And now? “It’s bliss,” says the 39-year-old Dutchman. “I can’t think of a more exciting job.” His employer, the British-based Joint European Torus (JET) project, again swarms with ambitious Ph.D. students attracted by the promise of new opportunities and near-certain funding. Behind their confidence: a resurgent interest in nuclear power, including fission research, as energy prices rise and supply concerns intensify. In 2007, work will begin in France on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), designed to settle once and for all whether fusion can fulfill its potential as a limitless source of cheap, safe power. Thousands of scientists from around the world, including those from JET, will contribute their expertise to a project expected to last at least 30 years.
Defying the skeptics, fusion is back in favor. As alarm grows over dwindling oil reserves and climate change, politicians from across the world are ready to look again at alternative energy sources, however costly the research. More than 30 countries, including the United States, China, Russia and the nations of the European Union, representing more than half the world’s population, are contributing to ITER. The total bill could top $13 billion, but the prize is on a matching scale. Says Antonia Mochan, spokeswoman on science and research for the European Union, which is meeting half the cost: “Nothing is guaranteed, but if it does work the benefits to mankind will be immeasurable.”
Fusion is a heady dream that’s sustained the interest of true believers since the 1940s, when the basic principles were first established. Rather than splitting atoms, scientists proposed slamming particles together to unleash the energy that binds them, harnessing the forces that power the stars, including our sun. Of course, re-creating such conditions on Earth is no easy task, and early optimism, sometimes based on a misreading of the data, turned to disappointment. The right reactions proved tricky to create, and researchers puzzled over how they might be contained.
But the outsize ITER plant is an upscale version of the earliest experimental reactors first suggested by the dissident Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. At its heart will stand a central chamber where atoms can be heated to temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius to form a plasma held in place by superconducting magnets. The goal: a sustained reaction generating massive energy.
As a process, fusion has merits that nuclear fission can never share. Start with the raw materials, lithium and deuterium, which are both plentiful. Champions of nuclear fusion love to repeat a folksy claim. The lithium in a single laptop battery and the deuterium in half a bathtub of water should be enough to meet the energy needs of the average citizen of a developed nation for 30 years.
No less important, fusion carries few of the risks that have turned the public against nuclear fission. There’s no danger of a meltdown or runaway reaction of the type that triggered the Chernobyl disaster: just shut down the reactor, and the process halts at once. Unlike fission, fusion needs neither plutonium nor uranium, so there is no danger that it would be used to make nuclear-weapons fuel. It’s nuclear power without the North Korea problem.
So why the continued skepticism? The time scale alone is a problem. “If you look at the challenges we have today in terms of cutting greenhouse gases and energy security, they have to be met in 10 years–not 50,” says Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace. Why not spend all that cash on refining known technologies such as wind power, in which a payback is more or less assured? Like others, Vande Putte suspects that political support owes much to a weakness for grand gestures. “It’s what we call the ‘big-big syndrome.’ Politicians just like big projects.”
For sure, political as well as scientific interests have often played a part in fusion history. ITER was first floated back in the mid-’80s at a U.S.-Russian summit when presidents Reagan and Gorbachev were seeking a handy gesture that might help thaw some cold-war ice. More recently, it took 18 months of diplomatic wrangling to pick a host country for the plant. As compensation for the fact that ITER was sited in France, Japan got to name its boss, and got a separate $1 billion center to research materials that will be needed to build commercial fusion plants.
Even the advocates of ITER concede that fusion’s success can’t be assured, and the record inspires little confidence. In the 1950s, the first generation of fusion devotees spoke of their confidence of feeding fusion into the grid by the end of the 20th century. Despite some advances, that goal is still decades away. Note the cautious tone of Kaname Ikeda, the Japanese diplomat appointed to head ITER: “Assuming that it’s a success, and more investment from the world community, there is a good possibility of power generation 30 years from now.”
His hesitancy is easily explained. Scientists still have to find dependable ways of controlling the reactions. And no one can yet say how the plasma will respond when contained inside ITER, which will be 10 times larger than any experimental fusion reactor to date. The challenges are daunting, as engineers must find the best way to not only generate such high temperatures but also contain the superheated plasma long enough for the reaction to occur.
Indeed, a belief in fusion depends as much on faith as on conviction. Scientists have to hope that, as in the past, technology will develop in response to need. “If you had shown pictures of a jumbo jet to the designer of the first airplanes, they would have laughed,” says Chris Llewellyn-Smith, head of Britain’s atomic-energy authority, which houses JET. Think of the sheer brainpower now devoted to devising solutions. “This is a global attack on a global problem.”
And who cares about those eye-popping costs? When compared with a world energy market worth about $4 trillion, the investment in ITER is trivial. Besides, say the boosters, the green lobby has no good answers. “The skeptics can say what they like, but tell me, what are the other options?” says Raymond Orbach, under secretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy. By a happy coincidence often noted by fusion’s true believers, ITER is more than just an acronym: in Latin, iter means “the way.” That is, the best way to realize the dream of a limitless energy supply.
