UK Joins Laser Nuclear Fusion Project

arisvega writes with this quote from the BBC: "The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with [the National Ignition Facility in the U.S.] to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source. ... Part of the problem has been that the technical ability to reach 'breakeven' — the point at which more energy is produced than is consumed — has always seemed distant. Detractors of the idea have asserted that 'fusion energy is 50 years away, no matter what year you ask,' said David Willetts, the UK's science minister. 'I think that what's going on both in the UK and in the US shows that we are now making significant progress on this technology,' he said. 'It can't any longer be dismissed as something on the far distant horizon.'"

Fusion research is good

[JoshuaZ]

There are now multiple different approaches to fusion research. Laser fusion looks promising although we don't have a really good understanding of how to efficiently extract energy from laser fusion. Magnetic containment fusion in the form of tokamaks is also still ongoing. There is an international group working now to build ITER which will be a very large tokamak which will be in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [wikipedia.org]. There are other ideas out there but unfortunately many of the more interesting ones are not receiving much funding. Laser fusion confines the plasma and crushes it with brief intense laser pulses while tokamaks confine the plasma using a torus of electromagnets. However, stellarators use a different form of magnetic confinement and might end up working but they are getting almost no funding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [wikipedia.org]

The idea that we are always 50 years from fusion seems to be unfair. We've gotten much better at handling the basics. We can now consistently get fusion to occur with a variety of methods. The primary problems are doing so efficiently enough to get more energy out than we are putting in. We've made slow but steady progress at improving efficiency through a variety of methods. The development of so-called high temperature superconductors (that is able to superconduct a bit over the temperature at which nitrogen boils) in the 1970s has helped a lot. And the engineering issues really are immense. We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also.

There's another aspect about this sort of thing that is good news. The United States is steadily eroding its scientific and exploratory capability. We've retired the shuttle with no replacement. In the 1990s we canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. As a result when the LHC came online the US lost a lot of particle physicists who went over to Europe. The US particle physics has been in a state of decline since then. Most recently, the US is closing down the Tevatron, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68988/title/Tevatron_to_shut_down_in_September [sciencenews.org] which is the star US particle accelerator. While the energy levels of the Tevatron are less than the LHC the types and variety of collisions it does are sufficiently different such that having both of them is very much not redundant. And, the James Webb Telescope might be getting canceled, so it looks like cutting edge astronomy is another area the US is giving up on. If I had just been told that there was a Slashdot headline about laser fusion in the US I would have guessed that it would have been funding cuts for the NIR. The fact that organizations from elsewhere are actually joining suggests that the decline in US science might not be as bad as a pessimist might think. It might be reversible.

Thorium Reactors are What Fusion Wants To Be Now

[RudyHartmann]

Fusion is probably going to take huge expensive and sophisticated facilities to produce an economically viable power reactor. To some point (not completely though) I think much of this has been just government works projects. On the other hand thorium nuclear reactors could be exploited for far less money and much quicker. Thorium is a fairly abundant element that does not have many of the negative properties which a plutonium or uranium based react would have. We have to do something to beef up the electrical grid. I read an article that said if 10% of the cars in the USA switched to electric, it would collapse the capacity of the grid. Besides, most electricity here is now generated by coal. Please look into the more promising technology of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR [wikipedia.org] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8 [youtube.com] I'm not saying we should stop research on fusion, but we have to have a quickly viable alternative.

Re:Progress

[Rei]

I hate this attitude, which says that, "Because we don't have the holy grail yet, we haven't accomplished anything." The Q-factors on fusion reactions are many orders of magnitude better than we were getting even just a few decades ago. The amount of "unknown", while not eliminated, has been dramatically reduced, and on some paths, there's a pretty clear route to commercial viability. Inertial confinement, like NIF, in particular. Well, not exactly like NIF. The leading path for commercial viability of an inertial confinement system is HiPER [wikipedia.org], which uses a much smaller (and thus much lower capital/operating cost) compression pulse, and compensates by adding a heating pulse as well. It's calculated to get a Q-factor of about 100, which is well more than is needed for viable commercial power production. There's so much confidence that this could lead to viable commercial fusion power production that they're already starting to deal with some of the "commercialization" aspects, not just the raw physics aspects -- for example, a high repetition-rate laser system.