Fusion power hopes spring eternal this time of year, but there’s plenty of reason to doubt. The periodic hype for fusion always seems to start in the spring, particularly when the U.S. federal budget season is in full bud. But endless energy from smashing hydrogen atoms together, promising unlimited clean and cheap electric power, so far is likely a fantasy.
The latest claim for a fusion breakthrough, as reported in POWER magazine, comes from San Diego-based General Atomics, which has long been a fusion enthusiast, with major support from the Department of Energy. DOE and its predecessor agencies, including the Energy Research and Development Agency and the Atomic Energy Commission, going back to the 1950s, offered significant support. Starting then and continuing to today, fusion is always at least 25 years in the future.
The POWER article touts an announcement from GA’s DOE-funded DIII-D National Fusion Facility claiming a new tokomak (the magnetic confinement approach to the enormous forces of atomic confinement) “compact” design. Tokomak designs, originally from the Soviet Union, have become the major technology behind fusion research, including the multi-national, multi-billion dollar International Thermal Energy Program, located in France.
GA claims its design for a “compact” tokomak can deal with the major problem of tokomak technology, the inability to contain the ultra-high temperature plasma necessary for fusion to work. GA investigator Richard Buttery said, “The key to our approach is to raise the pressure inside the tokamak. This makes more fusion occur, allowing us to reduce the current, which in turn makes the plasma easier to sustain and more stable. Our simulations show that by carefully shaping the plasma and moving the current toward its edge, we can suppress turbulent heat losses and support higher pressures at lower currents, to reach a state where the plasma sustains itself. This enables a device that can simply be turned on, generating electricity continuously in a steady state.”
Skeptics remain. Bob Hirsch, an early pioneer of fusion research and, when he ran the U.S. government’s fusion program was a proponent of tokomaks, has soured on magnetic control of the plasma. Among other criticisms of tokomaks, he points to an inability to make enough tritium, a key isotope of hydrogen, to supply the reactors, even if they eventually prove successful.
The chief alternative to magnetic plasma confinement is use of lasers to concentrate on hydrogen atoms to get them to fuse and released copious amounts of energy, known as “inertial confinement”. While this approach in the U.S. has received major research dollars, it is largely shrouded in secrecy because the money is coming from the Defense Department, which deems it unwise to disclose details. Neither tokomaks nor inertial confinement have come close to demonstrating a practical fusion energy technology.
An off-the-wall approach to fusion, still getting some attention, is “cold fusion.” In March of 1989 (note the date) two electro-chemists, Martin Fleishman of the U.K. and Stanley Pons of the U.S., unveiled in a purposeful leak to the Financial Times of London, that they had achieved fusion in a test-tube using electrolysis at room temperature.
It galvanized the world, and the U.S. Congress quickly appropriated money to support their work, which would have been revolutionary. But physicists raised doubts about their work and researchers were unable to replicate the experiments. The sad cold fusion saga is well described in Gary Taubes’s fine 1993 book “Bad Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion.”
–Kennedy Maize