We are trying to do exactly what the sun does.
We have to build big machines, very expensive machines to carry out our research.
There’s no doubt that job turned out to be more difficult than people thought 20, 25
years ago.
Fusion is so important to the future of the world.
3, 2, 1, shot.
The only catch is that we don’t have it yet.
3, 2, 1, push.
In our estimation, for the next century, we need fusion.
It’s a bright sunny morning in Princeton, New Jersey. Rob Goldston leaves his car in
the driveway and rides his bike to work. It’s his daily quest for fusion energy, a quest
to copy the sun.
And what we’re trying to do is imitate the fusion process that goes on in the sun, create
energy by the same kinds of physics, but within the laboratory.
The laboratory is Princeton’s plasma physics lab. It’s been home to fusion research
since Harry Truman was president.
Goldston manages experiments run by the 75 scientists here,
trying to see if fusion could be an economical alternative
source of energy.
The quest for fusion energy has been a long and winding road,
much like the concrete corridors leading to Princeton
University’s fusion test reactor.
A lot of fusion veterans walk through here.
Goldston’s 16 years in fusion science is only a fraction of the collective 2,000
fusion research years that Princeton physicists have logged.
This is where science hopes to open the door to a new future where energy is
safe, clean, and unlimited. it but even approaching that door has taken many
years lots of money and engineering wizardry like this huge fusion test reactor
and there’s a sense that it’s a much more expensive experiment than we’ve worked
with before and so we have to be more careful than before but it’s mostly
exciting it’s mostly an experience of new physics new regimes we haven’t been to
before so the the experiment experiences exhilaration more than feeling a sense
of being imposed upon by it. Princeton’s TFTR, as it’s called, is among the
world’s largest fusion test reactors, $350 million worth of copper, stainless
steel, and cable.
Fifty years from now, history may remember TFTR as the forerunner of clean, safe, endless energy.
But for what may already seem to be an endless era of research,
TFTR amounts to one giant physics experiment
to which dozens of scientists dedicate their time and their lives.
It’s a one mega amp shot with 12 mega amps of balanced beam injection.
The control room resembles the Houston Control Center that monitors space shots.
There’s even a countdown.
One minute.
But instead of rockets blasting, here motors whine.
The sound of the reactor draining power reserves to fire up atoms and run giant
magnets. Oh, that’s pretty. That’s a nice shot. Look at that. That’s really quiet.
They’re called shots because each one lasts only about five seconds.
Scientists feel if they can make fusion reactions last longer, we won’t have to
worry if we run out of coal or oil. If we do not have this alternative source of
energy, we will be in a world situation that would be much worse than where we could be
if this energy were available.
The energy available today won’t be around tomorrow.
The world’s growing population, forecast as high as 10 billion next century, will tax
our depleting supplies of coal and oil.
Today’s nuclear power picks up some of the slack, but safety and reliability issues have
already stifled the growth of nuclear fission. The answer to tomorrow’s growing demand for
power may not lie here on Earth. It may come from the basic energy that powers the universe.
The sun and the stars, they’re the universe’s way of making nuclear energy. But unlike today’s
man-made reactors that split atoms, the sun makes them fuse together. Its immense gravity
traps hydrogen atoms until the sun’s blazing core blends them into helium.
Their fusion unleashes dynamic energy and titanic heat.
The same atoms that power the stars are plentiful here on Earth.
Our oceans are rich with hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.
This is how science understands fusion. Each atom of hydrogen is like a tiny
planetary system. It rides a balance of a negatively charged electron orbiting
around a positively charged nucleus made of a single proton. Water also has
another type of hydrogen, deuterium, an isotope that lends itself to controlled
fusion research. It’s got an electron, too, and a nuclear proton as well.
But the deuterium nucleus also carries one neutron, a particle with no
electrical charge at all. There’s no shortage of deuterium. It’s found in one
in every 6,000 molecules of seawater. It’s also easy to extract. But more
importantly, it only takes a teaspoon of deuterium to equal the energy you get
from 100 barrels of oil. A typical fusion reaction would combine deuterium with
another hydrogen isotope, tritium. Besides carrying two neutrons, tritium is
man-made. It’s also radioactive.
But unlike today’s nuclear reactors, where waste stays radioactive for thousands
of years, tritium radioactivity would last less than a hundred years. Fusing
them forms harmless helium and releases massive energy, sending neutrons
bursting away. In theory, those flying neutrons would strike a reactor wall
that collects heat to drive electric turbines, while also regenerating expensive
tritium.
