﻿ Nuclear Fusion: Is it the Answer to the Impending Crisis in Energy and Resources | OilPrice.com

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I attended a fascinating event last night - a Cafe' Scientifique meeting held in the town of Reading in South East England. Last month it was me in the bear-pit, talking about "What Happens When the Oil Runs Out?", which remains a pertinent question. Last night it was the turn of Dr Chris Warrick from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy based near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, which hosts both the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) and the better known JET (Joint European Torus) experiments. Fusion research costs an awful lot of money and we are still told actually getting energy from it is decades away. In the audience was a veteran engineer/physicist who had worked on the pioneering ZETA experiment in the late 1950s, from which neutrons were detected leading to what proved later to be false claims that fusion had occurred, their true source being different versions of the same instability processes that had beset earlier machines.




The plan is to surround the chamber with a "blanket" of lithium with pipes running through it and some heat-exchanger fluid passing through them. The heated fluid would then pass on its heat to water and drive a steam-turbine, in the time-honoured fashion used for fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. Now my understanding is that this would not be lithium metal but some oxide material. The heat would be delivered in the form of very high energy neutrons that would be slowed-down as they encounter lithium nuclei on passing through the blanket. In principle this is a very neat trick, since absorption of a neutron by a lithium nucleus converts it to tritium, which could be fed back into the plasma as a fuel. Unlike deuterium, tritium does not exist is nature being radioactive with a half life of about 12 years. However produced either separately or in the blanket lithium is the ultimate fuel source, not tritium per se. Deuterium does exist in nature but only to the extent of one part in about two thousand of ordinary hydrogen (protium) and hence the energy costs of its separation are not inconsiderable.

Exposure to radiation of many potential materials necessary to make the reactor, blanket, and other components such as the heat-exchanger pipes would render them brittle, and so compromise their structural integrity. Providing a fairly intense magnetic field to confine the plasma (maybe 4 Teslas - similar to that in a hospital MRI scanner) needs power (dc not ac as switching the polarity of the field would cause the plasma to collapse) and large power-supply units containing a lot of metals including rare earths which are mined and processed using fossil fuels. The issue of rare earths is troublesome already, and whether enough of them can be recovered to meet existing planned wind and electric car projects is debatable let alone that additional pressure should be placed upon an already fragile resource to build a first generation of fusion power stations.



By. Professor Chris Rhodes


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