Fusion power
Fusion power is the extraction of energy in some useful form, generally expected to be electricity, from a nuclear fusion reaction. Technically, most forms of power generation are indirectly fusion-powered, since the Sun is an extremely large natural fusion reactor and its radiation drives most energetic phenomena here on Earth, but the term is usually only used to refer to artificially sustained nuclear fusion. While experiments continue, no actual fusion power generators exist yet.
Basic fusion
Fusion reactions bring together two atomic nuclei and force them together to combine into one. The amount of energy released in this reaction depends on the nuclei, with lighter nuclei releasing more energy. This suggests that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is the best fusion fuel.
An equally important factor is the amount of energy needed to start the reaction. This is dependant on two measures, the amount of electric charge holding the nuclei apart, and the number of nucleons (protons and neutrons) pulling them together. The former is also lowest for lighter nuclei, again suggesting hydrogen, but the later modifies this somewhat. After all considerations, a mixture of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, has the lowest energy requirement compared to energy release.
While the D-T mix has been the focus of most fusion research, it is by no means the only potential fuel. Other mixtures are either easier to produce or control, or more importantly, give off no neutrons. The latter, the so-called aneutronic fuels, are particularily interesting as they will result in no long-term radioactivity, dramatically lowering public concern as well as lifetime costs of dismantling the reactor. The complexity of maintaining fusion reactions with fuels other than D-T is increased however, D-T is considered the first step.
Fusion reactors as commercial power sources
For many reasons, fusion power is seen by many as the "natural" long-term universal power source. Some suggested advantages of commercial fusion reactors as power producers are:
- An effectively inexhaustible supply of fuel—at essentially zero cost on a national production scale;
- A fuel supply that is available from the oceans to all coastal countries and therefore cannot be interrupted by other nations;
- No possibility of nuclear runaway, as there is no chain reaction;
- No chemical combustion products as effluents;
- No afterheat cooling problem in case of an accidental loss of coolant;
- No use of weapons grade nuclear materials, thus no possibility of diversion for purposes of blackmail or sabotage;
- Low amount of radioactive by-products with significantly shorter half-life relative to fission reactors (components fabricated from "low-activation" materials).
Some argue that fusion is the best option for a truly sustainable or long term energy source because the fuel is virtually inexhaustible and readily available throughout the world. Deuterium can be taken from water, and a thimble full of deuterium is equivalent to 20 tons of coal in energy production - a medium size lake contains enough deuterium to supply a nation with energy for centuries using fusion.
Current development centers on the more easily attained deuterium-tritium reaction (D+T) which has a fuel cycle which requires the relatively rare metal lithium to generate tritium. Claims for a truly inexhaustible fuel supply refer to the possibility of using D-D reactions in second generation fusion reactors.
Like fission, fusion does not generate atmospheric pollutants or contribute to global warming. This is a major advantage compared to fossil fuels, from which 64 lbs (29 kg) of CO2 is produced per American per day.
Much less radioactive waste results from fusion than from fission plants. During the D-T reaction, neutrons are released which cause the reactor vessel to become radioactive, but this radioactivity can be greatly reduced by using "low activation" materials. Such materials would have half-lives of tens of years, rather than the tens and hundreds of thousands of years for radioactive waste produced from fission. This involves the design of new alloys with non-traditional chemical compositions; a complex process as the chemical composition also affects the materials' mechanical properties etc. Several researchers have dedicated their efforts to the practical aspects of such considerations including publications of the type, Investigations of the Formability, Weldability and Creep Resistance of Some Potential Low-activation Austenitic Stainless Steels for Fusion Reactor Applications (ISBN 0853111480) produced by A.H. Bott, G.J. Butterworth, F. B. Pickering, as part of the JET project). Hence, fusion power may be more attractive than existing fission systems as a nuclear power source.
Critics point out that it is far from clear that nuclear fusion will indeed be economically competitive with other forms of power, or that the radioactive waste can be kept to these levels. It is possible that fusion advocates are making some of the same mistakes in creating unrealistic economic projections that fission advocates have made in the past.
When the cost of the plant is factored in, it is not clear that fusion will be cheaper than traditional forms of power, and although there are many economic estimates of the cost of fusion power, these estimates can give wildly different answers as to its economic viability. Fusion advocates would counter that it is very difficult to predict these future costs, especially as they depend upon political climates that would set regulatory standards, as was a large source of the rising price of fission power, for instance. It has also been argued, although most economists would disagree, that it is difficult to weigh an increased economic cost with the environmental advantages of fusion.
Fusion does also have potential safety concerns. Although there would be no intrinsic danger of a runaway fusion reaction (a meltdown) and any malfunction would result in a rapid shutdown of the plant, there are possible scenarios that are safety concerns. In 1973 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) pointed out several concerns for a fusion power plant, including the possibility of a tritium leak, lithium fire or the accidental release of magnetic energy. These concerns would need to be addressed as part of any reactor design, just as loss of coolant and similar risks must be addressed in the design of fission plants.
Unfortunately, there are still significant barriers standing between current scientific understanding and technological capabilities and the practical realization of fusion as an energy source, and it is far from clear that an economically viable fusion plant is even possible. It is an extremely difficult task to harness a 100 million degree plasma in an economically efficient way, so a working reactor is still many years down the road and is an active part of plasma physics research. Another barrier is materials to withstand the high neutron fluxes, which are speculated to be about 100 times those of existing PWRs. Materials design for a practical plant is still (as of 2004) in its infancy, with materials testing to start in plants following the proposed ITER at the earliest.
Power plant design
Humanity has been able to create artificial large-scale fusion reactions since 1952, when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb, the Ivy Mike, as a test. However, an uncontrolled explosive reaction of that magnitude is not well-suited to power generation. Theoretically, one could use existing large fusion bombs as a source of power by detonating them deep underground and then using the resulting heated cavern as a source of geothermal energy, but such a power plant is unlikely ever to be constructed, for a variety of reasons. See the PACER project for more details.