The nice thing about fusion is there’s less radioactivity, and if you build the
thing right, it really has no ability to disperse itself over the countryside.
Imagine a busy train station, one where people hurry no matter how crowded it gets.
Now, it’s human nature for people to try not to run into each other, but let’s
just suppose that people kept coming into the station, but nobody could get out.
Well, eventually, as the crowd got more dense, there’d be a bigger chance of a collision.
Well, it’s that concept of density and confinement that science hopes will force hydrogen nuclei
to collide, fuse, and release energy.
Laboratories don’t have the sun’s gravity or size to clamp so much atomic
density in place. But there are other ways to increase the chance that atoms
will collide and fuse. The method at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab is higher
temperature. Two years ago, scientists here used super hot beams, raising the
reactor temperature to a record 300 million degrees, six times hotter than the
interior of the sun. Heat makes atoms speed up.
When they’re hot enough, electrons break away from their nuclei. The resulting
atomic swarm creates a plasma. It’s a warm plasma that burns in a fluorescent
light bulb. When plasma is hotter and denser, nuclei have a better chance to
slam together. But the proton’s positive charge makes nuclei repel, just like
people scurrying in a train station. They also respond to a magnetic field. It
takes a strong one to trap nuclei till they collide. That’s where Princeton’s
TFTR comes in.
Embedded inside is a donut-like chamber where plasma is made. Surrounding the
chamber, two sets of powerful magnets. Their grip resists the plasma’s struggle
to strike the reactor wall and cool, in effect binding protons onto a collision
course. But plasma is as hard to confine as it is to see. It’s like trying to
hold jello with an elastic band. The view from inside the chamber shows carbon
bumpers glowing with hot gas, a sign that some burning plasma is leaking away.
Solving the plasma confinement problem could solve the fusion mystery. Right
now, Princeton scientists have to put in a lot more energy than fusion reactions
give back.
By 1991, they hope to break even.
That means getting as much energy out as they put in.
But TFTR is designed only to test the conditions to make fusion.
If future reactors work, they’ll make plasma ignite, just like a match lights a fire.
enough fusion reactions, the plasma would stay hot by itself and outside power
needed to ignite it could be turned off. But we haven’t yet got the thermal
insulation to the point where the fusion power that’s generated would be enough
to keep the thing going on its own. We still have to put in our own power from
outside. The Austrian-born physicist who runs the plasma physics lab has been
researching fusion for over 30 years. Dr. Harold Firth foresees an experimental
reactor by 2010. He also knows the old fusion axiom that success is always 20
years away. But now scientific success is not 20 years away you know it’s it’s at
hand what’s 20 years away is the proof that this will be economically
attractive. Princeton’s plasma physics lab is among several facilities around
the world researching magnetic fusion. Now that’s one approach but it’s not the
only one. That satellite dish reminds scientists here that they have some
competition. It enables Princeton’s computers to communicate with another
computer more than 3,000 miles away at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory near San Francisco. This California computer complex is the nerve
center for magnetic fusion research around the world.
it looks a little like a coin laundromat.
but there’s no cleaning here it’s all thinking and some tape changing courtesy a
robot that works like a jukebox livermore supercomputer is a multi-million
dollar project run by the Department of Energy it serves plasma research in more
than a dozen American universities, as well as fusion labs in Japan, Europe, and
the United States.
A high-tech pumping system pipes special liquid that keeps super-fast processors
cool. But in supercomputing, they’re the hottest thing. They enable several
fusion researchers to tap in at the same time. One of those processors over
there might be sending data to New Jersey, for instance. And another processor
might be sending it to my diacommit across the room here.
Livermore’s supercomputer is designed to do in moments what a personal computer
might take years. It’s become the world’s first electronic fusion ambassador.
This particular center plays a crucial role in the international development as
well as the US development of fusion.
But ironically, most of Livermore’s magnetic fusion research no longer exists.
A $300 million project using parallel magnets, sometimes called mirror fusion,
was shut down because it cost too much to run. But there is other research here
that could give magnetic fusion a run for its money.
