Nuclear Fusion-Energy Source of the future?

With this being the anniversary of the nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan, there has been a lot of talk about the future of nuclear energy. This made me think about nuclear fusion about which I have not heard nor seen anything in the popular press.

About ten years ago I visited Japan’s nuclear fusion facility. There were large power lines going into and out of the facility. I was told by my hosts that the surrounding villages were actually powered by electricity produced with nuclear fusion. The only problem was that more power was consumed than created. At that time scientists there were projecting that 2016 would be a pivotal year where the amount of energy produced would start becoming larger than the energy consumed in the process.

Following is a little background on nuclear fusion from a layman’s perspective. The current atomic energy and the atomic bomb for that matter, rely on fission, which essentially splits an atom of one material into two separate materials of a slightly smaller combined mass. The mass that is lost is converted into energy. As the meltdown at Fukushima demonstrated, fission is a risky process with heavy costs in obtaining, refining, containing and disposing of the source material. In fusion, on the other hand, two separate materials are combined at an atomic level with the resulting material also having a little less mass. The lost mass, as in the case of fission, is converted to energy. Fusion (the hydrogen bomb relied on fusion instead of fission) has many advantages over fission. First of all, the fuel used is seawater. Though there is still radiation involved, the ½ life of the waste material is very short compared to that in the current atomic energy process and therefore the containment and disposal become much less of a problem.

At the time I visited the Japanese facility, there were also fusion reactors being refined in a number of facilities around the world. Before I retired, our company made a component that went into an instrument that measured temperature gradients in the reactors. Beside Japan we made components for Princeton University and general Atomic here in the US, Hydro Quebec in Canada, the Max Plank Institute in Germany and the French atomic energy organization. I had an opportunity to interaction with scientist involved, though not often and not on a deep technical level and had formed the impression that nuclear fusion, as a source of energy, had long transitioned from the feasibility stage to an engineering stage. I believe engineering problems are solvable. The question comes down to resources and time. In looking toward renewable energy in the future, our government is adequately funding this development.