Editor's Blog
There may soon be a run on coconut futures. Vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal is being used to help build what may become the first commercially viable Tokamak fusion power electrical generating facility near Cadarache in the south of France – about 38 miles from the Mediterranean.
Tokamak (from the Russian for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”) is a type of magnetic confinement device for producing controlled thermonuclear fusion power. The coconut charcoal is an environmental sponge that “adsorbs” the helium and hydrogen byproducts of the thermonuclear fusion reaction.
In what sounds like it could be the beginnings of a Star Trek-like Federation, the United States has joined the European Union, Japan, the Russian Federation, China, Korea, and India in negotiations for the establishment of the burning plasma prototype facility called ITER, which in Latin means "the way."
The fusion power produced by ITER will be at least 10 times greater than the external power delivered to heat the plasma. It’s not quite a Starship warp drive, but it does harness the power of the sun.
ITER is expected to cost more than $10 billion. Skeptics point out that ever since the idea of fusion power was first touted in the 1950s, fusion’s promise of clean power has receded endlessly into the future. Here’s a short video on the promise of ITER:
The Tokamak building is the core of ITER, where fusion experiments are planned to start in 2018. The reinforced concrete structure will sit with 5 1/2 stories underground and nineteen stories above. Adjacent to the main building, an assembly hall will be the location for pre-assembly of Tokamak components.
In ITER, the fusion reaction is achieved in Tokamak using magnetic fields to contain and control hot plasma. The fuel –- a mixture of deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen –- is heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million°C, forming helium and neutrons in addition to the hot plasma. A helium nucleus carries an electric charge that responds to the magnetic fields of the Tokamak, and remains confined within the plasma. Approximately 80% of the energy produced is carried away from the plasma by neutrons — a neutron has no electrical charge and is unaffected by magnetic fields. The neutrons are absorbed by the surrounding walls of the Tokamak, transferring their energy to the walls as heat.
This is where the coconuts come into the picture. The coconuts will be used to generate a cooling vacuum essential to ITER’s operation. In the central chamber, some of this vacuum separates the plasma from the surrounding solid walls and allows fusion to proceed unhindered by air molecules. The vacuum pumps suck air out of ITER and “adsorb” waste helium from the fusion reaction, along with other debris created when hot plasma smashes into the reactor wall.
"This can only be done with very large cryogenic pumps," says Christian Day of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The cryogenic pumps capture loose helium and hydrogen through a process that involves atoms of the gases sticking loosely to a solid surface — the greater the surface area, the better. "We wanted a material that behaves like a sponge, with lots of internal surfaces," Day adds. After 20 years searching for the ideal adsorber –- including sintered metals and porous minerals called zeolites –- Day’s team decided on charcoal. And not just any charcoal. "We found that coconut-shell charcoal is the best," Day says. "It is somehow strange that you need this very natural material to make a fusion device."
Only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy, says Lovelock.
Thermonuclear fusion and coconuts – strange bedfellows. But is fusion energy really "the way?" as the name ITER suggests? Why bother to build a fusion reactor when there is an almost inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun? Why not spend the $10 billion (or probably more) on wind or solar power instead?
A New Scientist editorial makes the case: "Compared with the more exotic schemes for large-scale manipulation of the environment now coming under serious consideration –- which do look 50 years away –- fusion power is a racing certainty. It’s safer too. A technology that messes with our planet’s climate is what got us into trouble in the first place." Ecologist James Lovelock –- concerned that humanity will shortly be facing a series of catastrophes from global warming –- might agree with this assessment. “By all means, let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy,” says Lovelock.
Lovelock – famous for the “Gaia hypothesis” – refers to conventional nuclear fission power generation (with all its attendant radioactive waste byproducts), but he is essentially making the case that humanity can’t afford to wait for “more exotic” technologies like solar and wind (and possibly fusion) to come online because he feels that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions needs more immediate action.
This isn’t to say that both sun-based solar and man-made fusion can’t coexist to help meet the world’s energy needs. According to ITER, fusion power stations producing 1-2 GW should be feasible within ten years – much the same size as standard fossil fuel power stations. Proposed space-based solar power from Solaren Corporation (see the h+ article Space-based Solar is Coming!) offers the possibility of scaling up to the same 1-2 GW range by 2020. Nanosolar, another solar start-up company, is building a solar cell production facility projected to generate 430 MW annually.
It’s good to know that there are options — and it’s ironic that the world’s 21st Century energy future could end up being a race between harnessing power from real and artificial suns. With fossil fuels “messing” with our climate, as both Lovelock and New Scientist suggest, it seems we’d best keep all our cards (and coconuts) on the table.
