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**Biting the hand that feeds IT**

Original URL: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/nuclear_fusion/>

**Nuclear fusion: power to the people?**

By Charles Arthur (feedback at theregister.co.uk)

Published Wednesday 6th July 2005 11:40 GMT

**Analysis** It\'s G8 week, and climate change is high on the agenda.
And now that even George Bush has acknowledged that climate change is
(a) happening and (b) is at least partly due to humans
[(]{.underline}<http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0,13365,1521149,00.html>[)]{.underline}
but insisted it (c) should be tackled through technology, why not focus
again on a technology that\'s (1) happening and (2) partly controlled by
humans?

That is, nuclear fusion. Unlike fission, already used to produce most of
France\'s electricity, fusion isn\'t commercial yet. Even its most
positive advocates reckon it\'ll be more than 25 years before a fusion
reactor could contribute usefully to the power grid (\"useful\" being
defined as a steady output of 1 gigawatt; the UK has about 42 GW of
installed electric plant).

But it does have one very important advocate, and another who is coming
along for the ride, and they\'re both G8 leaders. The advocate: Tony
Blair. The one along for the ride: George Bush. Plus it also involves
two other G8 nations, France and Japan, directly, as they\'ll get tons
of money from contracts to build the next stage in the long, long road
to commercial fusion.

Last week France was chosen as the site for the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
[(]{.underline}<http://www.iter.org/index.htm>[)]{.underline} (Iter)
project, beating Japan\'s bid. If it works, ITER will take in 50
megawatts of power and put out between 500 and 1,000 MW. That\'s right -
it could power itself.

Here\'s how. Fusion is what powers the stars. They burn by slamming two
hydrogen nuclei (protons) together, to produce a helium nucleus (two
protons) and some extra particles. (See the whole system here
[(]{.underline}<http://www.astronomynotes.com/starsun/s3.htm>[)]{.underline}.)

On Earth, we cheat a little
[(]{.underline}<http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/fusion.html>[)]{.underline}
by fusing a nucleus of deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron aboard) with
one of tritium (hydrogen with two neutrons), to produce a helium nucleus
plus lots of energy in the form of a \"fast\" neutron. Simple on paper;
fiendishly hard in practice. You have to heat the material to about 100
million Centigrade until it becomes \"plasma\", confine it using
magnetic fields, and compress it so fiercely that you overcome the
natural tendency of nuclei to repel each other as fiercely as Steve
Ballmer encountering an iPod.

Deuterium is plentiful. There\'s enough in a bath to generate all the
energy you\'d need in your lifetime. Tritium is trickier, produced
either from deuterium fusion, or other decay products. It\'s used
(<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/20/the_truth_about_tritium/>) in
nuclear weapons, exit signs that work without power, and some
illuminated watches
(<http://www.timezone.com/library/archives/archives631704126660375902>).

If you can control the fusion reaction and keep it going, you produce
huge amounts of \"fast\" neutrons which heat up the reactor vessel. That
heat can produce steam which can turn turbines to generate electricity.
Nuclear waste? Well, the reactor walls might be a little radioactive
after you stop; but in 10 years\' time you could reuse the parts in
another reactor. Tritium is poisonous, but wouldn\'t get out. And the
reaction can\'t run away like fission can; if the magnetic \"bottle\"
fails, the reaction stops.

**Big science**

The politics similarly involves bashing people\'s heads together at
sufficient pressure to produce a solid project and a fast-moving
schedule to make it happen. For years fusion was on the slow track.
That\'s because it\'s big science, and thus big politics are involved to
make it happen. Although the Joint European Torus
(<http://www.jet.efda.org/>) project in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, managed
to generate 80 per cent of the power put into it - falling just short of
being self-sustaining - it demonstrated what could be done. In 1985
Ronald Reagan signed an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev to work towards
ITER, with the aim of producing a prototype commercial reactor this
century.

But in 1998 Bill Clinton\'s administration withdrew from ITER, citing
costs, and the US began going it alone with its own FIRE fusion project
(<http://fire.pppl.gov/fire_program.htm>).

And ITER will cost. The budget is estimated at \$12bn - shared between
Europe, the US, China, Korea, Japan and Russia - and a lifespan of about
30 years. Then again, that\'s only £6.6bn at present exchange rates.
That would buy you a British national ID card scheme; in fact Britain\'s
share is much less, and it could even generate £100m of revenues for
British businesses
(<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/07/03/cnfusion03.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2005/07/03/ixcity.html>)
annually.

