US to halt nuclear fusion project

Amidst a prolonged stalemate over where to build the world's largest nuclear fusion facility, the US is halting work on a homegrown fusion project. The decision caused concern among researchers at a fusion meeting earlier this week.

The US is pinning its hopes on ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), which aims to lay the groundwork for using nuclear fusion as an inexhaustible and clean energy source.

But the project has been stalled since December 2003 because its six members - the US, the European Union, China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia – cannot agree on where to build the facility. The EU, China, and Russia favour the French city of Cadarache, while the US, South Korea, and Japan back the Japanese town of Rokkashomura.

The deadlock has persisted even after both the EU and Japan sweetened their offers in June, each agreeing to pay half of ITER's estimated $5 billion construction costs to host the reactor. And rumours have spread that some parties might splinter off to build the reactor on their own.

Now, the standoff has lasted so long that the US has reached a deadline on another fusion project. The deadline was set in 2002 by a committee advising the US Department of Energy (DOE) to proceed with a smaller project called FIRE (Fusion Ignition Research Experiment) if ITER negotiations had stalled by July 2004.

Planning for FIRE was actually begun in 1998, when the US Congress directed the DOE to pull out of ITER. Since then about 50 researchers have been working on a "preconceptual" design for FIRE. But the approximately $2 million annual budget for this will come to an end in September.

In 2003, the US rejoined ITER, and now the DOE says FIRE will not serve as an alternative even if ITER falls through.

"We do not have a backup plan," Anne Davies, director of the DOE's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, told New Scientist. "We are focused on making ITER work. If ITER doesn't work, we are going to have a lot of reassessing to do."

Davies said FIRE's use of copper magnets - instead of superconducting ones like ITER - was "dead-end" technology that would not lead as quickly to the goal of a fusion power plant.

She added that Congress would probably balk at building the $1 billion FIRE reactor without international partners, and that such partners might not want to sign onto a project whose plan was already so well established.

FIRE's design team leader Dale Meade, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, agrees that ITER should take top priority.

But during public comments at a meeting of the DOE's fusion energy sciences advisory committee near Washington, DC, this week, he urged the government to reconsider its decision to scrap FIRE as a backup.

"I was reminding them we were ready if called upon," he told New Scientist. If ITER negotiations fail, he says, "we might have to take a step back, but we don't want to go all the way back to square one".

Earl Marmar, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has reviewed the FIRE design, says it is a viable alternative to ITER. If FIRE were pursued, he says, it would be best to do it with international participation, but he says ITER has proven how difficult that can be.

"ITER has been technically ready to move forward for at least a couple of years - it's really been a political holdup," he told New Scientist. "We're all hopeful ITER will succeed, but we're also rather impatient."

It would, indeed, be a shame to not move forward on the development of a fusion reactor. Having written a term paper on fusion versus fission, energy of the future, back in my college days (circa 1973), I have followed the fusion debate with great interest.

Great strides have been made since that time. Back then, the biggest obstacle was containing the reaction long enough to reach the break even point, energy expended versus energy created, which entailed containing the reaction within a magnetic bottle long enough to harvest the energy. They have since then, exceeded and overcome that obstacle, the hurdle now is to build a big enough reactor to create the huge potential a fusion reactor provides for energy.

It is the amount of energy that a fusion reactor will create that makes it's location, other than for geopolitical reasons, irrelevant. I do not understand the choices of France or Japan, as the reactor should be located in a sparsely populated area. One, because of the large size this reactor will have to be, and two, safety, should an unlikely breach occur. While there is no radiation involved, as with fission (nuclear) reactors, there is incredible heat (50 million degrees), basically, the temperature of the sun being confined within that fusion reactor. As there are no materials on earth that can contain that heat, thus inertial or magnetic fields are the chosen methods of containment. Laser fusion appears to be the most promising method for creating a sustainable fusion reaction.

Why is fusion the energy source of the future ? Because the fuel used for it is plentiful, renewable and inexpensive. What is this fuel ? It is water, specifically heavy water, also called deuterium (exists naturally) and tritium (created, does not exist naturally)). Below is an explanation and description of these fuels, their availability, and their energy output.

Deuterium: One gallon of water contains 1/8 gram of deuterium. If fully burned in fusion reactions, the energy output would be equivalent to 300 gallons of gasoline.
In other words, the available energy supply of fusion fuel is equivalent to filling the Atlantic and Pacific oceans 300 times with gasoline. If fusion can be successfully harnessed, it could satisfy the entire world's electrical energy needs for millions of years. Fusion can also produce hydrogen which may be useful for transportation.

Tritium: This nucleus has a half-life of 14 years. Thus tritium does not exist naturally. To make the tritium component of the fuel, one combines a fast neutron with a lithium nucleus: lithium 6 + neutron => tritium + helium

http://other.nrl.navy.mil/LaserFusionEnergy/fusionfuels.html

The above site will provide you with you valuable information on fusion technology that will bring about the end of dependence on fossil fuels.

Why fusion over all the other choices for energy creation ?

Compared to coal, gas and oil:

- Fusion has no carbon emissions and no risk of global warming

Compared to fission:

- Fusion can't blow up; can't melt down
- Fusion has (ideally) very low radioactivity; waste can be shallow buried
- Fusion has a low risk of nuclear materials proliferation

Compared to solar and wind:

- Fusion is a concentrated energy source
- Fusion is always available, without storage
- Fusion is an abundant fuel, available to all nations:

- Coal will last a few hundred years; natural gas about a hundred years; fission thousands of years; fusion million of years

The hydrogen powered engine is an off shoot of this fusion technology. The benefits to the environment and making the world energy independent is immeasureable. Fusion energy is completely clean, no pollutants, and the amount of energy it creates would leave no shortages anywhere that was connected into the grid.

Bull hockey. some of the best money the feds spend is on research...

Certainly, but not in areas that involve personal risktaking, or in areas that tread on some crackpot's sensitive little toesies. This is why NASA has brought us pretty good unmanned probles, while manned programs have languished. This is why, after having come up with the basic idea underlying the Internet, actual implementation of an idea that threatened government control verr information was left to the commercial sector.

There is one "loophole". If you can sell a new technology to the military and have it developed as a black program, hazardous research can be jammed ahead away from public scrutiny.

The big picture is that Fusion energy offers only one advantage over fission: no nuclear waste.

Well, who says that nuclear waste is a big problem? Oh sure, it is a *political* problem, but in the grand scheme of things it's simply toxic garbage, of which we already make plenty every day.

So all of the money spent pursuing fussion technology will simply buy us less nuclear waste. We don't get more energy. We don't get cheaper energy. We don't get safer energy.

Just less waste. That's all that fussion gives us.

So all of this talk about spending BILLION$ on fussion is the same as trying to spend Billions on waste disposal.

...Because nuclear fussion simply means less waste.

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.