22 Comments
First off I like to say congratulations to our scientists of the world and others responsible for moving humanity forward and into cleaner and more earth friendly energy sources.
Second, I like to condemn those who want to keep humanity locked into ignorant and/or ideological pits of despair, feast upon human misery and suffering either for power and control or for the hope that they gain entrance into the next world because they have given up on this one.
Third I like to congratulate those who attempt to stop these control freak ignorant’s from infecting and harming others, making the world a better place for all of humanity, who put their very lives on the line to keep us all, regardless of our political leanings, safe from harm.
Fourth I like to condemn those who resort to the lowest form of human behavior and rhetoric in order to advance their political agenda. They do this because they don’t have any convincing logical argument that their way of thinking is better than the other sides.
Hi all, forget about bigscale energy propaganda.
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http://panacea-bocaf.org/
for real solutions. Energy is not a scarcity!!!
My understanding “only” 15-20 years ago was the major problem with fusion reactors was containment. Everything they could come up with to try to contain the plasma was still so leaky as to render the fusion reaction too short lived to remotely be usable. People were working on the Tokamak design back then. I thought they would have abandoned it by now.
No mention is made of the technical difficulties that have had and would have to still be overcome. I’d like to know what the actual technical progress has been.
Much progress has been made but, from there’s still a long way to go with the tokamak approach to fusion energy production. The key difficulty may be the problem with “turbulence” in the contained plasma. At the energy levels visualised for ITER (the test facility being planned for construction in the South of France) the result of turbulence in the plasma could be that the machine suffers serious damage, with the possibility that the “cascade effect” of particles being ripped off the tokamak’s internal wall could compound the damage and wreck the machine very fast. Scientists are no doubt working on these issues, but they don’t seem set to get a result anytime soon.
Meanwhile another team of scientists has been moving ahead very fast on fusion energy development. These are the laser people. The National Ignition Facility in California is about to be able to demonstrate that fusion can be triggered with a very powerful laser (a world first)… and beyond that, the European HiPER Project is preparing to take the knowledge forward and develop a demonstrator reactor which will move from the NIF “single shot” result to a system which can operate continuously and produce electrical energy at grid levels.
The NIF achievement of Inertial Fusion Energy” will change the game… at that point, suddenly fusion really does become the new energy source. It burns no fossil fuels, makes no CO2, creates only a very small amount of low level radioactive waste and runs on a fuel which is abundant worldwide… for the very long term. The key fuel component is deuterium, which is to be found in sea water. Thus, once fusion energy is mastered, we have enough fuel for millions of years to come.
… But we need the tokamak system too ! Laser plants alone will not be enough, and multiple technology apporoaches bring safety in numbers and diversity.
If the lights are not to be allowed to start going out as the fossil fuels run low and nations are to be dissuaded from the otherwise inevitable “energy wars” of the future, we MUST have fusion energy… and soon !
They may be attracted by renewable technologies Governments must be encouraged to realise that there is no other valid method of meeting the enormous energy demands to which mankind has become accustomed. Mastering fusion energy will take a long time and cost a lot of money, but there are few things in this world more worthy of serious international cooperation and investment !
I have the feeling that only mega-installations of this type of reactor will be viable commercially. That means they wil not be used for small-scale production of energy.
Probably we will see gigant installations at strategic points in each part of the world that distribute electricity over long distances and that make hydrogen to use elsewhere.
The aneutronic nuclear fusion reactor is a device much more well-conceived to harness the fusion energy than any other until now.
http://www.crossfirefusor.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
Ibercivis
Distributed computing project on Nuclear Fusion.
http://www.ibercivis.es
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibercivis
Fusion power has been N years away for over 40 years now. Until someone actually produces a working reactor, this is still much hype about nothing.
The real shameful issue is that investment in fusion has been so weak for so long. $10 billion over 20 years for ITER? Pssh! That investment is lost in the noise of the cost of bullets for Iraq.
If it’s expected to actually work, then we should have spent $100 billion on fusion just this year. Obviously a national program would be much more efficient than an international one, with all the bureacracy, diplomacy, and graft that implies.
Since unlimited low cost energy production would solve so many world problems, from desalinization for drought-afflicted nations to dealing with many pollution and global warming issues to food synthesis, we are led to one of two inescapable conclusions:
1) Fusion probably won’t work as expected in the projected timespan, and ITER is really just a lot of hype about wasting money on a lot of contractors.
2) Humanity is too stupid to live.
Of course both those could be true, independently.
Anyhow, as noted in the article, various alternate energy sources are really pretty trivial at projected scales over 20 years. 2 whole gigawatts from SPS in 2020? Another 10-years-away unfunded pipe dream, and even in the unlikely event that comes true, who cares about a measly 2 gigawatts?