3, 2, 1, go. This is Nova, a $176 million investment, the cornerstone of what’s
called inertial confinement fusion. And it takes something this big. to hit
something so small. The bottom tip of that metal arm holds a tiny pellet
containing fusion fuel. It’s the dead center of a five-story target chamber
that looks more like a giant metal octopus. When I first started, I walked in
here. It’s like being in a space movie or something, but after a while, it
becomes second nature. There’s a lot of things to think about when you’re doing
this. This is just one small part of it. But this one small part plays a big
role in fusion research. Laser fusion, in effect, turns pellets into tiny
hydrogen bombs. It only takes a microsecond. But slow motion shows how a laser
beam makes the pellet shell blast away. That makes the fusion fuel inside heat
up and implode. And researchers hope make deuterium and tritium fuel fuse.
All of this with the goal of trying to improve the fusion process with each shot
so that we understand better what’s going on for the ultimate goal of trying to
get more energy out of this pellet than we put in it with the laser this is a
scale model of the nova laser the real thing is over 300 feet long longer than a
football field it’s designed to fire a lot of power in less than a blink of an
eye in fact in a billionth of a second it drives 200 times the power of all the
power plants in the united States. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, shot. You could fit NOVA’s
control room in a corner at Princeton’s TFTR. Yeah, we got it. Yeah. Good, good
shot. But the laser it controls is the biggest and most powerful in the world.
It’s the third generation of Livermore lasers, each raising hopes that inertial
confinement is the way to go.
That requires a certain minimum fuel pellet size, which we do not have enough laser energy
to compress a pellet that size.
It means you’re going to have to build an even bigger laser.
It means that it’s most likely that we will have to have an even bigger laser than NOVA.
One of our challenges for the next year and a half to two years is to refine our concepts
for a technical and economic baseline to show us how we can build that laser at what we
tend to call an affordable cost. Reportedly, it was a secret nuclear bomb that told researchers
how much power that bigger laser would need. In a 1986 project dubbed Centurion Halite,
scientists found the bomb’s intense radiation made a fusion pellet’s hydrogen fuel ignite.
But Livermore has little to say about it. Much of the work here is classified. Even
the energy funding comes from a defense pie. They’re not just pursuing commercial power
here laser fusion lets science study the effects of nuclear weapons within the safety of a
laboratory. Beyond that there’s not much detail I’m afraid I can go into in that area. Livermore
and Princeton are going after the same fusion goal in different ways. They call it a friendly
rivalry where nobody’s ahead. But scientifically I’m sure that we view it as some some sort
of a race and a rivalry, but it’s not an intense one.
It’s a very good thing that not all the hopes of the future should dangle from a
single thread. These hopes cost lots of money. Next year’s magnetic fusion
budget totals over $351 million. There’s another $164 million for inertial
confinement. But those funds are over $100 million less than peak years when
the energy crisis gave fusion research funding a boost. It’s very difficult to
motivate political figures who are beset with day-to-day problems to think 25,
30 years in the future.
In the near future, the next decade, Princeton plans to build a new machine
designed to achieve ignition. But budget cuts mean the compact ignition
program, better known as CIT, may have to wait another two years. And the
machine after that may be so expensive that one government may not be willing to
pay for it We may have to have several governments contributing into it,
and that really slows down development.
In the fusion community, Steve Dean is a household name. He’s a physicist by
trade who lives, breathes, and literally drives fusion. A few years ago, he
left a job at the Department of Energy, raised private corporate funding, and
moved into a nearby Maryland office. Actually, I’m going to be over at NRL next
Tuesday. Are you going to be in the neighborhood of the plasma physics
division? Dean’s Fusion Power Associates keeps labs and private industry up to
date on fusion research. He’s also kept up with a bottom line, whether costly
research and expensive reactors will price fusion out of the market.
I think that’s a real problem if that turns out to be the case.
I personally believe that we can make discoveries
and come up with ideas and methods that will be cheaper than what our knowledge allows us to do today.
Dean is not the only one who thinks fusion will take a global commitment.
Fusion scientists are now marking more than 30 years of international cooperation.
A top emissary of scientific glasnost frequently meets with American scientists in Washington.
Eugene Velikov is the Soviet science minister.
Secretary General Gorbachev, in meeting with the President, told him exactly he
is interested in fusion, and our government is interested, and make a decision
to try to make this internationally. But fusion science is a lot older than 30
years. Seven American presidents have funded it. Those first funds, though,
went to study a fusion science that’s both secret and explosive. The hydrogen
bomb, the deadliest force known to man. It’s wild fusion energy that’s
uncontrolled. Its development after World War II inspired researchers to try to
tame it. But back then, plasma physics was virtually an unknown science.
