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Boris Horvat / AFP - Getty Images
A hardhat worker walks around the construction site for the ITER fusion experiment in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France.
The standard joke about nuclear fusion is that it's the energy technology of the future, and always will be. Well, fusion is still an energy option for the future rather than the present, but small steps forward are being reported on several fronts. That even includes the long-ridiculed campaign for "cold fusion."
Efforts by the Italian-based Leonardo Corp. to harness low-energy nuclear reactions (the technology formerly known as cold fusion) have reawakened the dream of somehow producing surplus heat through unorthodox chemistry. Today, Pure Energy Systems News reported that Leonardo's Andrea Rossi signed an agreement with Texas-based National Instruments to build instrumentation for E-Cat cold-fusion reactors.
Will this venture actually pan out? The E-Cat reactors are so shrouded in secrecy and murky claims that it's hard to do a reality check, but most outside experts say that the concept just won't work.
Some observers are similarly pessimistic about the other avenues for fusion research. The basic physics of the reaction is well-accepted, of course. You can see the power generated when hydrogen atoms fuse into helium when you look at that big ball of gas in the sky, 93 million miles away, or when you watch footage of an H-bomb blast.
But no one has been able to achieve a self-sustaining, energy-producing fusion reaction in a controlled setting on Earth, even after more than a half-century of trying.
Laser ignition
Researchers had hoped to reach that big milestone, known as ignition, at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility by the end of 2010. But in last week's issue of Science, Steven Koonin, the Energy Department's under secretary for science, was quoted as saying "ignition is proving more elusive than hoped" and added that "some science discovery may be required" to make it a reality. (Coincidentally, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced this week that Koonin will be leaving his post.)
The big challenge is to tweak all the factors involved in NIF's super-laser-blaster system to maximize the energy directed on tiny pellets of fusion fuel, and minimize the loss of energy through tiny imperfections or interference. "We're at the end of the beginning," NIF's director, Edward Moses, told Science.
How much longer will it take? The new director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where NIF is headquartered, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was convinced the facility would attain ignition "in this fiscal year" — that is, by next October.
Magnetic confinement
If NIF hits that schedule, it'll be way ahead of the world's most expensive fusion experiment, the $20 billion ITER experimental project in France. ITER is taking the most conventional approach to creating a controlled fusion reaction, which involves magnetic containment of a super-hot plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device known as a tokamak. The European Union and six other nations, including the United States, have divvied up the work load with the aim of completing construction in 2017 and achieving "first plasma" in 2019.
Right now, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER are testing a fuel delivery system that would fire pellets of ultra-cold deuterium-tritium fuel into the plasma.
"When we send a frozen pellet into a high-temperature plasma, we sometimes call it a 'snowball in hell,'" Oak Ridge physicist David Rasmussen said in an ITER report on the tests at the Dill-D research tokamak in San Diego. "But temperature is really just the measure of the energy of the particles in the plasma. When the deuterium and tritium particles vaporize, ionize and are heated, they move very fast, colliding with enough energy to fuse."
The tricky part has to do with shaping the pellets just right to produce the desired reaction. When it comes to snowballs in hell, the devil is in the details.
The politics of ITER is just as tricky as the technology. Considering the economic problems that are afflicting the world, and Europe in particular, will there be funding to support the development timeline? Last month, one of the leaders of the European Parliament's Green bloc called ITER a "ticking budgetary time bomb."
Wiffle-Balls and other wonders
Smaller-scale fusion research efforts, meanwhile, are getting a lot of good press. For example, the Navy-funded experiments in inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also called Polywell fusion, are continuing at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in New Mexico. The latest status report for the $7.9 million project says that the test reactor, known as a Wiffle-Ball because of its shape, "has generated over 500 high-power plasma shots."
"EMC2 is conducting tests on Wiffle-Ball plasma scaling law on plasma heating and confinement," the brief report reads.
The Polywell system is designed to accelerate positively charged ions inside a high-voltage cage, in such a way that they spark a fusion reaction. If enough of the ions fuse, the energy could exceed the amount put into the system.