The US electrical energy draw in 2007 is 3.892 trillion kWh, or an average usage of 444 gigawatts. +/- 2GW is hardly even noticeable at that scale.
I think we should spend $100 billion a year for fusion research. Just stop our involvement in wars and do it. Fusion is a reality, it happens in hundreds of billion of stars in our galaxy. It’s a matter of time to tame it.
Note: By we, I mean EU/Japan/Canada. US is too much a backward country right now to reliable be considered an intelligent partner.
I take it the ‘Farnsworth–Hirsch Fusor’ doesn’t qualify. It only fails on one or two points. The important points would be 1) it has real hardware 2) it’s affordable 3) it works and 4) it has to generate butt-loads of juice (oops significant positive power generation). Iter and the tokamak match only the existance requirement. (so does my toaster, think I could get a few million?)
Nuclear fission on the other hand works pretty well except for operator errors (idiots running tests etc.) and the waste that will doubtlessly plague humanity for the next 5 billion years. A significant bit of that comes from our duly elected idiots who are bending over backwards to appease the exploitive paranoid (excuse me homeland security aware individuals) and the rabid dendrophiles (uhm concerned environmentalists).
soc — well, someone should certainly do it.
However, ITER is really a EU thing right now as it is. It’s incredible slowness of implementation is a result of the combination of EU bureacracy and severe funding constraints. I think the US is only contributing a shamefully small share to ITER, and it’s hard to believe the Russians are contributing anything substantial either. Canada certainly doesn’t have the funds. While Japan could possibly come up with the the money, they have never managed any similarly large-scale science effort on their own — well, not one that actually worked, anyway (referencing the 5th generation computing project).
Anyhow, yeah, the US is backward in many ways, and often seems deliberately stupid in the ways it’s not backward, but the overall physicist base is I think still superior in the US — of course many of those “superior” physicists are immigrants, but that is traditional. So if any one nation (counting the EU as a sort of a nation) was to accomplish this investment properly, I think the US is the most plausible candidate. But it’s only plausible if by some strange stroke the political will to make the investment materializes, and that’s not going to happen in a “drill, baby” nation that can’t even decide to build proven fission plants.
I agree with your sentiment Miramon, but $100 billion a year is not exactly chump change. $10 billion a year would be fair…then again that amount of money would rival NASAs budget.
Miramon,
I’m pretty sure they will have to build more than one. But, I suppose since it is such a difficult task we should just give up altogether. Let me guess – you’re a Republican, right?
What does “Nanosolar, another solar start-up company, is building a solar cell production facility projected to generate 430 MW annually.” mean?
I agree with the previous posts that Fusion research is essential for out future on this planet.
However like all enterprises involving vast sums of money, there quickly come to be people and companies with vested interests in the status quo. These companies and individuals will fight tooth and nail against any threat to their funding. If you wonder why we still don’t have fusion after fifty years look no further. The established approach of tokamak fusion has been been receiving virtually all the available fusion funding during most of that period to the exclusion of the vast number of potential alternatives. If you keep researching and investing in a horse and buggy, you will never come up with an internal combustion engine. Constantly throwing ever increasing amounts of money at a failed approach in the hope that it will finally work if we build a large enough machine is crazy.
Naturally if ITER fails, then the people involved will just once again argue that the machine wasn’t big enough and the next 100 billion dollar one will be the one to break even.
I don’t believe that the huge size of these projects is necessary. If the approach is viable then it should be possible to validate it one a much smaller scale. In addition an approach that can produce small reactors would be much better than one that can only produce epic sized machines.
Its much better to have power generation at smaller plants closer to consumers than in one big station which will leave everyone in the dark if it fails.
Personally I believe the following two small projects are the most promising.
Focus fusion: http://focusfusion.org/
EMC2 fusion: http://www.emc2fusion.org/
Both of these approaches have had problems raising even a few million dollars of funding, while the failed tokamak approach has no problem getting 10 billion! How Ironic, these tiny projects are much more likely to succeed.
David
Here’s a slight addition to the last comment I sent:
“I agree with the previous posts that Fusion research is essential for out future on this planet.
However like all enterprises involving vast sums of money, there quickly come to be people and companies with vested interests in the status quo. These companies and individuals will fight tooth and nail against any threat to their funding. If you wonder why we still don’t have fusion after fifty years look no further. The established approach of tokamak fusion has been been receiving virtually all the available fusion funding during most of that period to the exclusion of the vast number of potential alternatives. If you keep researching and investing in a horse and buggy, you will never come up with an internal combustion engine. Constantly throwing ever increasing amounts of money at a failed approach in the hope that it will finally work if we build a large enough machine is crazy.
