Fusion Energy: Europe’s Holy Grail in jeopardy

June 10, 2010

By Peter C Glover
UK Correspondent
Troy Media

Peter Glover

LONDON, UK, June 10, 2010/ Troy Media/ – A standing joke among physicists has it that a breakthrough in the creation of fusion energy – the same energy that powers the sun – is “always just around the corner”. For the backers of the International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor (ITER) though, it is no laughing matter. With construction of the ITER facility at Cadarache in France already pushed back from 2015 to 2019, costs over the past three years tripling to $21.8 billion, the project faces a major funding crisis – and may be in jeopardy.

In May this year, while reiterating its commitment to ITER, the EU warned that $1 billion was needed by the end of 2011 to plug a shortfall in construction costs. While international backers include the US, China, Russia and Japan, the EU must raise the largest contribution after pledging to pay 45 per cent of costs to ensure that the facility was built in Europe. Given EU states are already struggling to make major domestic economic cuts, the EUs call for more cash for ITER is unlikely to rate as a high priority in European capitals.

Project in trouble

As one leading one ITER scientist told the journal Nature in June, “I think the momentum of the project may be in very deep trouble. Time is pressing.”

The ITER project represents just phase 1 of a twin-track approach to creating nuclear fusion. October 2008 saw the launch of HIPER (High Power Laser Energy) as phase 2, involving construction of the world’s largest – football field size – laser.

While ITER attempts to create nuclear fusion via a non-laser, conventional super-conducting magnetic compression process, HIPER, a $1 billion project instigated by the European Commission, will attempt to create laser-based nuclear fusion by mimicking the heat and pressure processes of the sun. The latter will try to fuse light nuclei into helium by squeezing together hydrogen atoms to enable the tapping of the energy produced in – the major challenge – a commercially viable process. In effect, what the sun and stars do via high temperatures and pressure, a HIPER laser would attempt to replicate. The theory is that as the hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium, though some mass would be lost, a colossal amount of energy would be released.

The trick is to get far more energy out of either process than is required to feed into it; an obstacle that has thus far proven insurmountable. 

Even before ITER or HIPER can do their key job of turning a lab experiment into a commercial enterprise however, a laser fusion ‘proof of principle’ needs to be demonstrated. This ‘proof’ is currently being pursued via research with two large-scale lasers under construction at Laser Megajoule in Bourdeaux, south-east France, and at the National Ignition Facility in California in the USA. The key objective for both is to show how in a single experiment more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it. If that hurdle can be overcome, then it falls to ITER or HIPER to exploit the principle further by turning a single event into a continuous cycle, making commercial power plants a realistic proposition.

Challenges huge

In 2007, when a British-led team of European scientists won EU science panel approval to build the prototype HIPER, Project Leader Professor Mike Dunne of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire explained , “We have two approaches because of the prize that is out there; fusion energy is the holy grail of energy sources.” He added, “It offers energy security because the fuel comes from seawater; it offers abundant supply, it’s clean and it’s safe. So the prize is huge.”

Huge too are the challenges. The HIPER laser is designed to fire more than a petawatt (a million billion watts) of energy at a two-millimeter fuel pellet held in place by a magnetic bottle. The laser barrage will compress the pellet to just a few microns that, researchers maintain, can generate the millions of degrees of heat needed for fusion to occur. But even those involved in the project have termed the prospect as “daunting”. Yet, in the face of such enormous scientific uncertainties, Professor Dunne has remained bullish confidently asserting, “We’re just a couple of years away from seeing it in the lab.”

Other senior physicists are far less sanguine. And, as Professor Dunne infers when providing “perspective”, it is not hard to see why. When news about the HIPER project first broke in 2007, the professor put it this way: “The laser is 10,000 times the power of the entire UK National Grid. And then you’re going to focus that down onto a spot that’s 10 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The pressure is equivalent to 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers sitting on your thumb. Some pretty crazy things are going to happen.” Given the serious setback suffered by ITER in 2008, when it was discovered that unpredictable bursts of energy known as edge localized modes, or ELMs – similar to eruptions in the sun, or solar flares – could occur and were bigger than anticipated, it is easy to see what kind of “crazy things” Dunne had in mind.

Indeed some senior physicists are not only sceptical about the fusion dream – they question the need for fusion energy at all.

Responding to HIPER’s launch in an online editorial at Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), leading US Atmospheric Physicist Professor S. Fred Singer identified the chief twin problems for all fusion energy research: the difficulty in confining unstable hydrogen plasmas through magnetic fields or other means, and the ability to commercialize the process.

But Professor Singer also posits what some consider a highly pertinent question: “Do we really need fusion?” Singer points out, “We [already] have the standard nuclear fission reactor based on uranium. It is relatively cheap, it is safe, and it works.” He explains, “Estimates vary but most experts agree that uranium will be a viable source of energy, and perhaps the best one available, for thousands of years. It becomes a matter of semantics whether an energy source that can be relied on for, say, 10,000 years or more is sustainable. But it is an empty argument. The point is we can do it now with available technology.”

Tantalizing prospect

The prospect of commercially viable fusion-powered reactors supplying most of the world’s needs by 2050 is undoubtedly tantalizing. But pouring massive public subsidies into unproven alternative energy technologies that cannot attract private equity capital, and where the ‘proof of principle’ is unlikely to be settled for decades yet, may suggest questionable energy priorities. In the current economic climate, we might wonder why, for the EU in particular, the nebulous goal of fusion energy has become the holy grail of new energy. Especially when – underlining Professor Singer’s point – we already possess the technological know-how to pursue clean and cheap standard, low-carbon, nuclear fission using uranium.

Though numerous polls suggest that most Europeans remain wary of expanding the use of nuclear fission, they may find the soaring expense, questionable science and distant pay-off from nuclear fusion an even less attractive proposition. But then, as Eurocrats have consistently demonstrated when it comes to funding countless other expensive and as yet commercially unproven alternative energy technologies, it is only taxpayer’s money.

Peter C. Glover is co-author Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate  (Continuum Publishing, to be published September 2010).

Channels: The New Glasgow Evening News, June 12, 2010