That’s why a 1951 edition of the New York Times caught science by surprise. In
a front-page article, Argentina’s president Juan Perón boasted a laboratory
breakthrough, claiming an Austrian physicist working near Buenos Aires
successfully controlled nuclear fusion. Skeptical scientists later found there
was no breakthrough and no fusion energy. But the story would turn a Princeton
physicist into one of the fathers of modern fusion research. Dr. Lyman Spitzer
started thinking about new ways to control fusion reactions. But he needed a
little seclusion to think them through, so he and his wife went on a Colorado
ski trip.
So I was all primed to think about magnetic fields, which is a very esoteric
subject, and I figured out on the lift that really the magnetic field should be
a method of acting at a distance, pushing on a hot plasma and keeping it from
striking the walls where it, of course, would immediately cool. Spitzer worked
out his ideas and got the Atomic Energy Commission interested. We grew and grew
and grew, and now what you see here is a direct result, or at least an outcome,
of that early project.
These coils that you see here, these carry electric current in this direction,
and that produces a magnetic field that goes around this racetrack, as we called
it, that, in principle, can hold the plasma in. And if it’s hot enough, the
hydrogen nuclei will fuse and produce electric power. Knowing he was copying
the energy of the sun and the stars, Spitzer called his device the Stellarator.
He used it to mount Project Matterhorn.
It was Princeton’s first fusion research, and it was cloaked in secrecy. But
fusion’s first pioneers got disappointing results. And in fact, if we’d gone
right ahead and built a device that was 10 times bigger than this, it would have
worked very much the way the present devices are. Looking back, it’s not
surprising that the people were disappointed in their early efforts. There was
no way they could have succeeded with the knowledge they had at the time. But
from Russia came some early fusion genius.
Dr. Andrei Sakharov and his wife Yelena live on the seventh floor of a Moscow apartment.
Together, they’ve braved the Kremlin’s muscle to fight for human rights.
A fight that’s won Sakharov the Nobel Peace Prize.
But Sakharov’s science won him worldwide respect.
After working on the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov turned to more peaceful science.
In the early 50s, he and Dr. Igor Tom wrote a theory of magnetic confinement,
fathering the concept that inspired modern fusion research.
Sakharov speaks broken English, but speaking in Russian, he told us through an interpreter,
the fusion science that grew out of his early theories is making good progress.
This work turned out to be much more difficult and lengthier than it had presented itself to
Sergei Tom and myself in 1950. But the fundamental principal problems have been overcome.
The reasons
for instability have been explained and it seems to me that we not only know that the magnetic
fusion device is possible but also the parameters in which magnetic fusion can become a real
operating machine how do you think fusion might change the world yeah I think that controlled
fusion reactors will decide problems of energy production which already have other solutions
and therefore I do not think that fusion will change the world its purpose does not have that
revolutionary character that the other great discoveries of the 20th century have had when
something was being solved for the first time all the same i think that practically it will
be very important for humanity I think that large-scale atomic energy production will receive
a great deal from controlled fusion in the first stage i think that this will take the form of the
breeder reactor controlled fusion reactions to obtain uranium-238 for use in atomic energy
production. Of course, this means of atomic energy is founded upon fission with all of its difficulties
and dangers. For this reason, I support the idea of placing all nuclear power underground. The fusion
breeder that Sakharov mentioned is a concept the Russians still study but found too impractical by
Western and Japanese science. It was the concept of safety though that prompted Sakharov to return
to english and remind fusion researchers to never forget we have no right to have another
chernobyls the man who’s given his life to peace feels science must do the same for the atom
that’s not a new idea
Hopes resting on the nuclear promise led the world’s scientific nations to start sharing
knowledge.
So the cloak of secrecy surrounding fusion and fission research started to lift.
Just before the opening of the conference, the United States and Great Britain
jointly announced the declassification of their thermonuclear research programs,
and the United States unveiled its most promising experimental devices actual
operating machines like Princeton’s b2 stellarator these represent the various
paths being explored in a quest for a new source of power many of these machines
were operated throughout the conference the Princeton exhibit included a model
of the university’s stellarator laboratory devoted entirely to fusion research
Another approach, the racetrack stellarator, in which the twist in the magnetic
field is produced by current flowing through adjacent groups of wires in
opposite directions.
