The Future of Power Generation: Nuclear Fusion
Major concerns about nuclear Fission power
Potential for possibly severe radioactive contamination by accident. As we saw earlier accidents do happen and Chernobyl disaster was not the only nuclear accident in history. Another meltdown occured in the second reactor of the Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, being the most significant accident in the history of the America, and even though it resulted in no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community - there is no such thing as zero radioactivity in practice.
Nuclear proliferation and use of waste byproduct as a weapon. Nuclear proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons and it's known that reactors could be used for weapons-development purposes — the first nuclear reactors were developed for exactly this reason — as the operation of a nuclear reactor converts U-238 into plutonium. An additional concern is that if the by-products of nuclear fission — the nuclear waste generated by the plant — were to be unprotected it could be used as a radiological weapon, colloquially known as a "dirty bomb."
Vulnerability of nuclear power plants to sabotage and attack. Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand threats deemed credible at the time of licensing. Land attacks are relatively difficult to achieve but an attack from the air is a more problematic concern. The most important barrier against the release of radioactivity in the event of an aircraft strike is the containment building and its missile shield. However, as weapons evolve it cannot be said unequivocably that within the 60 year life of a plant it will not become vulnerable. In addition, the future status of storage sites may be in doubt. Sabotage of nuclear power plants may be the greatest domestic vulnerability in the US today.
Differences of nuclear Fusion power
Accident potential and safety during abnormal operation. The likelihood of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor in which injury or loss of life occurs is much smaller than that of a fission reactor. The primary reason is that the fuel contained in the reaction chamber is only enough to sustain the reaction for about a minute, whereas a fission reactor contains about a year's supply of fuel. The density of the plasma is extremely low and the total amount of fusion fuel in the chamber is very small. If the fuel supply is closed, the reaction stops within seconds. Furthermore, fusion requires very extreme and precisely controlled conditions of temperature, pressure and magnetic field parameters. If the reactor were damaged, these would be disrupted and the reaction would rapidly extinguish.
Nuclear proliferation and waste management. Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is very small. The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer unique species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active. Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. By 300 years the material would have the same radioactivity as coal ash.
Fusion power as a sustainable energy source. Large-scale reactors using neutronic fuels (e.g. ITER) and thermal power production (turbine based) are most comparable to fission power from an engineering and economics viewpoint. Both fission and fusion power plants involve a relatively compact heat source powering a conventional steam turbine-based power plant, while producing enough neutron radiation to make activation of the plant materials problematic. The main distinction is that fusion power produces no high-level radioactive waste (though activated plant materials still need to be disposed of). There are some power plant ideas which may significantly lower the cost or size of such plants; however, research in these areas is nowhere near as advanced as in a tokamak pictured below.



27 thoughts:
Wow. I always wanted to know more about fusion. Never knew it was safe. Always thought it would be very dangerous.
I think nuclear fission is a bad way to get energy. We should do more with solar and wind power. Nuclear is so messy and dangerous. yuck.
Excellent write-up!
So when is fusion going to be a reality?
I wonder if we use the nuclear energy for our car, that means we don even need to refill our gasoline right?
A fusion reactor will heat plasma to temperatures which are ten times those in the core of the sun. Harnessing such extremes in an engineered "bottle" will take many decades. An editorial in New Scientist magazine explained that "if commercial fusion is viable, it may well be a century away."
Great job with it.I never knew that fusion was safe. Maybe you ought to look at the way doctor's use in curing cancer and other illness. I know that radiotion thearpy is painless. it's afterwards you get sick and your body gets weird.
BTW, great post!
Saying that fission (which we have now)is unsafe, and fusion (which we may never have) is unsafe, is a dirty lie and a trick of a crowd called the "Nuclear Club of Wall St" from the 1970s. If you sabotage, fission, including in advanced forms, you will never have the optimism, the capital, or the scientific cadre (as in young scientists) to develop fusion. You are dooming to oblivion 90% of the world's population. Gee thanks, brillant guys.
Now, if we can only get fusion technology to work - it will definitely solve all the energy problems in the world! And i kid you not! Nice take on the subject, my friend! You've done your homework. Keep it up!
