• Scientists develop fusion rocket technology in lab – and aim for Mars

    UW / MSNW

    An artist's conception shows a spacecraft powered by a fusion-driven rocket. In this image, the crew would be in the forward chamber, shielded from the fusion reactor toward the back. Solar panels on the sides would collect energy to initiate the process that creates a fusion reaction.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Researchers at the University of Washington say they've built all the pieces for a fusion-powered rocket system that could get a crew to Mars in 30 days. Now they just have to put the pieces together and see if they work.

    "If we can pull off a fusion demonstration in a year, with hundreds of thousands of dollars ... there might be a better, cheaper, faster path to using fusion in other applications," John Slough, a research assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, told NBC News.

    Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent on fusion energy research over the past half-century — at places like the National Ignition Facility in California, where scientists are zapping deuterium-tritium pellets with lasers; Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the home of the world's most powerful laboratory radiation source; and the ITER experimental facility in France, where the world's biggest magnetic plasma chamber is being built.

    So far, none of those multibillion-dollar projects have hit break-even, let alone the fusion jackpot. Timetables for the advent of fusion energy applications have repeatedly shifted to the right, reviving the old joke that the dawn of the fusion age will always be 30 years away.

    "The only answer to the 'always 30 years in the future' argument is that we simply demonstrate it," Slough said. And that's what he and his colleagues intend to do this summer, at their lab inside a converted warehouse in Redmond, Wash.

    Harnessing fusion
    It's obvious that nuclear fusion works: A prime example of the phenomenon can be seen every day, just 93 million miles away. Like other stars, our sun generates its power by combining lighter elements (like hydrogen) into heavier elements (like helium) under tremendous gravitational pressure. A tiny bit of mass from each nucleus is converted directly into energy, demonstrating the power of the equation E=mc2.

    Thermonuclear bombs operate on a similar principle. But it's not practical to set off bombs to produce peaceful energy, so how can the fusion reaction be controlled on a workable scale?

    Slough and his colleagues are working on a system that shoots ringlets of metal into a specially designed magnetic field. The ringlets collapse around a tiny droplet of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, compressing it so tightly that it produces a fusion reaction for a few millionths of a second. The reaction should result in a significant energy gain.

    "It has gain, that's why we're doing it," Slough said. "It's just that the form the energy takes at the end is hot, magnetized metal plasma. ... The problem in the past was, what would you use it for? Because it kinda blows up."

    That's where the magnetic field plays another role: In addition to compressing the metal rings around the deuterium target, the field would channel the spray of plasma out the back of the chamber, at a speed of up to 67,000 mph (30,000 meters per second). If a rocket ship could do that often enough — say, at least once a minute — Slough says you could send a human mission to Mars in one to three months, rather than the eight months it took to send NASA's Curiosity rover.

    UW / MSNW

    UW's Plasma Dynamics Lab has a vacuum chamber that is surrounded by two large, high-strength aluminum magnets. These magnets are powered by energy-storage capacitors that are connected by cables. The chamber is used to test a fusion-driven rocket technology.

    Next steps
    Slough's work at the University of Washington and a private-sector spin-off called MSNW has been supported by grants from the Department of Energy and NASA — including $600,000 from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept Program, or NIAC. So far, researchers have created the deuterium droplets and heated them up to fusion temperatures. They've also tested the magnetic system for crushing ringlets of aluminum. "Now we've got to do them both together and see that work," Slough said.

    The key experiments are due to take place starting in late summer, at the UW's Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond. If everything works, that would give the researchers the confidence to scale up the laboratory apparatus. For example, they'd use lithium rings instead of aluminum rings to increase the efficiency of the reaction.

    Even if Slough is successful, it's not clear how long it would take to turn the technology into a viable rocket system. Other plasma-based propulsion systems — such as the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR — have gone much further down the road of technology development. And some rocket scientists, such as the Mars Society's Robert Zubrin, think the whole idea of plasma propulsion is a potentially costly "hoax."

    Despite all that, Slough's work could help kill another old joke about fusion: that it's the power source of the future — and always will be. What do you think? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    More about fusion:

    For more about the fusion research being conducted at the UW Plasma Dynamics Lab, check out this news release from the University of Washington, as well as YouTube animations showing how the propulsion system's magnetic nozzle and ring compression process would work.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What's new on the fusion front?

    Boris Horvat / AFP - Getty Images

    A hardhat worker walks around the construction site for the ITER fusion experiment in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    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:

    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.

  • Fusion goes forward from the fringe

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    A Navy-funded effort to harness nuclear fusion power reports that its unconventional plasma device is operating as designed and generating "positive results" more than halfway through the project.

    The latest quarterly update from EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. comes amid other signs that seemingly oddball approaches to fusion research may not be all that oddball after all. Just last week, General Fusion announced that Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, was part of a $19.5 million investment round to further the company's plan to take advantage of a technology called magnetized target fusion. Another billionaire, Paul Allen, is an investor in Tri Alpha Energy, which is working on its own hush-hush fusion project (and occasionally publishing its research).

