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Page added on May 4, 2013
Is nuclear fusion power now possible?
On 26 April, the world largely yawned as a nuclear anniversary came and went.
Twenty-seven years ago, the Ukrainian SSR nuclear power plant at Chernobyl exploded, providing a severe test of the USSR’s General Secretary of the Communist Party Mihail Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost” (“openness,”), which the sclerotic Soviet leadership signally failed, providing a less than candid drip feed of news about the magnitude of the disaster.
Nothing to see here, move along.
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Twenty-five years later, Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six reactor Fukushima Daiichi NPP was decimated by a tsunami generated by the offshore Tohoku earthquake in the western Pacific, estimated at 9.0 on the Richter scale.
Response?
Nothing to see here, move along, yet again.
What even the strongest proponents of civilian nuclear power production cannot deny is that both incidents released radioactive material into the surrounding environment, whose long-term environmental and human health consequences have yet to be seen. (Related article: NASA Funds Research into Fusion Powered Rocket for Deep Space Travel)
But the Chernobyl catastrophe is not forgotten in Ukraine, where last month Ukrainian Minister Mykola Azarov participated in commemorative events of the accident, which released radiation equivalent to 500 Hiroshima atomic bombs, while President Viktor Yanukovych said the total cost of the incident for his country over the last 27 years has been almost $180 billion.
But now, another aspect of potential nuclear power generation from the atom seems poised to take a giant leap forward, with potentially enormous implications for the entire issue of civilian nuclear power generation.
The potential way out?
Nuclear fusion, which instead of using the heat from breaking apart radioactive elements and isotopes to use the resultant temperatures to drive steam powered turbines, would instead attempt to reproduce the nuclear processes fueling stars to generate power instead from the fusion energy generated by lighter elements combining.
The quest is well known, having been around since the dawn of the nuclear age, but the physics have precluded significant research.
Until now.
A tokamak uses an intensive magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus, which was were invented in the 1950s by Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and (later Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) Andrei Sakharov, inspired by the research of Oleg Lavrentiev. For the past five decades, the tokamak is the most-researched magnetic confinement device candidates for producing controlled thermonuclear fusion power, as magnetic fields are currently the best candidate for plasma confinement since no solid material could withstand the plasma’s extremely high temperatures. (Related article: The Coming Nuclear Waste Disaster)
And now, 34 nations are collaborating in the world’s largest scientific collaboration since the International Space Station to construct the $16.9 billion ITER (“International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor”) fusion power project In Provence’s Cadarache forest in southern France.
Sidestepping previous research bottlenecks, where experimental tokamak fusion reactors devoured more power than they produced, the ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for 50 megawatts of input power. ITER’s construction of the facility began in 2007, and the first plasma is expected to be produced in 2020.
What is the appeal then of ITER?
Its hydrogen isotope fuels are relatively abundant, and its fuel isotopes, deuterium, can be extracted from seawater, while its tritium isotope could be created using neutrons produced in the fusion reaction itself. Like its NPPs predecessors, a fusion reactor would produce virtually no CO2 or other atmospheric pollutants, but, unlike its Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima antecedents, its radioactive waste by products would be very short-lived compared to those produced by conventional nuclear reactors.
Given the depth of international commitment, one should not write off the possibility of success, as it involves top nuclear minds worldwide. In this context, it is worth remembering that America’s World War Two “Manhattan Project,” was an effort while, funded by Washington, involved emigre European scientists. What is the potential of a global effort of the “best and brightest, not only from the U.S. but Europe, Russia and Asia as well?
10 Comments on "Is nuclear fusion power now possible?"
BillT on Sat, 4th May 2013 3:46 am
Hype, hopium, and BS … more of the same. Nothing to see here but more techie dreams.
We already have over 400 nuclear waste dumps scattered around the world to clean up. They never will and the radiation will kill all life on the planet over the next 100 years. Why? Because it would take trillions of dollars to safely decommission and mothball the reactors and to dry cask the hundreds of thousands of tons of spent fuel.
In case you hadn’t noticed, all of the countries housing these death piles are BROKE! The energy needed to maintain their safe keeping is already shrinking. Japan cannot afford to clean up ONE site that is still spewing radioactive water and particles all over the place more than two years after the disaster.
Nuclear will be our death, if famine and disease don’t beat it to the goal.
BillT on Sat, 4th May 2013 3:57 am
BTW:
$180 Billion(Chernobyl cost for 25 years)
X 40 (equals 1,000 years)
X400 nuclear sites around the world
= about $3,000,000,000,000,000.00
That is 3 quadrillion or 3 million billion dollars. Do YOU think those 400 death traps will ever be safe? I don’t.
Norm on Sat, 4th May 2013 5:45 am
Seems like fusion is a government research scam. They never get results. They have to periodically replenish the fuel and trigger the fusion reaction. Now if they could do it 120 times per second, maybe you could plug the whole thing into the power grid. Unlikely. The pebble-bed fission reactors seem to have good potential. The Chinese are taking initiative to actually build one. Pathetic nobody working on it here. Its because alternative reactor designs involving fission might work. (get rid of the crummy uranium-rods-in-water approach). Meanwhile the fusion thing just seems to be their easy way to a paycheck while accomplishing nothing. And imagine all the garbage and waste they create with all those people building bogus fusion stations that dont work.
J-Gav on Sat, 4th May 2013 9:06 am
BillT – Correct, they’ll never dry cask all those spent fuel rods. And if they don’t have the money to do that, where a
J-Gav on Sat, 4th May 2013 9:08 am
BillT – Correct, they’ll never dry cask all those spent fuel rods. And if they don’t have the money to do that, where are they going to get the money to build all these miracle fusion reactors?
LT on Sat, 4th May 2013 2:41 pm
Nuclear fusion is possible only because it is done in laboratories and the amount of output power is less than the amount of input power. Thus, efficiency is still less than 1, which is complying with the second law of thermodynamics. But as soon as, they attempt to increase the efficiency to 1 and higher, they attempt the IMPOSSIBLE, according to the second law of thermodynamics. How big a magnetic can they create to contain those plasma reactions? Where do they get those enormous energy to produce that gigantic magnetic field? Poor science fiction? I rather spend those money on beef jerky, and help the economy! 🙂
Nick on Sat, 4th May 2013 11:27 pm
Nuclear fusion power is possible, and there is no violation of the laws of the thermodynamics, but the route taken by the mainstream scientists is wrong. A cheaper and better solution is with multiple colliding-beams instead of toroidal confinement and lasers. It has already been mathematically proven that plasma density and fusion rate is the key for net energy gain. And the plasma reactions can be easily contained by superconducting magnets with few power consumption. http://youtu.be/VUrt186pWoA
mo on Sun, 5th May 2013 2:17 pm
Mathematically Proven and what happens in the real world are two different things
econ101 on Sun, 5th May 2013 4:08 pm
I had two apples and got two from my sister. I have 4 apples.
Nick: I hope they can continue to develop different designs in a somewhat parallel fashion so we can find out faster which works best. thanks for the link.
oscar blauman on Mon, 6th May 2013 7:54 pm
No way ITER will develop any time soon in a practical device, wasted research money. Tokamak fusion should be kept alive in universities in a purely simulated fashion, we would be making faster progress at a much lower cost.
Practically nothing fo the supremely challenging tasks of a DC tokamak reactor have ever been tested experimentally, costs will be prohibitive and reliability abismal.