U.S. and China Join Fusion Project

Garp writes "According to the BBC News website, the U.S. has finally decided to join the international Fusion project, Iter, along with China, with the aim of building the worlds first commercially viable Fusion reactor. Fusion is one of the cleanest forms of energy conversion, excluding renewable natural sources, like wind farms, tidal generators, and solar cells."

Comments

Modern bombs are already fusion-based

[GuyMannDude]

So who gets to set off the first fusion bomb?

Fusion has been the nuclear reaction in all the modern weapons. Typically, a fission reaction is used to initiate the much more powerful fusion reaction. The real trick is getting CONTROLLED, CONTAINED fusion to work. That problem is what fusion as a viable energy source is all about. Just getting atoms to fuse and produce tons of energy is no great feat.

GMD

Cleanest?

[Otter]

Fusion is one of the cleanest forms of energy conversion, excluding renewable natural sources, like wind farms, tidal generators, and solar cells.

I suppose "cleanest" may be literally true, but in terms of overall environmental impact, fusion has got to easily whip at least the first two. The environmental footprint of windmills and tidal hydroelectric is huge. And, of course, most of the world doesn't have a tide to draw on, and I'm not even getting into the "draining the angular momentum of the planet" issue.

Re:Cleanest?

[bill_mcgonigle]

As of the late 80's (last time I was at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab) the strategy was to clad the reactor in a copper shield. This would create a radioactive copper shield over time, which would need to be stored as radioactive waste. The half-life is only 37 years though.

disclaimer: data from my non-ECC memory

Is Inertially-confined fusion dead?

[GuyMannDude]

I see from the Iter website that this reactor is essentially trying to get fusion to occur using the magnetic-confinement technique of the Tokamak reactor. The other approach to controlled fusion studyied over the last few decades is inertially-confined fusion. Can anyone tell us what the state of inertially-confined fusion is? Does the US's and China's joining of the Iter project signify that the mainstream thought is that inertially-confined fusion is dying? My understanding is that both were hot research topics in the 90s but I don't know what the current thinking is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

GMD

Re:Is Inertially-confined fusion dead?

[Peter T Ermit]

ICF was never principally for power generation; it was a weapons-lab project with energy thrown in as an afterthought to make it look like it had peaceful purposes. The big ICF facility in the states, NIF, is just coming online now... and the future of ICF will have nothing to do with what happens with ITER.

Solar cells are clean?

[RobKow]

The hideously low efficiency of solar cells makes them a waste of -other- natural resources to manufacture, transport, purchase, install, and maintain.

That is, you burn more fossil fuel energy deploying photovoltaic arrays than you regain during their (short) usable lifetime. That doesn't make them any less-convenient for remote off-grid applications, but they're not going to replace other power sources anytime soon.

Solar energy is still viable for heating (obvious) as well as power generation using mirror concentrators.

Re:Old news

[Jahf]

And if everyone monitored every news site, /. would be less than useless. But, we don't, so it's not. I found the article very interesting.

Relatively yes

[Yokaze]

Could you please back your statements up with some sort of facts, preferably from a reliable source?

This source seems to suggest otherwise. Btw, the mass-production of solar-cells has begun after the publishing of this paper.

>during their (short) usable lifetime
I don't know about your experience. But I've had a solar cell, which has been serving me well for longer than 20 years. Guarantees are usually issued for 20 years lifetime.

Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about nuclear plants. Not that I'm claiming that they are true.

Re:Relatively yes

[foolish]

Actually, you WILL find the kWh figures added into the costs of most current solar studies.

As you say, back about ten years, the solar people were getting lambasted for posting only operational and amoritized financial costs, and excluding the 'lifecycle' costs. They now usually make sure to post that information, though sometimes not in the sales literature, but almost always where investors can read it.

--foolish

Re:Relatively yes

[Yokaze]

Well, it is more of a summer house, which is off-grid. So being self-powered is no achievement, since only a radio and some light require some energy.

The point of mentioning it was the life-time of the solar cell.

Being completely self-sufficient in a (more or less) normal life-stile is a little bit more complicated. One cannot rely on photo-voltaic alone.