The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory showed a number of operating devices
including Scylla, in which the plasma is superheated by compression. All of the
machines are still in the experimental stage, but from one of these research
channels may come the elusive secret of cheap, plentiful power. A secret which
certainly will be unlocked the sooner as a result of international cooperation.
Fusion first worked in secret because governments wondered if nuclear byproducts
might help make powerful bombs.
They knew that, in theory, a plasma chamber wrapped inside a uranium blanket
would lead to a fusion breeder reactor capable of making plutonium, a key
ingredient for nuclear weapons. were afraid maybe this was some sort of
shortcut for making fissionable material for bomb. So by 58, it was clear that
building a fusion reactor just had to be one of the toughest ways on Earth to
make material clandestinely for bomb. And then it made sense to declassify.
Suddenly, fusion was heard around the world. And at a 1958 Atomic Energy
Conference in Geneva, researchers from a host of nations showcased their fusion
science. Soviets were there, the Japanese, the Europeans. And it was
remarkable, because up until that time, all these programs had been conducted in
secret. And when people opened the veils and they showed the other parties what
they had done, it was all the same.
But not for long.
In the mid-1960s, Russian scientists working in Moscow announced a major fusion
achievement. Using Sakharov’s theories, the Soviets improved on the donut-like
confinement chamber. Researchers at places like Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute
invited the world to copy their idea and the world copied away. They even copied
the word Tokamak, a Russian acronym that applies to today’s most common fusion
research device. The Soviets opened their fusion research doors years before
anyone ever heard of Glasnost, symbolizing that scientists around the world find
it a lot easier to cooperate than their respective nations do.
Perhaps it is today’s spirit of Glasnost that led the Soviets to invite our
cameras in for a rare and comprehensive look at fusion research here in the
USSR. this is russian fusion research at work the lab looks a lot different
than princeton’s tftr but the goal is exactly the same the ignition of the dt
reaction is the most important step in our old work we worked 38 years and if we
don’t ignite the reaction the public opinion will be against fusion 40 years
spend it and not ignite the reaction that is an unluck
you’re watching some of the international spirit to make fusion work the man
standing is sam hoken an american exchange scientist from mit he learned fast
that it helps to speak russian here He also learned from dusty oscilloscopes and
obsolete technology. After hearing how Russian science suffers from technical
setbacks and shortages, he came to Moscow armed with his own personal computer.
And that’s something that all American scientists and all Western scientists
know, that when you come to the Soviet Union to do exchange work, bring your own
equipment, everything, including a voltage meter, soldering iron, whatever you
want, because even if it’s here, it’s hard to find and things get tough.
But the brain power here is top notch Dr. Vyacheslav Strelkov manages Moscow’s
fusion workhorse, better known as T-10. It’s older and a lot smaller than
Princeton’s TFTR, but it leads the world in a key type of plasma heating
technology. Where most other tokamaks use electric heat and so-called neutral
beams, T-10 uses gyrotrons that generate the same kind of heat you get when you
turn on a microwave oven.
one. It’s called T-15. It’s the Soviets’ first modern generation tokamak experiment. When it’s
ready, it will look just like Princeton’s TFTR. But there are some key differences. The Soviets
are building T-15 with a superconducting coil. It will act like a power bank, storing the energy to
heat and confine the plasmas, minimizing the power T-15 will have to drain from Moscow’s
power company.
A real thermonuclear reactor must have only the superconductor coils.
It is practically impossible to have a thermonuclear reactor with usual magnet.
T-15 is supposed to start in December.
That’s more than five years since Princeton turned on TFTR.
The Soviets had hoped T-15 would have been working right now, but it suffers from a five-year
lag that underscores a fundamental complaint that bureaucratic rivalries and managerial
conflicts often slow down Soviet scientific development.
It is not easy, so many difficulties, not only the scientific difficulties, the technology
difficulties and also difficulty of organization manager maybe problem of management another
problem radioactivity first generation fusion reactors will burn radioactive tritium the soviets
say both they and their american counterparts have painful memories that will force them to minimize
contamination the public opinion no is against erect radioactivity we know in
the United States and now after Chernobyl in our state that the opinion
is that the energetic must be with such low level of radioactivity there’s
plenty of energy and enthusiasm here to make fusion work the Russians hope t15
will help them catch up to fusion science around the world.
