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The real question about fusion is why it even interests scientists and engineers. Fission is much simpler and has proven that it can compete against coal, oil and natural gas. It's production costs can be cheaper and it does not produce any polluting emissions.

I have thought about this question for many years. The most LOGICAL answer that I have found is that scientists love to work on hard problems, but they are not really interested in solutions or in the day to day effort required to keep fulfilling human needs for energy.

Governments seem interested in continuing to fund a search for new energy sources, but once the search has found a real competitor to the established energy sources, moneyed interests, like the fossil fuel industry, step in and attempt to raise barriers to entry for the upstart competition.

In other words, fusion does not threaten the establishment, so spending billions on it over time is no worry for the fossil fuel industry. Since I am more interested in solving the energy problem than "working on it" I prefer to invest my time, energy and money in fission developments.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.

Considering we have a labour government who are clearly un-able to even spell "future" never-known actually plan toward it, I am not surprised there are funding issues.

Hydrogen fuel is a pretty potent example of that. Honda have proven quite satifactorily that a car can be powered by hydrogen, yet our government are still even now un-willing to put the funds into the development to produce the hydrogen and therefore replace oil - though the fact that Brown is Scotish, and oil is Scotland's biggest export, does raise some questions there.

Fusion is an "illusion". It needs tritum which is made from lithium in a fission reactor. It has only a short half-life and to make sufficient for a commercial application would be impractical and would need lots of fission reactors to feed the fusion reactor.

(It must be remembered that Pile 1 at Windscale caught fire when making tritium.)

Fast breeders are equally impractical as the "doubling" time of 15 to 20 years to replace the plutionium fuel and with the need for more reprocessing plants to separate that gained from the depleted uranium "blanket", breeders like fusion will ever remain a mirage.

In the meantime the uranium gleaned from ever-decreasingly low grade deposits is running down fast. No wonder the scientists "harrumpf" when confronted with the reality of wind generation!

To RodAdams apart from the obvious conflict of interests as someone financially involved in the nuclear fission industry I was interested in your comment that Nuclear fission produces no polluting emissions. Following the unfortunate incident at Windscale (Sellafield as it is now known) you can still detect radioactivity in the beaches around the site and as far away as the Irish coast. After the accident at Chernobyl, half of Europe was rendered radioactive and parts of the Ukraine remain uninhabitable with childhood cancers still out of control. Nuclear reactors will always be a high risk strategy. Nuclear fusion, by comparison has a much smaller potential to cause harm.

It is disappointing however that even after the amounts of money poured into Culham, a commercially viable solution is a long way off. However, investment in alternative energy sources must be encouraged.

As long as the major petrochemical companies maintain their massive profits and thereby their political clout, real investment in alternatives will continue to be stifled or strangled at birth. Salter's Duck anyone?

A windfall tax, to be handed over to researchers into alternative energy sources might be viewed as a politically acceptable solution to funding issues.

VampiricHoshi the most abundant source for hydrogen fuel, in the energy liberating chemical reaction you're thinking of planning to be used in cars, is water, most likely sea water. This isn't a viable source for 'generating' electricity as it takes more energy to produce than it provides. However it is a very clean low polluting way of transporting that energy to cars to power them. It effectively moves the point of pollution to the power plants which are required to provide the energy to extract the hydrogen.
Which is a great step towards clean energy. However the energy liberating nuclear fusion reaction involving hydrogen is still the best source for generating energy in the long term. After all pretty much all life on our planet is already powered by energy from a fusion reactor in the sky...

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Rory:
I hope that Britain can afford fusion....


~Dennis Junior~

if we invested what we should be doing in energy efficiency and renewables, we might even have enough resources to carry on tinkering with this stuff... then again, we probably wouldn't need it any more. hard choice? not really.