It would be great if Fusion power could be made viable. It's interesting that so many people (us) have to trust the know how and expertise of so few (them) on this critical issue.
My understanding of fusion is that it's much more safe that fission in that if there's any interference with the machinery, the whole reaction just shuts down.
There's no possibility of a 'cascade failure', which is the principle weakness of fission.
Additionally, a recent advancement has been made with regards to the containment fields used in a fusion reactor, making the process more efficient and sustainable.
To clarify this, the point of magnetic shielding is keep all of the superheated plasma inside the torus-shaped chamber.
If it manages to escape, then there's a huge loss of energy, the whole thing becomes unstable and hen fusion stops.
It's also interesting to point out that there's such a thing as a natural fission reactor.
If memory serves me correctly, such a thing existed about 1 billion years ago somewhere in west Africa.
It was self-sustaining, self-regulating sources of hydrothermal energy and has been the source of some intense study for a few years.
The whole thing wasn't much more than a waterfall inside a cave system with a 'cyst', or well, where the water gathered before overflowing and passing on elsewhere.
The sides of the cave wall where shot through with uranium. So when the water welled up, fission reaction began.
But as soon as the process began to accelerate, the water simply boiled off and the process shut down.
Hours would pass before the rocks cooled enough for the water to flow once more and process started again.
Yet again, we need to hold the hand of Mother Nature...
The problem with fusion, which has kept it "a few decades away" for the past few decades, is that million-degree plasma must be kept in close proximity to nearly 0 degree superconductors to keep the plasma suspended.
It's not going to happen. If we had spent even a fraction of the billions that have been blown on fusion researching photovoltaics and deploying them, we'd already have fusion power--from the sun.
Here is one promising technology that is not getting the backing it needs to make or break it:
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
So I have decided to do an end run around the government by designing an open source fusion test reactor.
Any one care to help? You can start here:
IEC Fusion Newsgroup
IEC Fusion Technology blog
BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.
BTW the above IEC technologies mentioned could be developed in 10 years or less with the right kind of push.
IEC takes a lot less equipment than the Tokamak.
An interesting, concise and well-presented Sunday morning read. Though I may have heard the terms before, I never understood the differences between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.
Thank you for the introduction!
--Roberta Murphy
I'm really intrigued by this fusion vs fission discussion. I do think that harnessing the power of the atom is the way to go. Any endeavor to study safer and productive ways to do so is alright by me.
I thought your readers would be interested in looking at these energy technologies and EPS's theoretic base for ball lighting.
Aneutronic Fusion: Here I am not talking about the big science ITER project taking thirty years, but the several small alternative plasma fusion efforts.
There are three companies pursuing hydrogen-boron plasma toroid fusion, Paul Koloc, Prometheus II, Eric Lerner, Focus Fusion and Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems
Vincent Page (a technology officer at GE!!) gave a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research , which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion
He quotes costs and time to development of P-B11 Fusion as tens of million $, and years verses the many decades and ten Billion plus $ projected for ITER and other "Big" science efforts
Here are the links:
http://www.electronpowersystems.com/
A resent DOD review of EPS technology reads as follows:
"MIT considers these plasmas a revolutionary breakthrough, with Delphi's
chief scientist and senior manager for advanced technology both agreeing
that EST/SPT physics are repeatable and theoretically explainable. MIT and
EPS have jointly authored numerous professional papers describing their
work. (Delphi is a $33B company, the spun off Delco Division of General
Motors)."
and
"Cost: no cost data available. The complexity of reliable mini-toroid
formation and acceleration with compact, relatively low-cost equipment
remains to be determined. Yet the fact that the EPS/MIT STTR work this
technology has attracted interest from Delphi is very significant, as the
automotive electronics industry is considered to be extremely demanding of
functionality per dollar and pound (e.g., mil-spec performance at
Wal-Mart-class 'commodity' prices)."
It also provides a theoretic base for ball lighting : Ball Lightning Explained as a Stable Plasma Toroid http://www.electronpowersystems.com/Images/Ball%20Lightning%20Explained.pdf
The theoretics are all there in peer reviewed papers. It does sound to good to be true however with names like MIT, Delphi, STTR grants, NIST grants , etc., popping up all over, I have to keep investigating.