But what\'s remarkable is how fusion has abruptly moved up the agenda.
It\'s not for scientific reasons though, but politics. And it comes down
to one person: Tony Blair. He\'s come under pressure at home from
Professor Sir David King, the government\'s chief scientific adviser, to
do something on climate change. In 2001, he headed a European panel
looking for a fast-track to fusion, and concluded
(<http://fire.pppl.gov/eu_fast_track_101201.pdf>) (PDF) it was feasible.
The problem is that renewables like wind, waves and solar can\'t cover
the energy shortfall once the UK\'s nuclear power stations go offline
around 2020; presently fission produces 25 per cent of the UK\'s
electricity.

Building more nuclear fission stations looks the easy option, but
Margaret Beckett, at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs, hates them and talks them down as fiercely as King talks them
up. She sees them as vote-losers because nuclear waste disposal gives
environmental groups a stick to beat Government with. By contrast, the
only criticism (though it\'s a zinger) environmental groups like
Greenpeace have of fusion is that it\'s a lot of money that could be
spent subsidising or building renewables now.

That makes fusion the politically acceptable solution. Professor King
likes it, Beckett doesn\'t dislike it, and the greens can\'t hang you
for it. So two years ago at a Camp David summit Blair himself persuaded
Bush to rejoin ITER and stop funding FIRE. (In such ways is political
goodwill generated by supporting the US over Iraq recouped.)

So, note a key passage in Dubya\'s interview with ITN about how to get
around climate change: \"If people want to come together and share
technologies and develop technologies and jointly spend - and spend
money on research and development, just like the United States is, to
help us diversify away from fossil fuels, \[I am\] more than willing to
discuss it. I know we need more nuclear power in order - nuclear power,
after all, is not dependent on fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse
gases.\"

Note he doesn\'t specify what sort of nuclear power, and how he does
emphasise coming together on R&D; though the US did oppose the siting of
ITER in France, preferring the rival site, Japan, which would thus have
got the guaranteed construction jobs and contracts. Why? Well, which
country supported the US on its Iraq adventure, and which didn\'t? As we
said - politics, not science, rules here.

But once the politicians have gone away, ITER\'s scientists can get on
with the task. Which isn\'t trivial. But right now they\'re as happy as
dogs with two tails, especially compared to a few years ago when it
seemed the entire fusion project would run into the dirt. The arrival of
climate change as a political hot potato has given their cause new fuel,
and they\'re burning it as quickly as possible.

**Big question**

The big question is, can it work? Can \"hot\" fusion ever be commercial?
We\'ll deal with that in just a moment. But first, some think that
commercial fusion is much closer than grand projects like ITER make it
seem. For them, cold fusion never went away, just went underground, much
like its \"hot\" sibling. The publication in April of a letter in the
science journal Nature by a team at UCLA who apparently achieved
small-scale fusion (<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7654627/>[)]{.underline} in
a laboratory has had some people agog.

The trouble is that it\'s not going to generate cheap electricity. It
seems to work, but doesn\'t scale: you can\'t get more energy out than
you put in. So this crystal-based technique could produce fast neutrons,
for radiotherapy or X-ray machines; but not a power generator. \"It\'s
very interesting, but it\'s not a power source,\" says Chris Carpenter,
spokesman at JET. \"These small-scale things aren\'t viable because they
don\'t scale up.\"

For that, you need something like ITER - because hot fusion does scale,
gloriously. ITER will only be twice the size of JET, yet should generate
more than 75 times as much power.

And the potential? \"You have an energy market that\'s worth about \$3
trillion worldwide annually, and electricity is one-third of that,\"
says Carpenter. \"If we invest big now in fusion, then it could pay off.
OK, perhaps it won\'t work; in that case we\'ve found out sooner, and we
can try something else to generate the power we need. We aren\'t saying
fusion is the only option. But it\'s probably the only non-polluting,
large-scale option.\"

But what\'s changed since JET was built to make it any more likely that
fusion won\'t remain forever 30 years in the future? The materials, says
Carpenter, and the computers. From helium-cooled superconducting magnets
to tungsten chamber walls to supercomputers that can calculate how the
plasma will behave far more accurately and quickly than ever before, the
pieces are all there, waiting for the politicians to sign off the
cheques and shake hands.

Sorry, by the way, if you thought that solving the world\'s energy
problems was about something as trivial as *science*. As might be clear,
it\'s really all politics.

And finally: fusion scientists have managed to get all this cash without
enlisting Sir Bob Geldof or getting Pink Floyd to reform. Imagine if
they had: we\'d probably all have fusion-powered cars by now. ®

**Related stories**

France wins billion dollar fusion research plant
(<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/29/france_fusion_win/> )

UCLA demonstrates desktop nuclear fusion
[(]{.underline}<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/28/desktop_nuclear_fusion/>[)]{.underline}

The truth about tritium
(<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/20/the_truth_about_tritium/>

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