When you talk about fusion research and mention only electro-magnetic confinement you are missing at least half the story. The laser has developed at incredible speed since its invention and today huge lasers are being built to trigger fusion in the same hydrogen isotopes that are being used at JET and will be used at ITER in France when it is built. American scientists at the National Ignition Faciliy in California are within two years of proving energy gain from fusion driven by lasers and a UK-led international project (HiPER) will be ready to carry forward this major step and put together the world's first attempt at a demonstration fusion reactor. Try Googling the words HiPER and NIF and all will be revealed!!! Your question "Can Britain afford fusion" deserves an answer.... Britain cannot afford NOT to be involved in fusion. It's the only thing we have (or will have) to answer the long-term energy challenge for a species utterly addicted to buring energy on a scale completely inappropriate to its place on this planet ! Let's hope Obama's administration can move away from the domination of "big oil" and start taking the energy problem really seriously before it really is too late !

We don't have the materials needed to withstand fusion's temperatures of 300 million degrees C for prolonged periods and it is dubious that we will within the next 50 years - if ever!

Rather than chasing rainbows, such as fusion power, I wish the world would get as excited about expanding the use of highly effective and more basic energy efficient and renewable technologies which we know work.

We don't have 30-50 years to waste when it comes to tackling climate change and we need to focus our effort on projects which will offer tangible results before the natural feedback mechanisms make it impossible to reduce greenhouse concentrations to the levels the levels that have been experienced since human beings evolved.

Luckily the UK doesn't need to develope materials to withstand 300M Degree's C. The temperature required is 100M C, and that is just the plasma in the reactor. The walls will be a few meter's away from the plasma and the temperature they will have to withstand will be in the region of about 10,000 Degree's C.

Ofcourse, using the Laser idea might make it all the more easier again as their are some materials used today that can do the job... the only problem is they can't mass produce this material.

Fusion will work, as soon as politicians decide it is ok to spend 拢35,000 on a spanner to build a fusion reactor instead of spending 拢35,000 on a spanner that will build a cruise missile. This Iraq war alone has cost over a Trillion dollars... imagine if that money was spent on fusion over the last 10-15 years.

Also, I just feel I have to add...

I see some people think that Fusion is a pipe dream. But you people need to realise that if this is the case then we are not going to have an easy life at all and energy blackouts will be the normal thing in the future.

The current idea of renewable energy is unsustainable today, let alone tomorrow... unless Billions of dollars are spent installing MILLIONS of solar panels around this country alone. As for the world... well there is not enough money in global circulation for that! Solar is far too expensive and inefficient.

Don't count on hydro-dam's to take the brunt of the work... they can't build them because a few people cry that a plant will be drowned under water when it also lives acorss the rest of continent... madness. Then there is the price... ONE MEDIUM SIZED HYDRO-DAM COST'S AS MUCH AS THE WHOLE ITER PROJECT... including a fully built and working test fusion reactor!

Fission is a candidate, but there is always the potential for terrorist attack. Thankfully the modern fissions power stations are very very very safe, but still so expensive.

There is even localised energy to consider, my little village would certainly benefit from a nice new watermill to convert power from the stream but I doubt that the government can afford to spend over 拢250,000 installing such localized (mills or solar or whatever)equipment in the 100,000+ UK villages, towns and cities that currently exist.

For these reasons, Fusion must get higher funding and more nations need to join the ITER project which in turn should oversee all types of fusion research under one umbrella. Hopefully then at a later date a commercial alternative will arise, creating a competing project to fusion energy and that is where we may see real progress spark into life. While this research goes on... I suppose we must bite the bullet and power on building as many renewable devices as we can afford without collapsing our economy into a hyper-inflation induced dark age.

I have recently retired as a researcher working in the fusion energy field for almost 20 years. I soon became convinced that fusion energy production via magnetic (JET, ITER) or inertial (NIF) confinement fusion would never become a practical, economic way to produce useful energy. After spending billions of dollars on research and construction of huge machines, not one watt of useful electric power has been produced. If fusion energy is the answer, we would have it by now.