In the past, leaders of the EMC2 team have told me that their aim is to build a 100-megawatt demonstration reactor. Nowadays, EMC2 is more close-mouthed about their progress, primarily because that's the way the Navy wants it. But the report about 500 high-energy plasma shots brought a positive response from the Talk-Polywell discussion board, which has been following EMC2's progress closely. "I'd be drunk by now if those were shots of whiskey," one commenter joked.
Privately backed efforts are moving ahead as well: Last month, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics reported reaching a record for neutron yield with its "Focus Fusion" direct-to-electric generator. And this week, Canada's General Fusion and its magnetized target fusion technology were featured in an NPR news package.
"I wouldn't say I'm 100 percent sure it's going to work," General Fusion's Michel Laberge told NPR. "That would be a lie. But I would put it at 60 percent chance that this is going to work. Now of course other people will give me a much smaller chance than that, but even at 10 percent chance of working, investors will still put money in, because this is big, man, this is making power for the whole planet. This is huge!"
Is it a huge opportunity, or a huge waste — especially considering that the energy technology of the future will have to compete with present-day technologies such as solar, wind, biofuel and nuclear fission? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
Update for 3:40 p.m. ET Nov. 11: Some commenters have rightly pointed out that there are many other nuclear fusion and high-energy plasma initiatives under way, including the Z Machine, a huge X-ray generator at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. The journal Science quotes Sandia researchers as saying the machine could be used to start testing the feasibility of pinch-driven fusion, but conducting a definitive test would require a far more powerful machine.
Science also notes that some researchers suspect NIF's indirect approach to laser-driven fusion, in which fuel pellets are placed inside a pulse-shaping cylinder known as a hohlraum, may not be as efficient as it needs to be. Research groups are investigating direct-drive laser fusion at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester, N.Y., and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.
More about fusion:
- Fusion goes forward from the fringe
- Levitating magnet coaxes nuclear fusion
- Out-of-this-world ideas win NASA funding
- Physics turns from fission to the future
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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'Necessity is the mother of invention.' Cheap electric power is necessary for
reductions in manufacturing costs in aid of economic recovery; Bring it on, now !
Polywell Fusion seems closest to practical use, providing free fuel, not free power.
Cold fusion is more interesting on theoretical grounds; Whatever is happening
will require a rewrite of some of the laws of physics, as did quantum effects.
True sustainable, market-ready fusion power is DECADES away. Yes, we should still research fusion, but more should be spent on getting the current FOSSIL FUEL producers to convert to WORKING renewable solutions! Get on board, old fogies! The train needs to MOVE!
Do you truly believe that if there were a single viable alternative to fossil fuels the companies that now have major investments in that source would not be the first to try and get in on the ground floor and exploit a new source of profit? There is unimaginable wealth to be made by anyone who has a new form of cheap portable energy and the companies who are now involved in fossil fuels are the only ones with the resources needed to exploit a new form of energy.
When I see so many scientist fussing over fusion I just laugh.
There is a zillion billion gigawatt fusion power reactor right over our heads generously bestowing every 1000 square miles with enough energy to power the entire world and yet it's little used.
Less than 1% of our power comes from the sun but it has the potential to provide 1000% of our needs.
It's crazy but displaced greed and politics.
Anyone who dismisses Rossi's invention based on scientific dogma is not a real scientist at all.
Empirical data trumps theory every time.
The validity of the Ecat (or lack thereof) will be established soon. Until then , it is foolish to dismiss.
What about dismissing it based on other people dismissing it, as in a chain reaction? I really think that could work, at least in theory.
If the US spent as much on fusion research in the course of a year or two as we have on the "wars" in the middle east...
...we'd have it, and within a decade, the world would change.
lol, ya.. offer those atoms enough dough and they'll fuse alright
i just wonder how safe cold fusion really is.... under earth quack conditions.
OK Seems to me, that this is another propaganda article, since it avoids the Obvious and Touts one side only, what a shame, what a Scam!!
Well, quite aside from anything other considerations, for purely aesyhetic reasons I would never even consider covering the beautiful slate roof on my 1929 English Tudor style house with solar panels. Nor do I think it likely that many of my neighbors, or even the college next door, would choose to do so either. (The college does, however, have one solar panel mounted over a plot of grass next to the science building just to demonstrate to students and visitors that they can be made to work.) The former governor also used to have two small solar panels on the slate roof of the Governor's Mansion in Harrisburg, but I understand that the current governor has since had them taken down.
