A decision has finally been made to site the 10bn-euro (£6.6bn) ITER nuclear fusion reactor at Cadarache in France, in the face of strong competition from Japan. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER, pronounced "eater") will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station. In the end, the EU made huge financial and industrial concessions to the Japanese to clinch the 10 billion euro ($12.18 billion) project in a deal signed in Moscow on Tuesday. Global power politics took a hand when the United States, in what diplomats said was punishment for France's opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, leaned towards Japan's bid. The French had the backing of the EU, Russia and China, while South Korea also supported the Japanese fishing village of Rokkasho, on the remote north coast of Honshu island. The selection of Cadarache, north of Marseille in southern France, already home to the world's biggest nuclear fusion experimental centre, came at a high cost. The EU will fund 40 percent of the 4.6 billion euro construction cost with France paying an additional 10 percent, while each of the other five members of the international consortium will pay 10 percent. In Tokyo's case, this will be offset by contracts for up to 10 percent of the procurement, EU participation in science projects in Japan with up to 8 percent of the cost of ITER construction, and a disproportionate share of Japanese staff on the ITER organisation, including the post of director-general. Nuclear fusion taps energy from reactions like those that heat the Sun. Nuclear fusion is seen as a cleaner approach to power production than nuclear fission and fossil fuels. If it works, and the technologies are proven to be practical, the international community will then build a prototype commercial reactor, dubbed Demo. The final step would be to roll out fusion technology across the globe. What exactly is fusion? Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations. In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressure allows this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million degrees Celsius. At the much lower pressure that is possible on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million degrees Celsius. No materials on Earth could withstand direct contact with such heat. To achieve fusion, therefore, scientists have devised a solution in which a super-heated gas, or plasma, is held and squeezed inside an intense doughnut-shaped magnetic field. The European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China are partners in the project. Interesting; the realities of the waste are couched in the truth that materials optimised for low activation under neutron irradiation, materials that would be used in a full fusion energy economy, are not yet qualified for use in nuclear installations. Nevertheless, ITER's site offers, most activated materials generated by the non-optimum materials used in ITER during its life can be cleared from regulatory control or recycled after 50 - 100 years. According to ITER, radioactive materials arising during operation and remaining after final shutdown include activated materials (due to fusion neutrons) and contaminated materials (due to tokamak dust - mainly beryllium and some activated material such as tungsten), activated corrosion products, tritium, and mixtures thereof. Due to decay and decontamination, a significant fraction of activated material, increasing with time, has the potential to be cleared. The present assumption is that radioactive material not below the clearance level after 100 years is "waste", requiring disposal in a long-term repository. Estimates of ITER material masses show that about 30,000 t of material will be radioactive at shutdown, and that 80% of that can be cleared within 100 years. However, quantity of waste is not the consideration which makes fusion potentially so attractive. The radiotoxicity claim of ITER is compared with fission (represented by a PWR) and fossil (represented by coal ash) power stations in the following figure: ITER waste, then, is increasingly less dangerous after 100 years than the total ash from a large coal-fired power plant, and around 50,000 times less than the waste from a PWR...according to ITER. I'd like to see some independent analysis of the studies and of the concept, in a permaculture context, but it has to be, in one way, seen as pormising, and in another, seen as a further delay in the redress along energy lines of the eco-system degradation that comes from production as currently construed. Thoughts?
Theoretically, fusion sounds like a great idea: abundant supplies of deuterium fuel (basically, all of the world's oceans), lots of heat/energy generated from small units, and much smaller scale and manageable de-commissioning tasks (as this article and others have pointed out, it's not a completely clean technology, as previous myths would have it: we do have irradiated components that will have to be disposed of, though it ain't plutonium). That being said, I give the technology less than a 50-50 shot. The engineering and technical challenges are enormous. I think it is money well spent, and we should give it a shot. I am the glad the USA is getting involved, after we took a pass earlier. We'll certainly learn a lot, and there may be paybacks in other areas, particularly in the use of magnetic fields.
It bothers me that the United States lags behind in the adoption and use of nuclear power; the radical leftists that protested nuclear power development in the 70's have themselves to blame for the situation we find ourselves in. Now France - of all countries - boasts the lead in use of nuclear power... Even if we changed our outlook on nuclear power here in this nation, it would be decade or more before more plants could be brought on line to compliment the few nuclear power plans that we do have... "As of April, 2005, there are 104 commercial nuclear generating units that are fully licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to operate in the United States." http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html Note the following: "The current Administration has been supportive of nuclear expansion, emphasizing its importance in maintaining a diverse energy supply. As of April 1, 2005, however, no U.S. nuclear company has yet applied for a new construction permit." We need to change this, especially in light of France's proactive stance on nuclear power! IntheNet
Would it be possible to fuse spent fuel rods? It would make sense, and then we have an endless fuel cycle
My college-level physics textbook from the late 1970s touched on the possibility of fusion, and noted that fusion's heat could make it the perfect recycler -- toss garbage in, have it recycled into pure elements. Which means that somewhere down the road we may not need landfills. I'm sure I have that book around somewhere. Once I dig it out, I'll have to read what it says about fusion again. Best wishes to the French with the project.
Back in the mid-80s, I did an undergraduate thesis project on fusion power research. I didn't focus primarily on the physics, but I understood enough of it to think that the pessimists were more likely to be right. Unless there's been a lot of progress (and I would have expected to have heard about it if there was), significant energy production probably won't be high up the ultimate list of benefits of the project. I like that it's a multi-country deal. One of the things I learned in my research is that the multi-national efforts tend to have much longer budget cycles, and there is much less consensus among the political entities who provide the funding. As a result, they tend to leave the scientists more alone. In contrast, funding for fusion research in the US in the 70s and 80s was always very much at the mercy of whatever political winds happened to be blowing through the Department of Energy at the time.