The State of the Art of Nuclear Fusion: It's Not Easy

"...fusion is so far beyond our current technological abilities..."

That may be the case, but the only way to shift nuclear fusion into our spectrum of technological abilities is to spend time and attention on it. If we do not do it now, we will only have to do it later, and the situation of fusion lying outside our abilities will have remained as it currently is.

I believe that the unexpected side discoveries will lead to advancements that will make this venture worthwhile. The value of pure research has escaped us over the past 20 years.

Everyone said the same things about the Atomic Bomb [etc…] and it is here. I truly believe allot of today’s theories are still faulty/incorrect or haven’t been discovered. The knowledge man knows today’s but a spec of dust in an infinite universe of information. There’re things being discovered every day, but are taken for granted. History’s an example of what the future has to come.

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Just because it’s not possible today, doesn’t mean it’s not possible tomorrow. The greatest scientific breakthroughs weren’t restricted by past judgment. Believing in yourself and changing your mindset is step one.

Mr. Fox,

The NY Times article says in plain English that it might be impossible - how is that trying to "bury" the fact? Or did you not even read the article?

Excerpt:

"But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible."

What is often not noted in press accounts is that neither NIF nor ITER can make any net electical energy.

NIF might make 30 MJ of fusion energy per pulse, which could make about 10 MJ of electrical energy. But this requires over 1 MJ of laser energy, which in turn requires over 100 MJ of electrical energy. Thus the net electrical gain of NIF is about 0.1.

ITER might make 500 MW of fusion power for 500 seconds, which could make about 200 MW of electrical power during this time. But the electrical power needed to run ITER is also about 200 MW, so its net electrical gain is about one.

This is why neither facility will actually make any electricity from fusion; this would only be done in next-step DEMO devices, which are considerably more difficult and uncertain.

I find it surprising that you do not cover Dr. Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology called Polywell Fusion. They are making steady progress and should have results (can it work) in two years or less. The effort has been funded by the US Navy for a decade or so making it more that a crackpot idea.

You can read all about it at the "IEC Fusion Technology" blog. Google it. It comes out on top. Heh.

http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2009/01/easy-low-cost-no-radiation-fusion.html

The potential rewards are fabulous -- and maybe they are unattainable. However, we'll never know that if we don't keep trying.

Budgets and priorities are real, and this project needs to be managed. But, I would support this type of research until they say -- "we just don't know what else to try"

I also agree that we'll probably get a lot of side benefits along the way.

How many technologies used to write, publish, and read this article were "so far beyond our...technological abilities" in 1959? PCs were beyond comprehension 50 years ago. Today technology is advancing much faster than it did 50 years ago. Are you really going to claim to know the state of technology in 50 years?

The only way to make new discoveries is to do research. Weather you find what you're looking for or not is irrelevant. There are still people debating weather doing research at the LHC is worht the cost. What they don't realize is that decades before the project was even close to achieving its intended goal it was responsible for a little phenomenon called the internet. So maybe actually smashing atoms isn't very helpful,and attaining fusion power may be impossible, but that desn't mean the research isn't worth it. We should always be behind the big risky science projects, because they're the ones that actually make important discoveries (weather they find what they're looking for or not).

Can someone explain how fusion energy will be better than conventional atomic energy??

Regards,

Rick

Despite pronouncements to the contrary regarding the difficulty of controlled nuclear fusion, it should be attainable for one simple reason -- we know we can achieve uncontrolled nuclear fusion, i.e. the hydrogen, or nuclear (that's without a second "u" for those who pronounce the word like George W.) bombs. We were able to achieve controlled nuclear fission prior to developing uncontrolled nuclear fission -- the "A-bomb" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because fission is a simpler process. However, nature shows us that fusion is attainable every 24 hours when a huge ball of plasma rises over our eastern horizon, and this is done with basic hydrogen. Fusing tritium or deuterium in a reactor should be possible with more refinement on the containment aspect of the process. It isn't a matter of physics that constrains us at the moment, but a matter of engineering, which in turn is constrained by the funding provided by the federal government. Also, it has been suggested that the isotope helium 3, which is found in relatively great abundance in the lunar regolith, could be utilzed in a fusion power plant designed with exising technology (helium 3 is apparently easier to fuse than lighter hydrogen isotopes). I don't believe we should break the bank in funding fusion research, but I do think a few billion dollars a year might be a wise investment when the likely payoff will be a non-polluting source of energy that could forever end our dependence on fossil fuels.

Hmm... first things first, I suppose.

@Mike_R:
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a Uranium bomb, and the one dropped on Nagasaki was a Plutonium bomb. Both utilized nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion. ("A" standing for "atom" bomb, the atom being split. Not... well... whatever it is that starts with A that you thought implied nuclear fusion.) More modern nuclear weapons use a controlled fission reaction to set off an uncontrolled fusion reaction, hence they're called Hydrogen bombs. Even in bombs, fission came first.

@Rikinphx:
The biggest difference between fusion and fission is the byproducts. Current fission reactors require rare, atomically unstable elements for fuel and subsequently produce radioactive waste as a by-product. In hydrogen fusion, the "fuel" is hydrogen, and the byproduct is harmless, inert Helium. Higher levels of fusion likewise produce stable, common elements as byproducts.

The LHC was not responsible for the internet. *sigh*
History lesson:
The early versions of the internet were created by the US military as a back up communications system in the event of a nuclear attack which would create an EMP. It was based out of universities like Cornell, which then used the technology to coordinate shared research projects. As such, more and more universities joined in. By the early 90's, most undergrad students had email accounts, and were telling their parents how great it was, saving all sorts of money in long distance phone calls, and it was so much faster than "snail mail". Even then, it was text-based system, and so not very user-friendly for the average person. The graphical web browser changed all that, and began the introduction of the internet in to the mainstream.
The LHC takes advantage of the technology originally started on the SETI project, where users downloaded a screen saver that crunched numbers while the user wasn't active. Once downloaded on to thousands of computers, it became a powerful supercomputer.
In conclusion, the LHC has taken advantage of the best of the internet, from collaborating on projects in real-time around the world, to using the internet as a super-computer to crunch large amounts of data. It is not, however, responsible for any of these developments.

rickinphx,

The short form answer to your Q. is that fission "splits" the atom, or breaks it apart, and fusion adds material to the atom ( in the form of sub-atomic particles ) "fuseing" them together to create a larger atom (in this case Helium). This is a similar process to what occurs naturally inside the Sun.

The BIGGEST problems in both cases are a) controlling the reacton process, and b) by products of the reaction [i.e.: radioactive waste {spent fuel rods} in the case of fission].

I think a significant unasked question here is: How does all this relate to the article on the Canadian company making their attempt at "cold" fusion, and do any of these other teams consider their process viable, or even take them seriously? Thoughts? Anyone?

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Wow, People. Hold on! While this article was published in 2009 it did leave out big important facts also true over a year ago. Hence giving a false sense of reality. For example the fact that Europe also has it`s own Laser Fusion Facility. It has been under construction for many years called the Laser Megajoule. It is almost identical compared to the NIF in energy and scale. It is also along the same completion timelines. Further more is the fact that both NIF and the Laser Megajoule are build specifically for nuclear military research. They are NOT intended for actual energy production at all so comparing the NIF to ITER is biased. Finally when it comes to actual LASER fusion for the commercial grid the HiPER project should have been mentioned instead. This new European laser fusion research facility being planned is the only one that is actually intended for GRID! power laser fusion and not military research for mostly atomic weapons.