The U.S. Department of Energy explains that fusion is combining two atoms of hydrogen together and releasing energy. The easiest fusion reaction is to combine deuterium with tritium to produce helium and a neutron. That neutron can be conveniently directed at lithium to produce more tritium. One out of every 6500 atoms of hydrogen in ordinary water is deuterium, giving a gallon of water the energy content of 300 gallons of gasoline.
Over the past year and a half, I have been writing 'Butterflies Escape', a novel about the world's simultaneous energy and food crisis. (It is nearly complete.) Throughout this time, I have been in continual research on nuclear fusion and other forms of energy. Almost every researcher discusses yet another laser, or super magnet that will hopefully allow containment of the plasma. The world has never been able to sustain nuclear fusion, nor even obtain more energy out the reactor than is supplied to it. This is after 60 years of research.
After reviewing another story today, Proposed laser ignition fusion/fission hybrid commercial power by 2030, I am reminded of the play, Waiting for Godot. If you remember, there are two characters who wait for Godot to appear, but he never does. They further admit if Godot did show up, they would not recognize him. In a literary comic moment, they despair and botch a suicide attempt when one of the character's belt breaks.
I am beginning to believe that Samuel Beckett was really writing about the world's wait for nuclear fusion. Every 10 years, researchers tell us that we are just 20 years away from energy nirvana. Yes, nuclear fusion would fix all of our problems in the world, but so would the perpetual motion machine.
The reason we don't have commercial fusion online contributing electrical energy to our power grids today isn't technical, it's political and economics.
The fossil fuel companies have a huge vested interest in fusion power not being brought online commercially.
They have huge profits that enable them to buy legislators on a whim.
The end result is that they minimize research funding, and make sure that where it does occur it is directed at the least likely candidates.
Laser ignited inertial confinement fusion requires technology that simply doesn't exist. The power levels involved are so huge that the machine is self-destructive in short order. Lasers are not terribly efficient and they are not easily focused to the degree required for laser initiated fusion, particularly at those power levels.
Conventional Tokamak fusion could be brought online almost immediately IF we were willing to commit huge resources to it, but conventional Tokamak's would not produce power that is economically competitive without major improvements.
The reason for this is that conventional Tokamak's confinement abilities scale with size; while it is possible to scale existing designs sufficient to produce power, the huge superconductive magnets required would be incredibly expensive to produce. It wouldn't be practical on a scale of less than about five gigawatts, and our antiquated electrical grid is largely incapable of absorbing this amount of power at any one location.
To give you an idea of scale of research funding; ITER which was to be an international test reactor to test materials and technology at commercial power levels; the commitment the US made to it over a 25 year project lifetime was less than what we spend on two days oil imports.
So existing conventional Tokamak isn't economically viable, and we're not funding research sufficiently to make it viable.
However; there ARE alternatives; the British developed START and MAST, spherical (short aspect ratio) Tokamak reactors that achieved confinement effectiveness approximately 3x better than conventional Tokamak's The team that designed START and MAST, both of which outperformed design specifications, went on to design a commercial power reactor that would be approximately 600MW, about the same as a conventional nuclear fission power reactor, and they included the ability to replace the copper core easily (which is subject to neutron embriddlement over time).
Their design would cost less to build than an equivalent sized nuclear fission plant, and yet, it remains unfunded while ITER, a 25 billion fusion money toilet project is funded.
Then there is the Bussard Polywell reactor, an ingenious design that replaces the wire grids of the Farnsworth Fusor with a polyhedral magnetic field that steers electrons to produce virtual grids.
It accelerates particles through an electrostatic field to collide in the center. Because electrons weigh 1/2000th of a proton but have an equivalent but opposite charge, they are 2000 times easier to confine magnetically than hydrogen nuclei, and 4000 and 6000 times easier than deuterium and tritium nuclei, making the confinement much easier to achieve than with a Tokamak.
The electrostatic field created then confines and accelerates the nuclei. Because the energy imparted is controlled and fixed, the nuclei are all accelerated to the ideal energy instead of a bell shaped distribution of energies centered around the ideal.