Naturally if ITER fails, then the people involved will just once again argue that the machine wasn’t big enough and the next 100 billion dollar one will be the one to break even.
I don’t believe that the huge size of these projects is necessary. If the approach is viable then it should be possible to validate it one a much smaller scale. In addition an approach that can produce small reactors would be much better than one that can only produce epic sized machines.
Its much better to have power generation at smaller plants closer to consumers than in one big station which will leave everyone in the dark if it fails.
Personally I believe the following two small projects are the most promising.
Focus fusion: http://focusfusion.org/
EMC2 fusion: http://www.emc2fusion.org/
Both of these approaches have had problems raising even a few million dollars of funding, while the failed tokamak approach has no problem getting 10 billion! How Ironic, these tiny projects are much more likely to succeed.”
The other factor preventing investment in alternative approaches is of course the investment that has already been made in the tokamak one. The more time and money that has been spent on one approach the more reluctant people are to admit that they made a mistake and change direction as that requires writing off all the investment made so far. It means admitting to making a mistake. You seen this fault in investors who refuse to sell a failing stock, hoping it will rebound. In the end they loose much more by not cutting their losses and moving to a more promising investment. The governments who have been funding ITER are in the same boat. To switch funding would mean writing off the billions already spent. It would take a brave administration to do that, especially while the scientist involved are constantly claiming success is just over the horizon.
David
first of all, of course it’s not starship warp drive… everyone knows that warp drives are powered by matter/antimatter reactions…. not fusion…
Impulse drives are powered by fusion reactors, and because of relativistic time dilation, impulse travel is limited to speeds well below light speed.
secondly….
my calculator harnesses the power of the sun….
tokamaks merely use a process, kina like what powers the sun.
No, you’re wrong on both counts.
The projected 2 GW for SPS is not a projection for one satellite or one installation, it’s the total the firm expects to have by 2020. And that’s the only firm that claims to be working in that area. So SPS is irrelevant for the US by 2020, even in the unlikely event this firm is not just waving its hands dramatically to attract investors.
Of course we should keep investing in ground-based solar and wind technology. Maybe in 50 years with a great deal of effort, we can make something noticeable from renewable sources, and that does require investment today. We just shouldn’t hype these little firms’ press releases as if they actually meant anything within the stated 10 year time frame, because the total planned deployment in that period is negligible compared to fossil fuel generation and will not have any effect on global warming, pollution in general, or the nation’s or the world’s energy problems.
The only plausible approach to solving energy problems in a reasonably short term like 20 years involves major government investment on the scale of many billions of dollars a year. That hasn’t happened for the last 30 years, and it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
I think it means 430MW of solar cells can be produced annually.
The GDP of US is less than 80% than that of EU and is less than 60% of the combined GDP of EU/Japan/Canada. So there is more money in those countries than in US. Also those three regions are much more scientifically inclined right now than US. As far as I know, more than 40% of US population thinks that the Earth is 6000 years old and most of its education comes from a bronze age myths book. Those are not the right people to ask for more money for fusion research.
I’m sure that if EU would commit 100 billion/year for fusion research then the remaining physicists will migrate back to Europe (at least they will work remotely for that project). The same thing happens with LHC right now, on a smaller scale.
You don’t need 100 billion/year to build a huge reactor from the start. You need 100 billion/year to research the problem and to encourage top physicists/engineers to work on the problem.
It’s not smart that most intelligent people work for for-profit corporations with short term objectives. It should be the other way around.
If I was a politician, I would work to stop our involvement in wars/increase corporate taxes and to sharply increase fundamental research and education. However, probably I would not get elected with that platform as most people are short-term oriented mammals.
Politicians are not the people to get these things done, and large corporations are to short cited for the most part to care weather it works or not because most huge corporations own some part of the energy industry and where oil is threatened they see an enemy. This type of fusion technology does not threaten their oil interests as far as the automotive industry goes and they would only see a gradual decline in petrol power-plant usage. The world economy would not fall apart in one night as long as some moron didn’t go on national TV and say “we don’t need oil any more.” Life as we know it would only change as far as what we do with our energy.
If you wish to make an impact on the world through technology it has to be cheaper than the next best thing or no one will give a crap weather it works or not. If we only went for the most efficient, the cleanest, and the best for the job we would all be driving steam powered cars.
When this magnificent technology becomes what it is destined to become or lives will not change that much at all because of it. We will still go to work, there will still be gas stations open, and the large corporations will find some way to make billions of dollars off of it providing; potentially hundreds of thousands of new jobs encouraging younger fresher minds to improve and streamline the designs increasing our understanding and help increase education through privet funding for ways to implement this type of energy.