The present plans for fusion energy production requires the use of tritium fuel, a rare and toxic substance. The present reactors can only sustain a reaction for only a few seconds; the future ones a few minutes at best. The burning of this fuel produces intense amounts of neutron radiation. The fusion community doesn't want to talk about the fact that because of this radiation, the internal structure of the reactors becomes radioactive and damaged by the neutron radiation. It has to be entirely replaced, by robots, every few years, and disposed of. This will result in an enormous expense and downtime. The community has become so desperate for results that they have started working on a reactor that repeatedly explodes nuclear micro bombs inside a huge chamber. And all these planned concepts would ultimately boil water to produce steam, just like the power plants the century before last did. We can do better then that.

I became involved in a concept that can produce steady state fusion reactions without the use of tritium. It produces useful charged particles and fewer neutrons, if any. This promising university project became quite successful, producing ever increasing rates of fusion reactions to the point where we could use the small reactor to produce medical isotopes and detect explosives. It was far from producing a net amount of useful energy, but had a lot of advantages over the present concepts. But the mainstream fusion community refused to embrace alternative concepts such as this, mainly because it would threaten their careers. It is because of this that economical production of energy with fusion will never become a reality.

Deuterium fusion is interesting in that its fuel is very abundant almost everywhere. Uranium is extremely abundant on the Earth's surface, not so much so on other solar system objects. (Interesting to note the truthful, although I suspect inadvertently so, reference above to "ever-decreasingly low grade deposits" of uranium above. The uranium deposits that are being mined today are indeed much richer than in years past.)

Another interesting thing about fusion: when it's off, it's all the way off. At the moment that's all the time, but when we find the On switch, it will have some advantages over fission.

Rory might have enjoyed a short diversion, while at Culham, to the factory making ~4% of the world's supply of Solar (PV) silicon - about 500 yards away from JET.

So how much is that? About 130MWp/year; not much yet but rising fast!

Is solar economic?
Expect parity with grid power costs in two years, in Spain. We get half as much power per m2 as spain, so it'll be a bit longer here.

But 7 square metres generates about 1 kW, in the UK.
Going for "1 kilowatt from every roof" would give us about 20GW ~ current peak grid power is ~ 60GW.

Energy payback is about 18 months, now, and silicon needed is half that needed in 2002 and falling fast.

I think silicon PV will make quite a contribution to world energy supplies, well before fusion (which we certainly also need) can really start contributing.

So, Rory, why not call by and have a look?!!
Ed.

@15.

I am afraid your figures are somewhat off regrading the solar power on every roof. There is no way that any nation of Planet Earth could fit a solar panel on every home within the, let alone the UK do it alone. The global economic output is only 35 trillion dollars with being USA roughly 13 trillion and EU roughly 14 trillion. It would take in excess of 35 trillion dollars for the governemnt to employ poeple to first research the design, the contruct and then fit the panels as well as maintain them. with approxminately 10 million homes in the UK that would also take over 20 years to complete... and that is what pushes the price of national solar power above what the entire world combined can generate in taxes, imports and exports.

Solar power has no future in contributing a sufficient amount of energy to the UK needed for today and tomorrow. It's a niche thing, a "look, we are so green" niche!

EverOnABeach, #13;
It sounds like you are working with proton-boron fusion. If you want to see a p-B project MUCH closer to culmination, not using steady state but pulsed microfusion events, check out FocusFusion.org . Its proof-of-concept experiments have finally received the (miniscule) funding they required, and will be done by 2010's end. Then within 3 years, engineering design and prototyping of mass-producible 5MW generators will be done, to be licensed for manufacture by all comers, world-wide. The cost per watt capacity will be about 5垄 (2p), and the billing rate about 录垄/kwh (0.1p). Both are around 1/20 of current best market rates in North America, or perhaps 1% of UK rates.

No radiation, no waste (a few litres of helium per day). Direct current generation at 85-95% efficiency. (No thermal power cycle needed.)

All other power generating options become economic roadkill at that point.

I see some numeric/currency symbols didn't come across in my #17. The first one is 5 cents ($0.05), and the second one is one-quarter cent ($0.0025).