Recent support has also come from one of the top lightning researcher in the world, Joe Dwyer at FIT, when he got his Y-ray and X-ray research published in the May issue of Scientific American,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00032CE5-13B7-1264-8F9683414B7FFE9F
Dwyer's paper:
http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/PDF/Gammarays.pdf
and according to Clint Seward it supports his lightning models and fusion work at Electron Power Systems
lightning produces thermonuclear reaction
This new work By Dr.Kuzhevsky on neutrons in lightning: Russian Science News http://www.informnauka.ru/eng/2005/2005-09-13-5_65_e.htm is also supportive of Electron Power Systems fusion efforts .
Vincent Page (a technology officer at GE!!) gave a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research , which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion (Below Is an excerpt).
"for larger plant sizes
Time to small-scale Cost to achieve net if the small-scale
Concept Description net energy production energy concept works:
Koloc Spherical Plasma: 10 years(time frame), $25 million (cost), 80%(chance of success)
Field Reversed Configuration: 8 years $75 million 60%
(Eric Lerner)Plasma Focus: 6 years $18 million 80%"
Looks like Eric Lerner is moving down the road!!
U.S., Chilean Labs to Collaborate on Testing Scientific Feasibility of Focus Fusion http://pesn.com/2006/03/18/9600250_LPP_Chilean_Nuclear_Commission/
The learning curve is so steep now, and with the resources of the online community, I'm sure we can rally greater support to solve this paramount problem of our time.
However, short of a Energy "silver bullet" like fusion , Here is a fully DOABLE technology
Time to Master the Carbon Cycle
Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional, as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did,............ and that now......... we are over doing it.
The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and burning of the world's virgin forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till and reforestation have started to help rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, a returning of the misplaced carbon to where it belongs.
Energy, the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas management
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Energy%20Paper%2006_05.htm
On the Scale of CO2 remediation:
It is my understanding that atmospheric CO2 stands at 379 PPM, to stabilize the climate we need to reduce it to 350 PPM by the removal of 230 Billion tons.
The best estimates I've found are that the total loss of forest and soil carbon (combined
pre-industrial and industrial) has been about 200-240 billion tons. Of
that, the soils are estimated to account for about 1/3, and the vegetation
the other 2/3.
Since man controls 24 billion tons in his agriculture then it seems we have plenty to work with in sequestering our fossil fuel co2 emissions as charcoal.
As Dr. Lehmann at Cornell points out, "Closed-Loop Pyrolysis systems such as Dr. Danny Day's are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative". and that " a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! "
Terra Preta Soils Technology: Carbon Negative Bio fuels, massive Carbon sequestration and 3X Fertility Too
This some what orphaned new soil technology speaks to so many different interests and disciplines that it has not been embraced fully by any. I'm sure you will see both the potential of this system and the convergence needed for it's implementation.
The integrated energy strategy offered by Charcoal based Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.
The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:
I have heard that National Geographic is preparing a big Terra Preta (TP) article.
SCIAM Article May 15 07
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9FB144E40
Nature article: Putting the carbon back Black is the new green:
http://bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_200604.pdf
Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htm
This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 17,000 folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-preta.html
If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP website I've been drafted to co-administer.
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node
It has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus), chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of EPRIDA , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks and probably many others who's back round I don't know have joined.
There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.
Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.
The reason TP has elicited such interest on the Agricultural/horticultural side of it's benefits is this one static:
One gram of charcoal cooked to 650 C Has a surface area of 400 m2 (for soil microbes & fungus to live on), now for conversion fun:
One ton of charcoal has a surface area of 400,000 Acres!! which is equal to 625 square miles!! Rockingham Co. VA. , where I live, is only 851 Sq. miles
Now at a middle of the road application rate of 2 lbs/sq ft (which equals 1000 sqft/ton) or 43 tons/acre yields 26,000 Sq miles of surface area per Acre. VA is 39,594 Sq miles.
What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.