This allows the Polywell reactor to achieve energies necessary for aneutronic fuels such as hydrogen-boron that produce no radio active waste rather than deuterium-tritium that produces neutrons and neutron activation of reactor components.
After funding the last in a series of seven research reactors that was to be the final test reactor before a power reactor was built, the Navy took the whole project out of public view so we can no longer see the results of this research.
This technology has the potential to bring controlled nuclear fusion online in five years or less if it were adequately funded and available to the private sector rather than just to the military.
The real news is that the reactors are extremely cheap, costing less than 25 million to build, about 1/1000th of our original commitment to ITER. These could not only extremely power our country but even third world countries could afford them.
There are other less developed candidates such as the levitated dipole and Z-pinch machines that also could be viable paths if only they had adequate funding to further their development.
Unfortunately, vested interests, oil companies and the banks that fund them, an the US military-industrial complex, all exert great pressure on congress to make sure this doesn't happen.
Posted by: Robert Dinse | December 15, 2008 at 05:10 AM
The reason we don't have commercial fusion online contributing electrical energy to our power grids today isn't technical, it's political and economics.
The fossil fuel companies have a huge vested interest in fusion power not being brought online commercially.
They have huge profits that enable them to buy legislators on a whim.
The end result is that they minimize research funding, and make sure that where it does occur it is directed at the least likely candidates.
Laser ignited inertial confinement fusion requires technology that simply doesn't exist. The power levels involved are so huge that the machine is self-destructive in short order. Lasers are not terribly efficient and they are not easily focused to the degree required for laser initiated fusion, particularly at those power levels.
Conventional Tokamak fusion could be brought online almost immediately IF we were willing to commit huge resources to it, but conventional Tokamak's would not produce power that is economically competitive without major improvements.
The reason for this is that conventional Tokamak's confinement abilities scale with size; while it is possible to scale existing designs sufficient to produce power, the huge superconductive magnets required would be incredibly expensive to produce. It wouldn't be practical on a scale of less than about five gigawatts, and our antiquated electrical grid is largely incapable of absorbing this amount of power at any one location.
To give you an idea of scale of research funding; ITER which was to be an international test reactor to test materials and technology at commercial power levels; the commitment the US made to it over a 25 year project lifetime was less than what we spend on two days oil imports.
So existing conventional Tokamak isn't economically viable, and we're not funding research sufficiently to make it viable.
However; there ARE alternatives; the British developed START and MAST, spherical (short aspect ratio) Tokamak reactors that achieved confinement effectiveness approximately 3x better than conventional Tokamak's The team that designed START and MAST, both of which outperformed design specifications, went on to design a commercial power reactor that would be approximately 600MW, about the same as a conventional nuclear fission power reactor, and they included the ability to replace the copper core easily (which is subject to neutron embriddlement over time).
Their design would cost less to build than an equivalent sized nuclear fission plant, and yet, it remains unfunded while ITER, a 25 billion fusion money toilet project is funded.
Then there is the Bussard Polywell reactor, an ingenious design that replaces the wire grids of the Farnsworth Fusor with a polyhedral magnetic field that steers electrons to produce virtual grids.
It accelerates particles through an electrostatic field to collide in the center. Because electrons weigh 1/2000th of a proton but have an equivalent but opposite charge, they are 2000 times easier to confine magnetically than hydrogen nuclei, and 4000 and 6000 times easier than deuterium and tritium nuclei, making the confinement much easier to achieve than with a Tokamak.
The electrostatic field created then confines and accelerates the nuclei. Because the energy imparted is controlled and fixed, the nuclei are all accelerated to the ideal energy instead of a bell shaped distribution of energies centered around the ideal.
This allows the Polywell reactor to achieve energies necessary for aneutronic fuels such as hydrogen-boron that produce no radio active waste rather than deuterium-tritium that produces neutrons and neutron activation of reactor components.
After funding the last in a series of seven research reactors that was to be the final test reactor before a power reactor was built, the Navy took the whole project out of public view so we can no longer see the results of this research.
This technology has the potential to bring controlled nuclear fusion online in five years or less if it were adequately funded and available to the private sector rather than just to the military.