    EMC2 Fusion doesn't have tens of millions of venture capital to play with — but it does have a $7.9 million Navy contract to test a plasma technology known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also known as Polywell fusion. The idea is to accelerate positively charged ions in an electrical cage to such an extent that they occasionally spark a fusion reaction, releasing energy and neutrons. The concept was pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, and carried forward by the EMC2 Fusion team in Santa Fe, N.M.

    Some of the leading team members went on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on EMC2. Rick Nebel, the Los Alamos engineer who led the company since Bussard's death in 2007, retired from the company last November. Taking his place as acting chief executive officer is Jaeyoung Park. The 41-year-old physicist says he's given up his position at Los Alamos to focus fully on EMC2.

    "We had a lot of milestones to meet in the last six months or so," Park told me today. "It's been pretty hectic."

    Working on a Wiffle Ball
    The company currently employs eight or nine full-time technical staff members, and relies on about two dozen external consultants, Park said. The ultimate objective is to build a 100-megawatt demonstration fusion reactor, and Park hopes that the current small-scale experiment will show EMC2's scientists and their "customers" in the Navy whether this is realistic.

    "If this machine works as we hope it will work, it will probably establish a firm technical foundation," he said. "People may say, 'It's a big jump and you shouldn't be doing this.' But every year that the energy problem doesn't get solved ... costs tens of billions of dollars. Sometimes waiting too long is not a good thing. If you look at the solutions, you might say, 'Can we afford to wait?'"

    So how far along is EMC2? The current experiment is known as WB-8, which follows up on WB-5, 6 and 7. "WB" stands for "Wiffle Ball," which describes the spherical swiss-cheese look of the plasma containment cage. The $7.9 million contract covers work to see whether Bussard's fusion concept can be scaled up to a size capable of putting out more power than it consumes.

    Although fusion is the process behind the power of the sun and an exploding H-bomb, physicists have never been able to achieve a net energy gain in a controlled fusion reaction. But based on the experiments so far, Park thinks there's a chance that it could be done in a sufficiently large Wiffleball reactor, costing on the order of $100 million to $200 million. That sounds like a pretty good deal, especially in comparison with the $3.5 billion that's been spent so far on fusion research at the National Ignition Facility and the $20 billion expected to be spent on the international ITER fusion project.

    Driving the fusion Ferrari
    WB-8 didn't cost anywhere near that much. Park estimated that the parts alone cost on the order of $2 million, which he compared to the cost of a vintage Ferrari. "I'll take this machine any day over a Ferrari," he joked.

    "It's a very nice machine," he said. "I like what we have so far. It's quite well-built, relatively flexible to actually explore a lot of areas and find what's best. Achieving the plasma for fusion is obviously a tall order. ... You don't just push the pedal on a Ferrari and drive the car. Like an F-18 or a stealth bomber, you have to learn how to operate it properly."

    Park said that the WB-8 experiment was about 60 percent complete, which roughly matches how much of the $7.9 million has been spent so far. He acknowledged that EMC2 was originally aiming to finish the experiment by this time, but said the realities of government funding — including continuing resolutions, shutdown threats and other budgetary snags — have dictated a slower pace.

    "We decided at some point that it's not a good idea to follow the timeline directly, because if you follow the timeline and not the moneyline, you've got a big problem," he told me. "The reality is that we have to follow the timeline given by the funding profile rather than the timeline given by the date."

    The last little experiment?
    Park figures that the money provided under the WB-8 contract should last until the end of the year, depending on how efficiently the EMC2 team is able to stretch the money out. By then, the engineers in New Mexico and their backers in the Navy should know whether it's worth going ahead with the next step, perhaps even with the big demonstration reactor. Park hopes that WB-8 will be the last small-scale experimental machine EMC2 will have to build.

    "This machine should be able to generate 1,000 times more nuclear activity than WB-7, with about eight times more magnetic field," said Park, quoting the publicly available information about WB-8. "We'll call that a good success. That means we're on track with the scaling law."

    Don't expect weekly updates about EMC2's progress. "Currently all our funding comes from the Navy," Park said. "That's our customer. Our customer desired that we keep most of our progress confidential. ... They're somewhat concerned about making too much hype without delivering an actual product."

    But if WB-8 and the follow-up studies are successful, the Navy won't stand in EMC2's way. 

    "Our understanding is they want us to be successful," Park said. "They want us to provide something for our sponsors. They also want us to do well commercially as well, as long as we remain US-owned and control the technology."

    And if WB-8 fails?

    "Sometimes breakthroughs happen, and sometimes you can never solve it, and then maybe it's time to give up — at least for me," Park said. "But I can positively say I tried everything."

    More on the fusion quest:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.