Fusion falters under soaring costs

[IndianaGreen]

Page last updated at 00:43 GMT, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 01:43 UK

Fusion falters under soaring costs

By Matt McGrath
Science reporter, BBC World Service

An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges.

Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled.

Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away.

At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103557.stm

[GoesTo11]

1. Practical fusion is 20 years away.

Or so I have heard.

[TheWraith]

2. 5 years actually, if they adopt the Polywell design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[kentauros]

4. That is the best design I've seen yet

and it should get more funding :)

I have to ask this about fusion, though. Is it really just another method of using brute force to create steam from water? Is that the best we can do for converting that energy of the fusion process to usable electricity?

Also, if the fusing of the hydrogen is confined to the interior of that magnetic bottle, how do you get that heat to the water to create the steam? ;)

[Occulus]

5. No, the Polywell design creates current directly, IIRC

no steam turbines necessary, or even desired. IIRC, if/when a working Polywell is built that can generate net power, it will produce DC and be able to dump it into the grid directly. Thus, you don't need water pipes going near a very highly charged electrostatic core. There's no hydrogen involved in the process; Bussard suggested using boron-11 as a fuel (and hoo boy, there's a lot of boron available, and this design doesn't use very much while it's running).

Cooling is another matter entirely, but since that's "just" an engineering issue, it's doable, just very complex. Dr. Nebel and Tom Ligon have both said that they might as well build a full-size reactor, so it's pretty obvious they're happy with the experimental results so far and are confident their numbers work. Bussard himself was so certain he made a fairly blanket statement (paraphrasing here) "eventually, someone will build it, and it will work, and that will be the end of the oil era".

An interesting note is that Bussard was certainly in a position to know what may and may not function as advertised- he was Assistant Director of of the Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor Division at the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s, and helped to found the Tokamak project in the first place. Additionally, from the wiki on the man,

"In June 1995, Bussard claimed in a letter to all fusion laboratories, as well as to key members of the US Congress, that he and the other founders of the program supported the Tokamak not out of conviction that it was the best technical approach but rather as a vehicle for generating political support, thereby allowing them to pursue "all the hopeful new things the mainline labs would not try".

I wonder what those "other programs" were... :think: :D

edit: you can learn a lot more by going to the Talk-Polywell discussion boards and reading about it from experts. Much of those discussions are very complex and technical, but they are always happy to explain themselves in layman's terms, and they're always happy to know that word is getting around regarding their project.

If the Polywell functions the way it's supposed to, it will accomplish what decades of funding other approaches has not, and the era of human oil dependency will come to a rather abrupt end.

[kentauros]

6. Thanks for the link, Occulus; I'll check it out soon.

And it's good that the people on that forum are willing to "explain themselves in layman's terms" because that's all I am ;) Just a strong interest in science most of my life, but no solid background.

However, I would like to point out that although the development of this will likely end our use of oil as a fuel source, it won't end our use of it for the other 50% of that same barrel of oil. What too many people either forget or just plain don't know is that half of the oil we process is not for fuel but for plastics and lubricants, with other chemicals being produced for everything else we need them for in society. I'm not a petroleum engineer, but I do work in the oil industry (pipeline mapping designer) and have known these processes pretty much all my life.

What we should be doing in addition to funding the Polywell design is to put more effort into the production of alternatives to oil-based plastics and lubricants as well as recycling the existing plastic, whether into new plastics or back into oil. I've been told the process for converting plastic back into oil is a very energy-intensive process. Perfectly suited for a fusion reactor that converts a plentiful fuel source directly into usable energy. I figure we will eventually have to "mine" old landfills for the plastics contained within...

[krispos42]

3. And it's been 20 year away since the Bicentennial...

...:-)


Or something like that.