The real news is that the reactors are extremely cheap, costing less than 25 million to build, about 1/1000th of our original commitment to ITER. These could not only extremely power our country but even third world countries could afford them.
There are other less developed candidates such as the levitated dipole and Z-pinch machines that also could be viable paths if only they had adequate funding to further their development.
Unfortunately, vested interests, oil companies and the banks that fund them, an the US military-industrial complex, all exert great pressure on congress to make sure this doesn't happen.
Posted by: Robert Dinse | December 15, 2008 at 05:11 AM
The reason we don't have commercial fusion online contributing electrical energy to our power grids today isn't technical, it's political and economics.
The fossil fuel companies have a huge vested interest in fusion power not being brought online commercially.
They have huge profits that enable them to buy legislators on a whim.
The end result is that they minimize research funding, and make sure that where it does occur it is directed at the least likely candidates.
Laser ignited inertial confinement fusion requires technology that simply doesn't exist. The power levels involved are so huge that the machine is self-destructive in short order. Lasers are not terribly efficient and they are not easily focused to the degree required for laser initiated fusion, particularly at those power levels.
Conventional Tokamak fusion could be brought online almost immediately IF we were willing to commit huge resources to it, but conventional Tokamak's would not produce power that is economically competitive without major improvements.
The reason for this is that conventional Tokamak's confinement abilities scale with size; while it is possible to scale existing designs sufficient to produce power, the huge superconductive magnets required would be incredibly expensive to produce. It wouldn't be practical on a scale of less than about five gigawatts, and our antiquated electrical grid is largely incapable of absorbing this amount of power at any one location.
To give you an idea of scale of research funding; ITER which was to be an international test reactor to test materials and technology at commercial power levels; the commitment the US made to it over a 25 year project lifetime was less than what we spend on two days oil imports.
So existing conventional Tokamak isn't economically viable, and we're not funding research sufficiently to make it viable.
However; there ARE alternatives; the British developed START and MAST, spherical (short aspect ratio) Tokamak reactors that achieved confinement effectiveness approximately 3x better than conventional Tokamak's The team that designed START and MAST, both of which outperformed design specifications, went on to design a commercial power reactor that would be approximately 600MW, about the same as a conventional nuclear fission power reactor, and they included the ability to replace the copper core easily (which is subject to neutron embriddlement over time).
Their design would cost less to build than an equivalent sized nuclear fission plant, and yet, it remains unfunded while ITER, a 25 billion fusion money toilet project is funded.
Then there is the Bussard Polywell reactor, an ingenious design that replaces the wire grids of the Farnsworth Fusor with a polyhedral magnetic field that steers electrons to produce virtual grids.
It accelerates particles through an electrostatic field to collide in the center. Because electrons weigh 1/2000th of a proton but have an equivalent but opposite charge, they are 2000 times easier to confine magnetically than hydrogen nuclei, and 4000 and 6000 times easier than deuterium and tritium nuclei, making the confinement much easier to achieve than with a Tokamak.
The electrostatic field created then confines and accelerates the nuclei. Because the energy imparted is controlled and fixed, the nuclei are all accelerated to the ideal energy instead of a bell shaped distribution of energies centered around the ideal.
This allows the Polywell reactor to achieve energies necessary for aneutronic fuels such as hydrogen-boron that produce no radio active waste rather than deuterium-tritium that produces neutrons and neutron activation of reactor components.
After funding the last in a series of seven research reactors that was to be the final test reactor before a power reactor was built, the Navy took the whole project out of public view so we can no longer see the results of this research.
This technology has the potential to bring controlled nuclear fusion online in five years or less if it were adequately funded and available to the private sector rather than just to the military.
The real news is that the reactors are extremely cheap, costing less than 25 million to build, about 1/1000th of our original commitment to ITER. These could not only extremely power our country but even third world countries could afford them.
There are other less developed candidates such as the levitated dipole and Z-pinch machines that also could be viable paths if only they had adequate funding to further their development.
Unfortunately, vested interests, oil companies and the banks that fund them, an the US military-industrial complex, all exert great pressure on congress to make sure this doesn't happen.