One has to be a little bit more intelligent in building the house and selecting the equipment.
The keyword is: Zero-Energy Home.

IIRC, those houses are cost effective. But the critical part is, that the initial costs are much higher. But don't take my word for it.

Concerning the cost effectiveness in California, new taxes might totally void it.

self sustaining?

[k3v0]

it may produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer, but how much energy is required to initiate the process? i'm not really that familiar with fusion, but it would seem that quite a bit of energy would be required to heat the elements to the balmy 100 million Celsius.

Re:self sustaining?

[Pyromage]

Less than that. I can't give you any numbers, but /.'s history has stories on fusion. Basically, we've long since gotten past the point of getting more energy out than we put in. We just can't sustain it for more than about 2 minutes, yet.

Re:self sustaining?

[Peter T Ermit]

Um... can you point me to an experiment that's reached breakeven? The closest I know of is a late '90s claim by JT-60 that claimed a "breakeven equivalent" -- basically, they said if they had run the machine in a different configuration, they should have had breakeven. (Read: they didn't reach breakeven in the experiment they ran.)

AFAIK, we haven't gotten more energy out than we put in yet, much less "long since gotten past" that point.

problems with fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

the main problem with fusion and fission is that not many people understand the technology. thermal, hydro-electric power station technology is understood for the last 100 years or so. fission technology can be used in bomb making and hence there are sever restriction on technology exchange. fusion can be used in bomb making, but that requires having fission bomb. So the restrictions are less. however, the fusion technology is inherently too complex for today's scientists and engineers to understand. there are very few independently reproducible experiments which demonstrates that fusion can be used commercially.

I have visited thermal, hydro-electric and nuclear power plants. At thermal and hydro-electric plants, even low level workers had some idea how the things work and what control panel indicator means what. At nuclear plant, all they could say was, "if this light is red, we are screwed" (well, this is oversimplication). When you have such things, it is hard to expect, safe, reliable and cheap power. The same remains true for fusion tech. Only few qualified people exists and hence, it would be too costly atleast for next 30-50 years to use fusion to replace other types of power. We are still at early experimental stage and nowhere close to commercial exploitation of fusion power.

Re:problems with fusion

[Vellmont]

So we'd have fusion technology today if Joe Scmuchatelli had a weak inkling of what happens in a nuclear reactor? I'm afraid you're vastly uninformed about fusion. The problem isn't that Joe Sixpack doesn't know a little, the problem is that Joe Scientist doesn't know the intricacies of how to maintain a fusion reaction. That's why this facility is being built.

Fusion research has reached a stage where the only way to get closer to commercial production is to scale the whole experiment up. You state that there haven't been any experiments to show fusion can be used commercially... Well Duh! Researchers have only recently gotten past the break even point. That's why we call it "experiment", and not "commercial implementation". The problem is not one of not enough qualified workers and thus it's too expensive, the problem is we just don't know how to make a sustainable fusion reactor yet.

Re:problems with fusion

[Xilman]

And there isn't _anything_ that can go wrong at a fusion reactor. The absolute worst case is that the containment magnets could cut out - letting the superheated plasma hit and scar the chamber wall. This causes the operator to swear and fetch another cup of coffee before restarting the reaction.

Tell this to the people at JET. A few years ago the plasma accidentally touched the chamber wall. The tokamak was converted into a single-turn electromagnetic motor carrying a hell of a lot of current. The entire system, weighing hundreds of tons, leapt almost a foot into the air. The resultant thump when it landed was picked up on seismographs all over Europe. IIRC, it was equivalent to an earthquake measuring about 3 on the Richter scale.

Paul

Cleanest my foot

[Euphonious Coward]

Fusion is one of the cleanest forms of energy conversion, excluding renewable natural sources, like wind farms, tidal generators, and solar cells.

They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors. The whole apparatus would have to be replaced frequently as it gets too damaged by the bombardment to hold itself up, and the scrap would have to be put somewhere safe, just as with fission reactors.

(These remarks apply to thermal neutron processes, not those that extract electromagnetic energy from kinetic charged particles. For some reason nobody likes to talk about those.)