To take just one fairly representative example, in the classic Rothampstead experiments in England where arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous temperate woodland, soil organic carbon increased 300-400% from around 20 t/ha to 60-80 t/ha (or about 30-40 tons per acre) in less than a century (Jenkinson & Rayner 1977). The rapidity with which organic carbon can build up in soils is also indicated by examples of buried steppe soils formed during short-lived interstadial phases in Russia and Ukraine. Even though such warm, relatively moist phases usually lasted only a few hundred years, and started out from the skeletal loess desert/semi-desert soils of glacial conditions (with which they are inter-leaved), these buried steppe soils have all the rich organic content of a present-day chernozem soil that has had many thousands of years to build up its carbon (E. Zelikson, Russian Academy of Sciences, pers. comm., May 1994). http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon1.html
All the Bio-Char Companies and equipment manufactures I've found:
Carbon Diversion
http://www.carbondiversion.com/ ( Clorox / Kingsford Charcoal just licensed this Plasma Carbonization process )
Eprida: Sustainable Solutions for Global Concerns
http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4
BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. | Slow Pyrolysis - Biomass - Clean Energy - Renewable Energy
http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html
Dynamotive Energy Systems | The Evolution of Energy
http://www.dynamotive.com/
Ensyn - Environmentally Friendly Energy and Chemicals
http://www.ensyn.com/who/ensyn.htm
Agri-Therm, developing bio oils from agricultural waste
http://www.agri-therm.com/
Advanced BioRefinery Inc.
http://www.advbiorefineryinc.ca/
Technology Review: Turning Slash into Cash
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17298/
The International Agrichar Initiative (IAI) conference held at Terrigal, NSW, Australia in 2007. ( http://iaiconference.org/home.html )
.
If pre-Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.
Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of energy return over energy input (EROEI) for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.
We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.
I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society.
Thanks,
Erich
Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540) 289-9750
Very interesting post. I have submitted this article to our science news site at SciCastLive. Check it out if you get a chance. Thanks.
As much as i love the little understood concept of fusion power (and fully support the ITER project), there is a joke referring to the unfortunately long development time of harnessing fusion power (as many believed back in the 1960s that once fission was controlled, fusion would be easy)
It follows:
"The harnessing of fusion power is 50 years away......and it always will be."
Thanks to ilker for helping to enlighten people on this most wonderful of subjects.
PS Who wouldn't support nuclear fusion if they understood that one of the main byproducts is helium. The same that is used to fill childrens party balloons :)
The Russians are planning to have a Nuclear Fusion reactor by 2050.. i think the technology is there
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wow i didnt think fusion would be better than fission!
wow i didnt think fusion would be better than fission!
Who here has heard about the CERN Particle Accelerator. I think that will be cool.
Part of the problem with any source of nuclear power, whether fission or fusion, is the generation of waste products. Currently with PWRs you are seeing only a 4% burn of the fuel prior to need for refueling. The refueling process generates significant amounts of waste products. However another source is the materials inside the compartment becoming irradiated from the neutron flux. In the case of fusion, there is a significant increase in the neutron flux. This increase will cause significant irradiated materials. Worse much of the materials have a long half-life. Cobalt 60 would still be created in the heat transfer system if valves are used and the flux can act upon it. With it's 5.27 year half-life and two 2.2 MeV gammas produced in the decay, you'd still have disposal issues.
A major meltdown of a fission power plant has happened exactly twice. Once was at Chernobyl, and happened because they designed their reactor in a hurry, and so it was really crappy. The other time was at Three Mile Island, and the reaction was quickly taken care of and nobody was harmed. While fission power does have the risk of a runaway reaction, the chances of it happening are very slim. Fusion has no such risk of a runaway reaction, for the same reason that makes it hard to do.
Fusion "power", as it's done now is done by fusing a deuterium (hydrogen-2) and a tritium (hydrogen-3) atom together to form a helium atom and release a neutron with about 14MeV of energy. That energy is currently being harnessed by slowing down the neutrons in water, allowing them to pass their energy on to the water in the form of heat. The steam is then used to turn a generator, just as in a conventional power plant. The problem with this is that it takes more energy to keep the fusion going that the fusion releases, so one of ITER's main goals is to "ignite" a self-sustaining fusion reaction. The other problem is that the neutron-steam idea is that the free neutrons sometimes get caught by atoms in the shell of the reactor, sometimes making the parts of the reactor vessel radioactive. All in all, this still produces only a minute fraction of the radioactive waste that a fission plant produces, which itself is very small.
