Princeton University Test Fusion Reactor 1982 - 1997

Fusion is the dream of all societies, except for maybe the oil, coal and natural gas producers. Fusion is a form of nuclear power that is clean, safe and cheap. I am sure the big oil companies wouldn't want to see this come about, but except for these guys, it is what every country would want. It would end the dependence on black gold for everything except maybe autos. All the nuclear plants in the world today use fission, a much more dangerous procedure for producing energy. The waste from these plants is clogging storage pools all over the world. Not only is this waste dangerous today, but it will remain so for about 100,000 years. Think of how long 100,000 years is. The pyramids are about 4000 - 5000 years old. Some say they might even have been built around 10,000 B.C. That would make them about 12,000 years old. The oldest city is somewhere around 12,000 - 15,000 years old, give or take a couple of thousand years. That means that this stuff will be dangerous for about seven times the time from when the world's oldest city was built to now.

Fusion works completely different from the current nuclear fission which we use now. In a fusion reactor particles are forced together and create a gas known as plasma. Actually plasma is the step after gas is super heated. Very powerful magnetic coils contain this plasma in a chamber that is shaped like a donut. This chamber is called a tokamak. So why is everyone so excited over the thought of fusion power? That is because it has so many advantages. The fuel is deuterium which can be extracted from water. This means that the supply of fuel will never run out. It also requires tritium which can be obtained from lithium. We know of at least several thousand years supply. Another advantage is that the experts claim that a nuclear accident causing a release of energy is impossible. Such a small amount of fuel is used that if there was a malfunction, the plasma would hit the containment vessel's walls and cool. The generating process is pollution free. There would be no high level nuclear waste. There will be some low level waste but careful selection of the materials used will keep this to a minimum. Finally the reactor doesn't produce weapons materials. All these reasons make the idea of a fusion reactor very attractive.

A consortium composed of several countries, including the U.S. has been working on the problems connected with developing fusion reactors. One of the major problems was edge localized modes. The scientists refer to this as ELMs. Simply put, the plasma's outer edge erodes the tokamak's, or chamber's inner wall. This is caused by fluxes in the plasma's edge. This is unacceptable because it means constant replacement of the wall in the tokamak, making the reactor impractical. This problem has been solved by a scientist working in California. He introduced a small resonant magnetic field and this stops fluxes in the plasma, thus one of the major stumbling blocks in fusion reactor development has been solved. To see a fusion reactor in action, one has merely to look at the sun. A test fusion reactor is going to be constructed by the consortium of nations, which is composed of, the U.S., Japan, India, Russia, South Korea, China and the European Union. The plan is to take up to ten years to build the reactor, by then it is believed that most of the bugs will be out of it. Next, the plan calls for running the reactor for up to twenty years. I guess by then, everyone will have them.

Not all scientists believe that this fusion reactor is the best way to go. Some say that it will be too hard to overcome the design and engineering problems. They claim that it will have to be enormous, require too much maintenance and will have to protect itself and the area around it from the high energy neutrons it will produce. These scientists are proposing a different type of fusion reactor called a colliding beam fusion reactor. The fuel would be protons and boron. They claim that it will produce much less radioactivity and be much smaller, better for the environment and easier to maintain. They claim their type of reactor is better for at least the reason that so much shielding would be required with the original plan that it would be impractical to build.

There is still much new technology that must be developed before either plant can be built. A fusion reactor must produce more energy than is put into it. Unfortunately, politics is now getting in the way of the consortium. There are huge differences of opinion on who should pay how much and who should be in charge. How people can expect a group of nations, specially a group that has many differences, to be able to agree on a project this important is beyond me. Lets look at the group again. Russia is rich in natural gas and oil and it may not be in their best interest for fusion to take place too soon. China is in competition with the U.S. in exports and the U.S. is losing badly. The EU and China are also in competition as is Japan, the U.S. and the EU. South Korea and Japan and in a battle for the electronics and automotive markets. It seems that although all have something to gain from the project, China and India have the most to gain with cheap energy. Maybe a fair way to divide the cost would be by population.

We can only hope that all this bickering will stop and the project will proceed with the final result being cheap energy for all.