Posted by: Robert Dinse | December 15, 2008 at 05:11 AM
Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead. -- Poor Richard's Almanac
The problem with conspiracy theories of this sort (even on a techno-thriller website) is that, according to the theory, a lone maverick with a couple of million dollars can steal a march on the entire industry. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet.
I watched the late Dr. Bussard's presentation on Polywell which he gave at Google.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
His enthusiasm was infectious. I expect that the Navy isn't the only player working with this scheme-- the published data are sufficient for China or some other entity to re-create the work. So the stakes are much too high to simply bury the technology.
Let me put it another way: while I am confident that both government and corporate leaders are perfidious enough to want to squelch new technologies that threaten the status quo, I am equally confident that they are not COMPETENT to do so without botching it. No matter how many black helicopters they have...
Posted by: CharlesT | December 15, 2008 at 06:36 AM
The Livermore LIFE concept is about 10% fusion and 90% fission. It is difficult to see how this can compete with conventional fission reactors.In this fusion-fission hybrid system the laser fusion gain can be small and would not endanger the lasers from being toasted by the photon flash of the micro-explosion. A small gain can be used for weapons simulation, but not for a fusion reactor where a gain of 10^3 is needed. The easy achievement of fusion with a fission bomb trigger demonstrates that it is the "driver", respectively the small driver energy of lasers, which is the problem. The available small driver energy results in the need to make complicated highly spherical symmetric targets to avoid RT instabilities. For sufficiently large driver energies the target can be rather simple. This means that the research should be focussed to find a much more powerful driver, not as powerful as a fission explosion, of course. One possible solution, I think, is in the attainment gigavolt-gigajoule electric pulse power, as in my proposed super Marx generator. With it one might be able to ignite deuterium, as it was achieved in the 10 Megaton fission triggered Mike test, but with a much smaller yield, 100 tons per micro-explosion, for example.
Posted by: Friedwardt Winterberg | January 16, 2009 at 11:44 PM
The fusion-fission hybrid design lowers the level of fusion that is required to be useful. Fusion just becomes an efficient means of generating the neutrons to burn the fission cleanly. A fusion neutron source can burn 99.9% of the fission blanket. (100-300 times more efficient than current nuclear reactors.) Most of "nuclear waste" is unburned fuel so the hybrid would not only generate almost no waste but burn the old waste and burn the 700,000+ tons of depleted uranium. Also, there is less need for enrichment and preparation of material for the blanket.
So if it is taking 50 years for ITER to get to 50-1000 times energy gain then the hybrid approach could be done a lot sooner as it only needs about 2-4 times the energy gain from the fusion part.
Just making better fission reactors is another option. Liquid Flouride thorium reactors also can achieve 99.9% burn.
Developing a design that can be factory mass produced will lower costs.
China may have the money and will to achieve a similar infrastructure with factory mass produced high temperature reactors of about 200 MW in size. They start building a full scale 200 MW reactor this year to follow their 10 MW version. They could get up to 4-8 times more fuel efficiency out of that type of reactor or with deep burn redesign up to 50-65% onsite fuel burn. They may have to make offsite reprocessing to achieve a closed fuel cycle. Achieving true deep burn is only necessary when we have trouble getting the amount of uranium/thorium each year that we need. We can scale up first and then follow a few decades later with the efficient fuel designs and handling although scaling deep burn first would be preferred.
Actually there are groups who are indicating that we are only a few years away from break even and even commercial fusion reactors.
General fusion thinks within 3-5 years they can demonstrate breakeven (steam punk fusion, privately funded. second round raised. Magnetized target fusion variant. Featured in Popular Mechanics)
Tri-alpha energy. Funded for $50 million privately. Working colliding beam fusion. 5-8 year timeframe.
Bussard fusion as noted has gotten some more navy money for inertial electrostatic fusion.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. Dense Plasma focus fusion method got $1.2 million to experimentally validate their approach over 2 years.
Winterberg had many interesting papers and proposals for fusion. I have written them up on my site. There does not seem to be funding for them for whatever reason.
Mass produced better fission or fission/fusion hybrids or even pure fusion if things pan out. But the situation is not if pure fusion does not pan out that we would have nothing.
Posted by: Brian Wang | January 22, 2009 at 09:39 AM