Fusion: the energy of the future - think 50 years

DESLEY BLANCH : Nuclear fusion is what you might call the 'holy grail' of energy. Think back to high school physics class, and you may recall that today's nuclear energy is produced by splitting atoms. It's called nuclear fission, and it produces radioactive waste.

Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is where the nuclei of two atoms are fused into one. It would produce more energy, and is completely clean. There's no radioactive waste at all.

The problem is that at least until now, no one has figured out how to do it reliably.

So, it's Canberra to the rescue, where over 100 scientists from all over the world gathered in Australia to try to solve the problem.

Professor Boyd Blackwell co-chaired the conference. He's the director of the Australian Plasma Research Facility at the Australian National University, as he explained to ABC Radio's Waleed Aly the big picture of world energy.

WALEED ALY : Thanks to climate change the planet is desperately looking for a clean source of energy. Can you tell us if we could crack this, just how significant a breakthrough nuclear fusion would be?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Plasma fusion gives you essentially limitless energy from sea water and in the future lithium which is also rather abundant, not as abundant as sea water but there's tens-of-thousands of years in the short term, millions of years of energy with virtually no carbon impact and very little but I wouldn't say no radioactive waste, about 100 times less radioactive waste through incidental processes than nuclear fission.

WALEED ALY : And when you say limitless, you can't really mean that can you. There has to be some kind of limit doesn't there?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Well, there would be, but I think the world's approaching its capacity for population fairly rapidly, so assuming that the world population live at about the standard that the first world live right now, then we can only consume energy at a reasonable rate and we will be sensible and reduce our energy consumption, it might take a while for people to do that, but already a lot of progress has been made in that direction. So there are limits on how much we use, but the amount of energy available will supply a huge population on the earth beyond its capacity I guess for 10,000 years with the technology that we're working on right now and a million years for the technology of the next generation, that would deuterium, deuterium fusion.

WALEED ALY : So what does that mean? Does it mean we shutdown all the power plants that we've got, all the electricity plants, coal we don't need to worry about, we don't need to worry about nuclear power plants as they currently are that they're reconfigured to fusion. Basically the whole energy debate just goes away?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : That's right, that's right. There's no reason why we should have a mix of renewables and base load. One of the things about fusion power is that say a base load source, it's always there on tap as much as you want when you want it and so it's a good complement to the renewable such as solar and wind.

Now we can't just switch off the coal stations, we can't just switch off the fission reactors because it will take 50 to 100 years to replace all those reactors, because people will expect their investment to be returned and unless someone's willing to put in lots of money to repay the people who've invested in those power stations, they're not going to switch them off straight away and we can't build power stations quickly enough, so talking about a transition time, make a difference in 50 years and make a very big difference in 100 years.

WALEED ALY : If I remember back to my high school project on this and it was a cracker let me tell you Professor Blackwell. But the problem here is that you have -- to try to fuse atoms there's sort of a natural repulsion that exists between the atoms, so you have to overcome that and the way to overcome that is by applying energy, which means lots and lots and lots of heat and we just haven't been able to figure out a way to generate high enough temperatures or at least not do so safely. Am I right so far?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Well, the main obstacle I think can be simplified to saying that we have to take one gram of plasma which is the fourth state of matter that we discussed and we have to hold it for one second, that sounds easy, but the problem is at 100 million degrees.

WALEED ALY : Yeah, right. So how do you create that sort of temperature? Is the problem just creating it or is the problem creating it safely?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : No, it can be reasonably easily, then there's really no safety aspect, anything like nuclear fission of the old generation, because new generation nuclear fission is a lot safer. 

But it's quite simple. We basically use the principle of a microwave oven, just a very big one, and so we use waves which are invisible to us, but carry energy and then we aim the waves at the plasma. We make the waves resonate with the plasma particles by choosing the right frequency and the trick at least from our point of view, the trick is to create a magic force field which is a magnetic field which holds these particles in place without letting the heat escape. So we launch waves into a magnetic field; so it's like putting a magnet in your microwave oven, but on a very big scale.

WALEED ALY : Okay, you make it sound reasonably simple. What's the hold up?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Well, one of the problems is chaos. The problem is magnetic fields can break into a chaotic shape, particularly when you try to make them efficiently in a three dimensional reactor. The present program is to make a doughnut-shaped plasma which to our listeners will sound like it's three dimensional. But if it's a perfect doughnut, it actually is from a physics and a mathematical point of view two dimensional, so it's living in a two dimensional world.

When you make a real reactor that's economical and lasts a long time and can be maintained remotely, then you can't keep that doughnut perfectly symmetric in its shape, so it will have lumps in it, where you have connections and access ports and so on. So you know move to a three dimensional world and that's one of the subjects of our conference. How do you make these two dimensional idealised machines work in the three dimensional world?

WALEED ALY : This is obviously a challenge that's before you. I gather you must be making some kind of progress; otherwise this sort of conference wouldn't happen if it was just a pipe dream that was really in the realms of science fiction. How far away do you think we are from developing the kind of technology that might actually solve this problem?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Well, I guess there are two stages. The first stage which is well underway now in Europe in an international effort is making this doughnut-type machine but a little bit three dimensional, a little bit practical and that will produce results one or the other in less than 20 years. 

So that's 500 million watts which isn't that much, but it's a serious amount of power that will give investors confidence these final demonstration type reactors which are maybe a factor of two to ten times larger in power capacity. They'll all happen in another 20 or 30 years after that. So once a demonstration reactor is done, then the various companies that make them hopefully will start to mass produce them.

