in the hell

[jspaleta]

anybody got any info on what tech problems?

MAST is a spherical torus....and ST's are suppose to solve a few issues that tokamaks (doughnuts) where found to have. First Tokamaks reuire a very large magnetic field for containment. Producing the magnetic field is probably the biggest overall cost money and energy-wise. An ST, like MAST or NSTX (www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html) or the machine I'm chained to NSTX's little brother CDX (w3.pppl.gov/~cdx) use proportionately less external field that a tokamak would need for the same plasma current. For fusion reactor design that's a big advantage for the ST.

The ST also hopes to solve a real plasma physics issue...MHD instabilities. Making cold plasmas isn't all to difficult. Once you start pumping energy into the plasma you get very exotic plasma wave physics that can tear the plasma apart. You can design some of the instabilities away, if your design is clever enough....is the ST a clever enough desgin? I don't know. but ST's do allow access to a new regime of labortory plasmas

There are a lot of unresolved issues in magnetic confinement fusion. The ST machines are definitely worth exploring but it's not clear that a working fusion reactor will be based on anything like MAST.

-jef
im too tired to write anything longer

No Fun At All

[TripleP]

Damn Cold Fusion! I was starting to really enjoy the rolling blackouts, besides the super long coffee breaks, I got to grope the hot intern in the copy room when the lights went out.

Hmmm...

[kidtexas]

Fusion is a ways off. I am currently doing fusion research at PPPL. Everyone here (and everywhere) really wants it to happen, and we realize that brute force projects are not the way to go. While it is technically feasible to build a working fusion plant (ITER), the cost would be so astronomical that it would never be used for its intended purpose. Sure, we would get more energy out than we put in, but it wouldn't be the most cost efficient process... The current thrust of the US fusion program appears to me to be aimed at designing smaller, cleverly designed machines that move us towards fusion while being cost efficient. The end goal is the adoption of fusion power. But if that adoption costs more money than the energy-equivalent amount of fossil fuels, no power companies are going to adopt it.... In answer to the safety questions of fusion power, I'm pretty sure most experiments nowadays are using D-T reactions (deuterium and tritium). Tritium is pretty goddam radioactive. The byproducts of this reaction are radioactive as well. However, the half life is short enough that within 2 or 3 years (can't remember the numbers), the radioactivity of the fusion products is below that of the regular environment. Bottom line: nasty byproducts, but with 2 or 3 years of storage, safe as anything outside. None of this 20,000 year half life.... If you want to get into something really creepy (in my mind) check out the loosely disguised bomb research known as Inertial Confinement Fusion. The Nation Ignition Facility (NIF) etc. Scary.

Codeposition fusion is happening today

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people think cold fusion is complete bunk, because the field got off to a bad start, with poor early reproducibility. However, it has since been determined, mostly by the U.S. Navy, that electrolysis simultaniously co-depositing deuterium and palladium together on an ordinary cathode reliably produces a five-fold gain from input power.

Codeposition fusion might not only relieve a significant portion of our dependence on foreign oil (and we all know how important that is), but it might also be a natural way to retrofit our dangerous, dirty fission nuclear plants. Codeposition fusion produces nearly zero ionizing radiation of any kind, and no nuclear waste products.

Here are three good references:

"Calorimetry of the Pd + D Codeposition," by S. Szpak, P. Boss, and M.H. Miles, in Fusion Technology, volume 36 (Sept. 1999), pp. 234-241. search near the end of this page for the abstract ("...excellent reproducibility, high power outputs....")

"On the behavior of the cathodically polarized Pd/D system: Search for emanating radiation," by S. Szpak, P.A. Mosier-Boss, and J.J. Smith, in Physics Letters A, volume 210 (1996) pp. 382-390. (Phys Lett A is much easier to find than Fusion [Science and] Technol.)

"Calorimetry of Pd+D Codeposition in a Fleischmann-Pons Dewar Cell," by M.H. Miles, S. Szpak, P. Boss, and Martin Fleischmann (March 2001) abstract on web only

In short, codeposition fusion reliably produces a 500% power gain without fast neutrons, high-energy radiation, or radioactive waste. The peak of the energy produced is in the infrared, with x-ray production just 9% above the baseline in a lead cave, and gamma-ray production only 2% above a lead cave's background levels. There is a very high likelihood that codeposition fusion will soon be commercialized to drive electrical generation turbines, helping to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and, given sufficient electric vehicles, foreign oil. The cost of codeposition fusion electricity is likely to be less than one cent per kilowatt hour.