Free choice is a wonderful thing, but I would Choose having a livable planet over slate roofs any time :-) lol
Well, I do agree with you that we need to ensure that our planet remains livable, but I also want to create many more livable habitats for our species throughout the solar system. I really like the quote by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke that he made in an interview prior to his death in 2008: "The day will come when many of the descendants of the human species will have difficulty pointing to which part of the sky the earth is located."
Indeed but the key is " Make a Secure Home base First " then one can more out, without a Secure HOME base, we are fooling ourselves!
If all "discoveries/inventions" were based on anothers "waste of time (flawed perceptions of incomplete knowledge)" we would not have half the tech we do now. If you stifle creativity, you kill the human race!
Fusion is a black hole for money. What we should do is to dedicate a crash program to develop and deploy Molten Salt reactors using thorium for fuel. This type of nuclear reactor operates at ambient pressure so explosions are impossible. It produces no materials suitable for atomic weapons. They do not need water cooling so they can be sited in a desert if desired. They only need a small amount of uranium or plutonium to start the reactor. After that, thorium is bred into U-233. The US imports 100% of the uranium needed. We have enough thorium to last thousands of years unlike uranium which is very rare. Molten salt reactors produce minute amounts of waste which is radioactive for only 300 years, not tens of thousands like legacy reactors. The best part is that they are ideal for mass production on assembly lines and are cheap to produce and operate. They are not all theory like fusion. Molten salt reactors were built and operated for 5 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 1965 through 1969. They work just fine. Because the cold war was ongoing, the decision to support Pressurized Water Reactors over Molten Salt reactors was made because Pressurized Water Reactors produce large amounts of atom bomb materials which MSR's do not. China announced last year that they started a program to research and develop molten salt reactors and to claim intellectual property rights for the technology. The US needs to start a well funded crash program to develop this molten salt reactor technology before we have to buy them from China.
The political ramifications of producing U-233 and spurring a plutonium economy notwithstanding, MSRs are not the energy salvation of the planet that a fusion solution would provide. They are simply not in the same category. MSRs are the next generation of fission reactors - they're cleaner, smaller, safer and better, yes. But they are not a fusion replacement - and fusion physics is not 'theory'. It's all well established, verified by experiment since the 1960's. Fusion science is not even strictly a high energy physics discipline, so you don't need an LHC to prove fusion goes on in an IEC or an ICF. You simply need to show it goes on A LOT. The obstacles to a clean, efficient fusion solution are engineering obstacles - not physical.
And in terms of accolades, aneutronic fusion reactors can beat or match any of the safety features you mentioned. They are noncritical. They're non-radioactive. They don't produce radioactive waste NOR use radioactive fuel. Alpha particles are so weak they decay in air within a few nanoseconds. They don't produce any fissile material of ANY kind, and they rely on a fuel (hydrogen, Boron) that's plentiful and not used for practically any other high-demand industrial application.
Concerning IEC fusion pursued by the Navy, the most intriguing thing about this is that involves direct energy conversion from the reaction to electricity, basically you eliminate the steam generator and turbines that most coal/fission plants utilize to generate power. ITER is essentially following the old model as well, use heat from the reaction to generate steam to spin a turbine to create electricity. While using fusion to create steam is a stepped improvement, going directly to electricity and eliminating the steam cycle is HUGE, you've basically eliminated the life cycle costs associated with maintenance and personnel used to operate the plant. Anyone that works in the industry can tell you that maintenance on a steam plant is constant, involving tons of manhours to keep the plant going safely. So, my point is that IEC fusion is a game changer in that it is simple, safe, low maintenance, involves an aneneutronic (proton-boron-no neutron radiation) reaction, and can be used in a decentralized power generation model (no NIMBY concerns).