WALEED ALY : So 50 years before that point?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Yes, but as I said before, it's got to be a gradual role in because practically speaking, we have so many power plants. Several each week are being built in China. The world needs so many power plants to support the existing population to a reasonable level of comfort, so it's going to take a long time to turn enough power plants out.

WALEED ALY : But being asked to invest in something that is that long range and may well not bear any fruit. It's got to be hard to raise funds for this, doesn't it?

PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Yes, there have been a couple of investors in the US that have pulled out, but there are still some private investors in the US, Tri Alpha Corporation for example who has employed a couple of our students, our graduate students are still going strong. 

I guess the thing that you have to keep in mind is that this is the biggest pay off that you can imagine. The world is really energy hungry and it's willing to pay a lot for that energy. This is more or less free energy from the point of view of power stations in a long term, because the cost of fuel is zero. The energy cost is not zero and it'll be similar in cost to the already escalating price of fossil fuel energy, solar energy and so on.

DESLEY BLANCH: Professor Boyd Blackwell is the Director of the Australian Plasma Research Facility at the Australian National University in Canberra where he has co-chaired a conference there that if it's successful could just change the world. He was speaking with Waleed Aly from ABC Radio.

Source: radioaustralia.net.au

Provcence in southern France, known for its picturesque villas and vineyards, is also home to a vast building site - about the size of 60 soccer pitches.

Before work began in 2007, the dead-flat 42ha platform at Cadarache, about an hour's drive from the French Riviera, was forested. Now it is set to become one of the biggest nuclear research facilities in the world.

In all, says my guide Topher White, 90ha of woods have been cleared, something he suggests has been accomplished with a certain ruthless efficiency.

Czytaj więcej...

Whether it’s the 21st Century’s version of Stars Wars is yet to be seen. But advocates of nuclear fusion are saying that it would be life-changing while politicos are helping to bring it one step closer to reality.  

Fusion is responsible for powering the sun and stars. So, the ultimate goal is to imitate that process on earth. Indeed, the countries bankrolling the science hope to have a reactor erected in France by 2019 -- one that could be replicated so as to produce electricity at commercial scale. To that end, the European Commission has drafted a plan to inject $1.7 billion into the so-called international nuclear fusion project, or ITER, to 2018. 

Czytaj więcej...

The supercomputer is operational according to schedule at the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC) hosted by the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA) in Rokkasho, Japan. The machine that was manufactured by Bull and whose mission is to perform complex calculations for plasma physics and fusion technology, has passed its acceptance tests achieving 1,132 Petaflop LINPACK performance. The Computer Simulation Centre (CSC), where “Helios” operates, is an important component of Europe’s contribution to the Broader Approach (BA), an agreement signed between Europe and Japan to complement the ITER project through various R&D activities in the field of nuclear fusion. The European participation to the BA is coordinated by Fusion for Energy (F4E), the European Union organisation managing Europe’s contribution to ITER. The supercomputer was provided by France as a part of its voluntary contribution to the BA, through a contract between the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA) and Bull.

The acceptance tests of the supercomputer were carried out between 13-22 December 2011 in Rokkasho, Japan. The tight construction schedule was successfully met offsetting any disruptions caused by the great East-Japan earthquake in March 2011. It’s a first for a large piece of equipment stemming from an international scientific collaboration, to be procured by a European team and get assembled in Japan. The installation of the equipment was completed in early December and by the end of the month a 1.132 Petaflops LINPACK[1] performance was achieved, ranking “Helios” on the fifth position of the TOP-500 November 2011 list.

The operation of the supercomputer will kick off with four high-visibility runs otherwise known as “light-house projects” which are expected to shed light on plasma calculations. From January to March 2012, the four selected codes will run one at a time to test-drive the capacities of the supercomputer and achieve maximum performance. The first call for proposals has attracted high numbers from both European and Japanese researchers, and submissions are under review. It is expected that routine operation will start in April 2012.

Based on the number of proposals submitted to the first call, there has been an oversubscription by a factor of three of the computer’s time, demonstrating the great interest from the European and Japanese fusion communities to use the supercomputer facility. The majority of proposals address issues related to plasma physics (turbulence, MHD, edge physics and integrated modeling) together with an important number of proposals addressing technology issues. Click here to view the distribution chart.

Sorce: F4E

During one busy weekend in January, while plasma operations had paused, another upgrade was installed on JET. The item in question is called a 'collimator'. It weighs about 2 tonnes and it is made of layers of lead and polythene, contained in a stainless steel envelope.

To understand what a collimator is, consider when you were a child and your mother gave you a cardboard tube to play with. You probably put it to your eye and looked through it, pretending that it was a telescope. Of course it does not magnify the image that you see, but it simply limits your field of view, blocking out the surrounding bigger picture. This toy telescope is really a collimator. The main difference between this and JET's new collimator is that light is stopped by a thin layer of card, but the energetic neutrons from the JET plasma need layers of high density lead and of low density, hydrogen rich, polythene to slow them down.

The installation process was almost like an exercise in choreography. Different teams of people were required to complete the work at precisely scheduled times. The shielding doors had to be opened and the shielding beams lifted. 4,000 tonnes of concrete has to be moved to achieve this! The main crane was then able to carry the collimator and its stand into the torus hall. The crane operations team, the 'riggers' had to be ready. A team of scaffolders built a tower a few metres high, for the team of fitters to work from. First the stand was lifted into place and bolted to an existing component. The positions of the feet were then marked on the concrete floor and the stand was lifted away so that the floor could be drilled. Then the stand was re-installed, bolted into position, and the collimator lifted into position, aligned and secured.

Source: efda.org