You may have heard that cold fusion was discredited. Early experiments used smooth, solid palladium cathodes, which did not produce reliable results. Some such smooth, solid cathodes would run for weeks without producing excess heat, and then would do so for perhaps a few days, and often would never do so again. Over 400 studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- see: the Dieter Britz bibliography [about a megabyte] -- have confirmed that the effect is certainly real, but is only reproduceable in less than one out of ten attempts. Those who have studied codeposition fusion get 99+% reproducibility, and precise control of the effect. The crucial difference is that codeposition cathodes are mossy and dendritic, instead of smooth and solid. Any kind of mossy, high surface area cathodes produce much better results than any smooth cathodes, but they were not in common use until a couple years after the poor early results had discredited the entire field.

Of the six laboratories in the U.S. publishing cold fusion research, three are in California, one is in Mountain View (First Gate Energies), and one is in Menlo Park (SRI International.) Szpak et al's lab is in San Diego. The governments of Italy, France, Russia, Japan, and China all sponsor cold fusion research in their own national laboratories. However, the budget for cold fusion here in the U.S. is very small, because the entrenched plasma fusion "big science" community (whose most optimistic estimates indicate that plasma fusion will not be viable for another thirty years -- and even then it will produce nuclear waste; perhaps more than fission does) keeps funding away from cold fusion (which does not produce nuclear waste or dangerous radiation) through continued, unfair ridicule.

Cheers,
James

Oh man

[Graymalkin]

I wonder if this is a Boron-Hydrogen CBF reactor they are talking about. These sorts of reactors have two plasma streams guises by magnetic fields. The two plasma beams converge at high energy and Hydrogen whams into Boron fusing but causing the new Boron-12 radioisotope decays in about .0202 seconds down into three alpha particles with very high velocities which are guides through an energy converter (a magnetic coil) which generates electricity with a pretty high efficiency. You also end up with clean byproducts rather than Tritium-Deuterium fusion (heavy water fusion) I keep seeing pushed by researchers and oddly enough the DOE. I don't get how the DOE could keep a straight face whilst pushing the cleanliness of fusion power talking about heavy water plants. Tritium product isn't exactly cheap or easy considering you get it from sticking lithium into a laser implosion chamber because tritium is pretty damn rare naturally. Shit the only two facilities they've got working on the waste products are MIT and INEL (Idaho National Energy Laboratory) which is a fraction of the effort they're putting into everything else. This is what got us into the mess of nuclear waste disposal in the first place.
BTW, heavy water fusion (the fusion of H-2 and H-3) yields an alpha particle and a free neutron. Both of these byproducts are moving really fast after the reaction. The helium isn't much of a problem considering it has a charge and can be confinsed and controlled by magnetic fields. The neutrons however have no charge and thus fly in whatever direction they were originally headed. Thus heavy water reactors need lots of shielding and cooling systems due to the thermal pollution of the energetic neutrons. This adds up to alot of wasted energy in the form of heat (about two thirds of the total energy from the reaction). You can run the coolant through exchangers to get some energy back out of it but you're left with the same radiactive problems fission reactors have to deal with. Namely contamination. CBF's using Boron-Hydrogen or Helium3-Deuterium don't need this sort of extra bulk and also are more efficient since alot of their energy is being directed by the magnetic fields of the reactor and harnessed. They can thus be smaller and more efficient so instead of one big reactor you could have a handful of 100MW reactors distributed in a region. Oh yeah, for nuclear nuts I didn't go into He-3/H-2 fusion because He-3 is so fucking rare on Earth it would literally cost you billions of dollars to collect even a little bit for industrial use. Until we can efficnetly mine the Moon and asteroids and eventually the outer gas giants (Uranus and Neptune first and Jupiter and Saturn when we can have an efficient way of escaping their gravity) we're not going to be using He-3 for industrial purposes.

Fusion is close...

[affenmann]

...it's about 149 597 870 kilometers away.

Fusion Safety

[billstewart]

Fusion reactors are only safe if you can provide adequate shielding and keep them far enough away from people.

93 million miles and an ozone layer seems about right.

As a A&M Physics grad,

[workly]

let me just make sure that everyone knows
that it was the chemistry department.

Yes, the guys with the grant
for turning lead into gold.

You think I'm kidding.