Controlled nuclear fusion within a containment vessel has been possible for some time, but it remains quite difficult to make into a practical generation system. The fusion field refers to a break-even point where the energy needed to start the reaction is being returned by the reaction itself. We have been capable of reaching this break-even point for over a decade.
There are other important break-even points, however. One is that the electricity out should be the same as the electricity in, a measure that factors in the efficiencies in extracting heat from the reactor and turning it into power in conventional generator systems. Perhaps most important is the point where the system is generating enough money to pay for itself. This is a much more complex calculation, as the price of electricity often fell when a new power plant was introduced, which ruined the economies of many nuclear plants in the 1970s. This last goal looks to be decades away if development continues at the present pace.
Fusion systems are typically classified by the type of "confinement" system they use to handle the hot plasma that is the result of a fusion reaction. The vast majority of research has focussed on magnetic confinement, where an arrangement of powerful magnets keeps the fuel in the center of a container. Of the variety of such systems, the Tokamak has received the most attention since it was first introduced. Other systems include the magnetic pinch fusion machines, where a current running through the plasma generates its own magnetic field; inertial confinement fusion systems that use lasers to explosively compress small pellets of fuel; and electrostatic confinement fusion systems, in which ions being "sprayed" into the reaction chamber hold the fuel in the center, as in the fusor.
The different forms of reactor each have advantages and disadvantages. Tokamaks are the most developed magnetic confinement scheme. Inertial confinement produces plasmas with impressive densities and temperatures, and might be best suited to research, X-ray generation, very small reactors, and rocketry. They rely on "perfect" fuel pellets in order to generate a symmetrical inward shock wave to produce the high-density plasma, and in practice these have proven extremely difficult to manufacture.
Competition between the various strands of fusion research for funding is fierce, with the large costs involved meaning that practical research has been concentrated mainly on Tokamaks in the past few years.
Most controversially, some researchers have claimed to observe neutron production in electrochemical systems, the so-called cold fusion systems. Peers have not been able to reproduce this. Today cold fusion is regarded as pseudoscience. Research into sonoluminescence, sometimes known as bubble fusion, continues as well, although it is met with almost equal sceptism.
Fuel cycle
First generation fusion reactors are expected to use deuterium and tritium as fuel. Several environmental drawbacks are, however, commonly attributed to DT fusion power.
- It produces substantial amounts of neutrons that result in induced radioactivity within the reactor structure, and it requires the handling of the radioisotope tritium.
- Only about 20% of the fusion energy yield appears in the form of charged particles, which limits the extent to which direct energy conversion techniques might be applied.
- The use of DT fusion power depends on lithium resources, which are less abundant than deuterium resources.
The claim that fusion will have a smaller problem with radioactive waste than fission is also questionable for the D+T reaction. The fuel cycle depends on the use of the neutrons produced to irradiate lithium. As D+T produces only one neutron, any neutron losses at all will mean that not enough tritium is produced in the fusion reactor, and needs to be supplied from an external source, such as the fission reactors currently used to produce tritium for experiments.
The neutron flux expected in a commercial D+T fusion reactor is about 100 times that of current fission power reactors, posing enormous problems for material design, and potential waste problems. Design of suitable materials is underway but their actual use in a reactor is not proposed until the generation after ITER. After a single series of D+T tests at JET, the largest fusion reactor yet to use this fuel, the cavity was sufficiently radioactive that remote handling needed to be used for the year following the tests.
These drawbacks of DT fusion power have led to the proposal of alternatives for longer term application—for example, fusion power reactors based only on deuterium. Such systems are expected to (1) reduce the production of high energy neutrons and also the need to handle tritium; (2) produce more fusion power in the form of charged particles; and (3) be independent of lithium resources for tritium breeding.
It has also been suggested that materials with slightly higher atomic numbers (like lithium, beryllium, and boron) be used as fusion fuels to provide power that is essentially free of neutrons and tritium and that release all of their energy in the form of charged particles. Although such alternatives to DT fusion power are attractive, there is an important scientific caveat. To derive useful amounts of power from nuclear fusion, it will be necessary to confine a suitably dense plasma at fusion temperatures (108 K) for a specific length of time. This fundamental aspect of fusion power is expressible in terms of the product of the plasma density, n, and the energy confinement time, τ, required for fusion power breakeven (i.e., the condition for which the fusion power release equals the power input necessary to heat and confine the plasma). The required product, nτ, depends on the fusion fuel and is primarily a function of the plasma temperature. Of all the-fusion fuels under current consideration, the deuterium-tritium fuel mixture requires the lowest value of nτ by at least an order of magnitude and the lowest fusion temperatures by at least a factor of 5. When the plasma requirements for significant power generation are compared with the anticipated plasma performance of current approaches to fusion power, it is apparent that fusion power must initially be based on a deuterium-tritium fuel economy. However, the eventual use of alternate fuel cycles remains an important ultimate goal and consequently attention will be given to identifying concepts which may permit their ultimate use.
Major controlled fusion experiments
Magnetic confinement
- Alcator C-Mod (MIT), US
- DIII-D (General Atomics), US
- International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor(ITER, location TBD)
- Japan Torus JT-60 (JAERI)
- Joint European Torus (JET), UK
- National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory), US
- National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX, PPPL), US
Laser driven
- National Ignition Facility (NIF), US
- The Laboratory for Laser Energetics' Omega Laser
Electrostatic confinement
Fictional appearances of fusion power
- Back to the Future (movie)
- Spider Man 2 (movie)
- Star Trek (various movies and TV shows)(used to power sublight engines)