BOTTOM LINE: Fission is safe and easy, fusion is safe and difficult. Nuclear power is safe.
To begin with, what the all fusion reactors currently under development have in common is this little known nuclear methodology called fluoride molten salt technology. This was conceived and perfected by the Idaho national lab (INL) back in the 1970’s and could offer the world an abundant source of carbon free electric power today, not years from now.
The Liquid fluoride thorium reactor (Lftr) has already been designed, prototyped and demonstrated to be safe and effective. But research on the Lftr was canceled to leave the field open for breeder reactor development when plutonium was important to the national defense, but now the government feels it is dangerous. In stead of fusion to produce nuclear heat, the Lftr burns nuclear waste; something we have plenty of.
In his open letter to President Obama, the climatologist Dr. Jim Hanson recommended the Thorium fuel cycle and the Lftr. Dr. Edward Teller, the father of Fusion, after a lifetime of work on every aspect of nuclear technology had at the last month of his life came to this conclusion in his final study: “the LFTR is the best of all possible reactor types”. (see http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf)
The LFTR, a GEN IV reactor, which is currently in development in France, Japan, and Russia, is an elegant type of reactor that can compliment renewable energy by allowing for base load, load following, or peak power production. It can start up on any kind of nuclear fuel, bomb material, or nuclear waste product to produce very efficient, high temperature heat and at the same time breed more fuel in the bargain. This thrifty approach to nuclear energy greatly appeals to me, but I became even more interested in the LFTR when the details of a new patent were revealed by Dr LeBlanc (see below @ minute 53). It opens up the possibility of building a very compact but powerful reactor that can run for 30 years without refueling. With no danger of a core meltdown or runaway reaction, this air cooled reactor can be deployed anywhere and operated remotely in an unattended fully automated intrusion detecting mode and sited underground while it breeds self perpetuating new fuel within the thorium structure of the reactor itself.
The Lftr is highly proliferation resistant. In order to get to its fuel, U233 that has been produced inside the very solid metal walls of this 200 ton reactor 1800 degree, white hot containment vessel, a proliferator must destroy and disassemble the reactor, lift its heavy reactor core out of a 100 meter deep reinforced aircraft crash proof hole in the ground, then cut the thorium containment vessel up into small pieces while enduring heavy killing gamma radiation exposure, next reprocess these reactor pieces using isotopic separation since the U233 is denatured with enough U238 to make chemical separation of bomb grade U233 impossible, and do all this without being detected. Now, this is a tall order for any bad guy and may just be an impossible assignment.
The Lftr burns its fuel at 99.8 % efficiency. At the end of the service life of the Lftr, the reactor vessel is sent back to the factory where it is reduced to liquid fluoride salts that become the feedstock of the next new Lftr. This feedstock can only be used by the new Lftr and not for bombs. A few handfuls of waste products are held at the factory for a few hundred years to cool down before they are mined for the many precious elements contained within like platinum and iridium. Now that is what I call a safe, efficient and thrifty mode of operation!
I thank you for the opportunity to bring this little know nuclear technology to your attention.
To learn more see one of the following:
Aim High
http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh
What Fusion Wanted To Be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So
Axil
http://writentalk.blogspot.com/2009/07/nuclear-fusion-and-future-10-years.html
Here is a critical statistic that you left out!
Electricity generated by Fission power plants this year = 2,167,515 million kWhr's
Electricity Generated by Fusion power plants this year = 0 kWhr's
This number for fusion is not likely to change in the next 50 years and the number for fission will continue to increase.
Hello,
can anyone tell me which is the best counter strike guide ? :)...i found this one :
http://www.downloadzdb.com/Counter_Strike_Best_Guide
What do you hither terminate to it ?
Thanx in advance
Sorry for my bad english :s
What do you think? Post your thoughts..