Nary a day goes by without an internet news story about a fusion energy “breakthrough,” often breathlessly claiming that the event significantly shortens the already glacial advance of energy that is “clean,” “endless,” and, we’ve heard this before, “too cheap to meter.” Some of the reporting is legitimate, some is hyperbolic.
Some recent examples: ‘‘Holy Grail’: US Claims Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Tech That Can Bring It Closer To Harnessing Unlimited Energy (eurasiantimes.com); DIII-D National Fusion Facility Adds Capability to Rapidly Test Key Fusion Science; Laser PB11 Fusion Yield Increased 40 Fold.
There is even hype about the long-discredited fantasy of “cold fusion”: Is cold fusion the answer to air pollution?
When the late Hans Bethe (1906-2005) offered his insights into the proton-proton chain in 1939, atomic scientists began talking about the fusion reaction producing copious amounts of energy by smashing hydrogen atoms together. In the 1950s, as conventional fission for civilian purposes was becoming practical, some atomic scientists postulated that fusion would be next, within perhaps 25 years.
Some 70 years later, fusion remains a chimera. Some expert predictions now suggest that it will be another 60 years or more before controlled fusion can be attained.
While governments have poured and continue to pour enormous amounts of money and effort into fusion research, the results are meagre and disappointing.
The key problem, explains Bob Hirsch, who ran the fusion energy program for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and then the Energy Research and Development Administration, both predecessors to today’s Department of Energy, is focusing and containing the enormous amount of energy needed for the element to produce more energy than consumed.
The best-known approach to energy containment is using a magnetic field to concentrate the forces. The key component is a donut-shaped ring of magnets, known as a “tokomak,” due to its Russian origins. That’s the technology behind the massive, multinational International Thermal Energy Research (ITER) project underway in France. [Iter is Latin for “the way”]
Launched in 1985, ITER has brought together 35 nations, including the U.S., with a commitment to billions of dollars in project funding, in an ambitious tokomak experiment. The initial goal was to produce “net energy,” more energy out than in, by 2020. Clearly, that objective was not obtained. Not even close. And even if ITER can harness fusion experimentally, that’s years, more likely decades, before that knowledge and technology can produce a commercial electric generating plant.
Nonetheless, the ITER program, which has suffered from management and leadership problems in addition to a seemingly intractable physical problem, this July began designing what a fusion power plant might look like, something some might describe as “wishful thinking.”
Even this hypothetical, paper fusion reactor will be far short of the stupendous expectations of the cheap, clean, endless electricity of the hype. As journalist Will Lockett noted in Medium recently, even if ITER can reach actual energy production by 2025, “it will be years, maybe even decades, until scientists can complete their experiments and have the knowledge needed” to build a real generator, 2054 at the most optimistic.
Even then, it will be small potatoes, a pilot at best, not commercial, “but only produce around 300–500 MW of power and will be extremely expensive to use. In theory, you could use it as a commercial power source, but it would cost orders of magnitude more than the market demands.”
An alternative to tokomak fusion is using lasers to concentrate energy to cause fusion. Less is publicly known about this technology, as it is also useful in nuclear weapons design. The Department of Energy has long funded a laser project, the National Ignition Facility, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a $3.5 billion project.
Almost a year ago, August 2021, Livermore announced a major advance in fusion research. Nature reported, “Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s flagship laser facility shattered their own record earlier this month by generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for a fraction of a second — roughly 700 times the generating capacity of the entire US electrical grid at any given moment. News of the breakthrough has revived hopes that the long-troubled National Ignition Facility (NIF) might yet attain its goal of producing more energy than it consumes in a sustained fusion reaction.”
A year later, without much fanfare, Livermore backed off. In an exclusive report, headlined “Laser-fusion facility heads back to the drawing board,” Nature wrote, “efforts to replicate that experiment have fallen short. Nature has learnt that, earlier this year, researchers at the California facility changed direction, moving to rethink their experimental design.” The article added that the best the scientists and engineers could do in repeating the 2021 results was less than half of the claimed energy produced, adding that “the failure to reproduce last August’s experiment underscores researchers’ inability to understand, engineer and predict experiments at these energies with precision.”
Finally, there is a fundamental element that will confound any likelihood of commercial fusion: hydrogen. Fusion requires fuel. Using just plain vanilla hydrogen atoms to fuse and release a burst of energy won’t work. Rather, fusion will require a 50-50 concoction of two different hydrogen flavors: deuterium and tritium. Common hydrogen consists of one proton and one electron. Of all three of the hydrogen isotopes, it is the most abundant, more than 99.98%.
Deuterium (one proton, one electron, and one neutron) is not the problem. It can be found in sea water. Tritium (one proton, one electron, and two neutrons) is exceedingly scarce, yet necessary for fusion to occur. Tritium isn’t naturally available. New Energy Times, which has followed the tritium story for several years, summarized the problem: “Fusion scientists only occasionally told the public that tritium did not exist in nature as a fuel source. When they did disclose this fact, they said that sufficient quantities of enriched lithium, from which tritium could, in theory, be made, were available. They are not. Moreover, there is no environmentally acceptable method, let alone facilities based on such a method, to enrich lithium with the required levels of the lithium-6 isotope.”
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (@kennedymaize)