First published in InFocus: Nuclear, a supplement to Cleantech magazine January/February 2008. Copyright Cleantech Investor 2008
by Denis Gross
In February 2008 the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) revealed what its committee of experts believes are the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. One of them is providing energy from fusion. Fusion energy is the process that powers the sun, in the interior of which immense heat and gravitational pressure compress nuclei of certain elements into heavier nuclei, releasing binding energy. While reactors on earth are incapable of recreating the enormously high pressures of the sun’s interior, this can be compensated to a large extent by the ability to achieve far higher temperatures. For the past five decades fusion has been seen as one of the most promising inexhaustible clean energy sources for the future, with the fuel abundantly available and no carbon dioxide or long-lived radioactive decay products being produced. However, mainstream research has yet to identify a route to a commercial fusion power plant.
Since research on fusion got under way in the early 1950s, the problems with which international researchers have grappled are containing the fusion reaction and getting more energy out than is put in. The Burning Plasma Assessment Committee, formed by the US National Research Council, backed one approach that has consumed a significant proportion of fusion research money through the years. This approach – magnetic confinement – was outlined in its 2004 report ’Burning Plasma: Bringing a Star to Earth’. A burning plasma is a plasma (an ionised gas) in which at least 50% of the energy to drive the fusion reaction is generated internally. As a result, Washington was persuaded to commit the US to becoming a significant partner in a project that is expected to provide a breakthrough step in fusion energy, ITER.