Agreed. Direct conversion for p-B11 or even p-Li6 is the way to go - for those not familiar, these fusion cycles do not produce the swarms of neutron radiation produced in typical fusion cycles that research efforts like ITER have been hammering away at for 30 years. Instead, almost all of the fusion energy goes into the production of VERY HOT energetic alpha particles. There are still questions about how to efficiently capture these alpha particles but that's where the "direct energy conversion" comes in. There are good arguments to the effect that one could semi-efficiently direct them through induction coils to pull off their charge by slowing them down in a biased field. Very little, but some, work has been done on p-B11, even though it has been identified as a potential source of clean fusion energy since the 1970's. My academic research advisor, Dr. George Miley, pioneered this work with Dr. Bussard. The problem with p-B11 is that it has a much higher ignition temperature than D-D or D-He or D-T so it's harder to achieve without thermalizing the plasma and losing all of your plasma energy to useless electron heating.
I'm not trying to plug :) but this is what we're looking for funding to expand our research on at UIUC. I recently presented our work on p-B11 aneutronic IEC fusion. Lots of obstacles - lots of industry naysayers who don't think IEC has a future (Brem losses, confinement limitations). But half the money spent on ITER would produce a working IEC reactor and ignition in probably 5-10 years at most. I'm gonna go ahead and say even break-even in 15.
I agree, Stan, that orbital collection is undeniably the "Golden Egg" of any long term effort to develop major sustainable solar energy grid - however it is a ways off. There are a half dozen or so major technical challenges to implementation and dozens of smaller ones. That doesn't mean it should not be considered, but it means that as a short term energy solution it is not on even keel with ordinary run-of-the-mill terrestrial PV power stations. The ONLY thing standing in the way of mass market widespread PV power use is political and social. It's just convincing people it's the right move, getting around the political ties of the major commercial nuclear/fossil power companies who don't want it to happen until they're ready to monopolize it.
The problems with orbital solar power collection, on the other hand, are all inclusive of terrestrial in addition to a boatload of technical obstacles. As it stands I think projections estimate that you'd get 50% losses from collected power to transmitted power - and that's AFTER you factor in the fundamental inefficiency of the cell and the array. But you are right that flux in space is higher - around 1.5x higher I believe. So if you are getting 1.5x as much flux on a 30% efficient array (which, at commercial sizes is EXTREMELY generous and probably 15 years from our capabilities), you will actually get about 50% of total power before transmission - cut that # by 50% and you'll get 25%. Which means even with more flux and seriously advanced arrays, you're still barely getting what solar arrays on Earth can pretty much get now - only with the addition of launch costs, R&D costs, replacement costs (cells don't survive long in space), and anything else that might crop up along the way.
We'll resolve some of these problems by ever continuing to push the boundaries of efficiencies, improving microwave power transmission efficiency, reducing spacecraft launch costs and in general just becoming a more space-faring civilization. Under ideal circumstances I could see this being a viable technology to begin building an experimental array in probably 25 years.
Dear Mr. Boyle,
I am at a loss for words as to how a science editor for a prominent news source such as NBC could have written about Rossi in 2013 and given him any credence whatsoever. Have you done no homework on this sir? Have you no awareness of this scam? Do you believe everything that is written on the Internet without question? And if you knew that Rossi's E-Cat was a scam, why did you publish a story about Rossi and fail to inform your readers?
You are quoting a news story from PESN that states that Rossi is buying tools from NI? Seriously? Are you not aware that the author of that PESN article (Sterling Allan) once had a financial compensation agreement with Rossi? And that a year ago, Allan wrote "Rossi has been caught in some whopper lies...I apologize to anyone that I've encouraged to try and do business with Andrea Rossi, and I retract my endorsement." Now, a year later, Allen is again pumping Rossi. This is your credible news source???
Have you no awareness of the extensive investigation we have performed?
"Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat) Investigation Index"
Or Rossi's criminal history history?
Or our video of Rossi's demo that shows it is fake?
Steven B. Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times
Editor-in-Chief, 2011 Wiley Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia
"Will this venture actually pan out? The E-Cat reactors are so shrouded in secrecy and murky claims that it's hard to do a reality check, but most outside experts say that the concept just won't work."
Please look at our Rossi E-Cat timeline of events. There is no question about whether this venture will pan out. It has already fizzled out.
It is not hard to do a reality check. We went there with cameras and Rossi showed it to us. Then he did the calculations. It didn't match. The scientific evidence that showed his electrical heater was putting out as much steam as a normal electrical heater was simple to see.
What was and is not simple is his sophisticated manipulation of the public and the media including MSNBC.
Steven B. Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times
Editor-in-Chief, 2011 Wiley Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia