Fusion power no
distant dream: scientists
May 25, 2006 - China Daily
There is a deafening, unearthly howl as if a jumbo jet was firing up
its engines in London's Albert Hall. On the screen in the control room a
ghostly pinkish glow whips round the edges of the inside of the nuclear
reactor. At its core it is 10 times hotter than the centre of the sun.
This, according to some physicists, is the solution to the energy
crisis a future with cheap, reliable, safe and nearly waste-free power.
Today, after years of false starts and political wrangling dating from
the Cold War, they will get their chance to make that dream a reality.
A US$14 billion project, called Iter, to build a prototype nuclear
fusion reactor will be signed off in Brussels by the EU, Japan, China,
South Korea, India and the United States.
The prospect of virtually limitless energy is not merely science
fiction. The haunting, screaming growl of matter being smashed together
at unimaginably high speed is a daily occurrence at Jet in Oxfordshire,
Southern England, an existing experimental fusion reactor. Jet is by far
the biggest of the world's 28 fusion reactors. It is the work of
scientists here that has paved the way for the much bigger Iter, which,
once the project is ratified in December, will be built in Cadarache in
southern France.
Its advocates say nuclear fusion is the most promising long-term
solution to the energy crisis, offering the possibility of abundant
power from cheap fuel with no greenhouse gases and low levels of
radioactive waste. But critics say the government is gambling huge sums
of money 44% of the UK's research and development budget for energy on a
long shot with no guarantee of ever producing useful energy.
Last week British Prime Minister Tony Blair backed conventional
nuclear power, saying in a speech to business leaders that not replacing
Britain's ageing nuclear power stations would be "a serious dereliction
of our duty to the future of this country."
He argued that only nuclear energy could prevent a huge hike in CO2
emissions once the current nuclear stations were decommissioned.
But while the debate over the future of conventional nuclear power
continues, many physicists argue that fusion is the future. "Fusion
works it powers the sun and stars," said Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, head
of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. "In the second part of the century
I'm optimistic it will indeed be a major part of the world energy
portfolio."
Unlike nuclear fission, which tears atomic nuclei apart to release
energy, fusion involves squeezing the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms
together. This process releases a helium nucleus and a neutron plus huge
quantities of energy.
The hydrogen fuel is part heavy hydrogen or deuterium, which can be
easily extracted from water, and part super-heavy hydrogen or tritium,
which can be made from lithium, a reasonably abundant metal.
The energy produced is truly colossal. The lithium in just one laptop
battery and the heavy hydrogen from half a bath of water could provide
enough energy for the average European for 30 years.
One of fusion's big advantages over fission is safety. Firstly, there
is no chance of a runaway meltdown as happened at Chernobyl.
If you stop applying the fuel or switch off the magnetic jacket that
keeps the fuel in the reactor, the reaction just stops.
"It is very difficult to keep it running. It is like keeping honey on
the back of a spoon," said Mathias Brix, a physicist at Jet. Also, the
quantities of fuel involved are much smaller than in fission reactors.
Jet contains less than a gram of fuel, while Chernobyl had 250 tons.
Lastly, the fuel and waste from the reactor is much less radioactive.
But although physicists think they understand fusion, harnessing it
has proved extremely difficult. Research first began in the 1950s with
claims that fusion would provide reliable power by the end of the
century but even now scientists admit that a commercial application is
at least 40 years away.
The problem is getting two nuclei close enough to fuse and then
controlling the reaction. This means putting in huge amounts of energy
at the start to convert less than a gram of the fusion fuel into a
super-hot gas or plasma. Hydrogen nuclei flying around at high speed in
the plasma can then come close enough together to fuse.
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