Re:Cleanest my foot

[the eric conspiracy]

They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors.

Fusion reactors do not generate high level radioactive waste that must be isolated for geological lengths of time in the way fission reactors do. The radioactive by products from a fusion reactor are low level and with short half-lives (less than 100 years). The short half-life makes in place storage of the irradiated structural components quite feasible - they don't need to be transported etc.

In addition a fusion reactor is fail safe - there is no danger of a meltdown or similar event.

The real attraction of fusion is that it is potentially extremely scalable. Alternative energy sources like solar, wind, etc. are attractive within the near term framework of reducing greenhouse gases over the next decade or two. Ultimately however it is hard to imagine how these dilute, funtamentally limited sources of energy will supply what is needed for strong economic growth into the next century, or a world population that exceeds 10 billions.

Before you condemn it, understand it

[fuzzykitty]

While it is true that the result from Iter will be a lot of radioactive waste, this project must continue because it is vital to fusion research. The radioactive waste will result because of the plan to use stainless steel in the reactor construction. Stainless steel is easy to activate (because of the nickle and other elements in it) however it is one of the few materials that can take the reactor wall loading that we know how to work with (Vanadium would be an excellent replacement and have a very short halflife (on the order of decades) except for the fact nobody really knows how to roll it, weld it, make it into a pipe etc...). Don't forget that the vast majority of our industrial complex is built on the understaning of steel.

As with any prototype, there are issues. Fusion by itself is clean and if low activation materials can be used, such a silicon carbide and vanadium, which will result in very little radioactive waste with short halflifes.

The other aspect of ITER, which is a boon for fusion research, is that it is the first comercial "scale up" of a fusion reactor. Current research reactors are small and thus too small to generate enough fusion power to be useful on a grid. Fusion does occur, but it is not at a "density" (I am taking a bit of liberty with the nomenclature for a simplified explanation) that is sufficient to offset the power put into the system (ie other lossy effects are not overcome until there are more fusion reactions per unit time in a given volume)

In short future reactors will be a LOT cleaner after ITER. It's sort of like the early days of fission. A crude graphite pile lead to intrinsically safe and efficient boiling water reactors. It seems to me that a little bit of pain to jumpstart the research is worthwhile.

Re:True, but...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

...aren't even those examples better than fission?

Not really. The hazards are about identical- the lithium reactor can still melt down, the fusion reactors certainly become radioactive in and of themselves, and have a finite life due to radiation damage. It's not clean, it may very well not be cheap either.

The tritium-tritium reaction is a different beast though; that's potentially pretty clean, and pretty safe- no fission reactors need be involved. But very much more difficult to ignite.

ITER fusion and the tokamak design

[reverseengineer]

The problem with nuclear fusion is that it has been the classic example of a tech that's 50 years away- and it's been that way for the last 50 years. It's turned out to be a much more thorny problem than people anticipated- uncontrolled fusion reactions are fairly easy to produce after all- just direct the energy from a fission primary at an appropriate quantity of tritium. Unfortunately, this is a hydrogen bomb, and makes for a rather inefficient power source.

However, controlled confinement of plasma has proven to be much harder. ITER will use the most popular confinement method, a tokamak, which is a design devised by the Soviets (Tamm and Sakharov) back in the 1960s. So essentially, the basic plan is 40 years old, but there have been a number of obstacles- political and economic as well as technical to making this work. It will be interesting to see if their tokamak avoids the key problem of the design; in a tokamak, the plasma itself has an internal current running through it (as opposed to other designs like stellarators) and has proved rather deifficult to contain in the torus. I believe the Joint European Torus has had several "disruptions" of this sort that have lifted the several hundred ton vessel off its bolts. The good news, of course, is that such events (which are rare, and should be much more rare in a non-experimental reactor) are really the worst things that can happen to a fusion reactor. Although the plasma is extremely hot, it is not very dense at all (obtaining a critical density is really the greatest challenge) and thus there exists no possibility of 300 million Kelvin plasma vaporizing the container walls in some sort of runaway accident. Also, while they are not completely clean (no power generation method is) the radioactivity produced is low level, especially in comparision with fission reactor spent fuel rods.