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US Joins ITER Tokamak Fusion Project
WannabePhysicist writes "Energy secretary Spencer Abraham
announced at the Princeton Plasma Fusion
Laboratory
that the U.S. will join ITER
, the international plasma fusion reactor effort. They're currently
planning a tokamak (doughnut) design, and have some pretty optimistic energy
production predictions for 2014. As many of us in science know, estimated
times are usually off by a factor of two, and then sometimes and order of
magnitude -- but hopefully they'll get it to work.
Many people push this as the cleanest form of energy, but fusion reactors
will most likely contain deuterium, tritium, and lithium (tritium's not exactly
water) The deuterium and tritium fuse, giving off an alpha (4He nucleus),
a neutron, and some energy. This energy causes more reactions (the controlled
fusion part). The neutrons hit a 6Li blanket (surrounding the chamber)
which then produces more tritium for burning."
At this point, there are very few major research tokamaks out there. In the US, there is only really one that is flexible enough to do a wide range of experiments on (at GA).
This isn't going to necessarily lead directly to a commercial design, it's still a research reactor, but there are a LOT of big questions in fusion that can be answered by this device, and it would be irresponsible of the US to not be a part of it (that is, as long as we want to at least look like we're trying to find clean energy). At the rate different things are going, fusion might not be the energy source of the future, but you never know, it's always worth trying. It's only through programs like this that we'll get there.
When the US first left the project it was because it was billed as a demo commercial reactor, which just wouldn't have worked. It might be able to get more energy out than you put in, but the cost of construction and upkeep is still too high for such large reactors. A major part of fusion research now is making the reactors more efficient, require less repair and have a smaller size. Oddly enough, we can't do that unless we build a larger research reactor.