FUSION POWER HAS LONG HELD THE promise of providing a safe, clean and inexhaustible supply for all the world's energy needs far into the future. Some would say fusion power has held the promise for too long.

The promise of fusion power, in perception and mostly in fact, is to steer clear of a legacy of energy accidents with much safer technology, eliminate the production of pollutants and long-lived radioactive wastes with much cleaner technology, and curtail the depletion of nonrenewable energy resources with an effectively inexhaustible supply.

The promise is mostly real. Our sun, after all, is a successful fusion reactor. The sun produces the energy that it delivers to us by fusing atomic nuclei at high temperatures and densities. With a little E=mc² magic, these fusion reactions are what feed the Earth a reasonably steady solar-power diet of almost 1 gigawatt per square mile.

Shortly after building the hydrogen bomb, a successful fusion power source, the United States set out to build a fusion energy reactor. Initially classified, the program was expected to take no more than the few years it took to develop the hydrogen bomb. Today, generations later, after countless billions of dollars spent and countless thousands of man-years expended, fusion power has not added as many kilowatt-hours to the national power grid as 25 cents will buy today. What happened?

Producing the sun-like temperatures needed to ignite the nuclear fuel, and confining the nuclear fuel for long enough in a controlled manner inside a reactor, has proved a problem too hard to crack. The difficulties explain the worldwide excitement generated by the 1989 report, later discredited, of cold fusion.

Conventional nuclear power presents a much easier challenge than fusion power. What has hamstrung conventional nuclear power in this country though not in others is not technology, but public perception. Americans have long memories. They remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

To realize the promise of fusion power, a promise free of an objectionable legacy, major efforts have been under way for decades all around the world. In 2006, seven participants, including the United States and the host, the European Union, agreed to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Now expected to take at least 10 years to build at a cost of at least about 10 billion euros, by the end of its run in 2038, ITER is designed to generate as much electricity as all other fusion power sources combined – that is, none.

In the United States, two major fusion experimental programs with billions invested are competing, one at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and one at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Construction began in 1997 on the larger program, the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, and was completed five years behind schedule last year at a cost almost four times more than budgeted. Both the Livermore and Sandia facilities are experimental. Neither will generate electricity. No fusion pilot plant is even on the drawing board.

To realize the promise of fusion power quickly may take a crisis or it may take a technological breakthrough. Without such a crash program or breakthrough, though, the promise of fusion power seems likely to remain just that, a promise, for decades to come.

 

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