Russia until now has been pretty much out on its own.
And as experiments get bigger,
as it looks like a fusion reactor is going to be a big, complicated, expensive thing,
at least at the beginning,
it is clear that international cooperation is necessary.
It is nonsense to make a competition in such field as fusion
because it is a very long-term goal
and we benefit from the development of tokamak in the United States.
The Soviets’ appeal for joint fusion development historically gets a lukewarm response at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.
It’s a concern that the Russians are subtly trying to grab Western technology.
As one House staff member put it, we don’t want to give away the store.
Among those concerned, the New Jersey congressman who chairs a House Science and Technology Committee.
As it is now, in my judgment, we’re a little paranoiac on technology transfer.
I don’t mean that unfairly.
I mean legitimately we have concerns there.
We’re all going to have to change our ways of how we do business internationally
and our concern of technology transfer and the protection of our country,
which everybody understands.
But if we’re going to be doing these big things together,
we’re going to be breaking new ground, we’re going to do joint missions to Mars
with the Soviets and so forth,
we’re going to have to be in a position of being developing new methods which we don’t exist today
those concerns held back researchers like doug post he’s a princeton physicist we met last april
that was just before he left for germany where he and teams of scientists from around the world
are working to design the international test engineering reactor better known as iter the
A multi-billion dollar reactor would be a joint project to be built after the turn of the century.
Originally, Post and other scientists hoped the Munich conference would actually lead to construction.
But the U.S. Defense Department was concerned that there would be issues associated with technology transfer
with the Soviet government, and so they basically downgraded it to a design study.
Before we get to the big construction area, we’ve got to see this relationship between the Soviet Union
and the Western countries continue to mature by quite a bit.
I can’t tell you how that’s going to go. That’s up to the Russians. But if we
make proper steps in the arms race control and disarmament after start and
better interrelation, I think why not? But if East and West grow close enough
to start test reactor construction, then where would it be built? Princeton’s
TFTR is the latest in a series of plasma physics lab experiments. With CIT
planned to start in 1996, it’s unlikely that Princeton would have time, place or
room for another project.
California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory hopes to build a new laser even
bigger than nova to perfect inertial confinement fusion so it’s unlikely that
iter would be built there in fact it’s unlikely that iter will even be built in
the united states the u.s is only one of four major fusion research nations the
betting money on iter’s location somewhere in a rural tract in europe we’re very
nationalistic when you when you get right down to it and i think this especially
on the in the congress you’ll see a lot of resistance to having that us money go
abroad if we had to stop some of our own plasma work in this country that we’re
working on again in princeton tokamak and so forth and versus participating in
funding uh an either program in europe i think we would we would work with i
know we would go to the domestic end you understand where i’m trying to come
from so i don’t think that the decision process is as hand as yet Nor do I think
that the case is set and anybody determined that that program would be built in
Europe or any place else at this point. So why don’t we start with our usual
agenda and see what the status is of the machine, beams, and so forth. But
before ITER, there’s still TFTR.
Every Monday morning, Rob Goldston leads a crowded conference updating
Princeton-Tokomak progress. We had about three or four choices of problems on
the RF limiter. and it turned out the difficulty that we’re seeing the hot spot
most likely wasn’t insulated on the limited balance it’s like managing a
baseball team except here they use computers instead of bats and their field is
a mysterious and challenging level of plasma physics what to talk about how we
how we implement this procedure to save the machine and also let us operate but
if TFT our works the machine won’t be saved it only burns deuterium now but in
two years, Princeton plans to wrap up research with a hundred tritium shots.
Resulting radiation will make TFTR literally too hot to handle. Maintenance
would require special tools and special robots. Those planned tritium shots
raised government concern. Federal research found TFTR’s radiation would pose no
danger even in the unlikely chance that safety systems fail. In fact, a geology
study concluded there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that even harmless trace
amounts of tritium would penetrate underground water supplies. Yet tests are
underway to see if in a worst-case scenario, like a major fire, nearby Princeton
neighbors would still need an emergency response plan. Leaking radiation
apparently went unnoticed for three hours yesterday. The nuclear reactor at the
Three Mile Island plant overheated and shut down at 4 a.m. Three Mile Island, a
symbol for what can go wrong with nuclear power. Loose This radioactivity
contaminated one of the reactor buildings. The device itself radiated with what
nuclear scientists call after heat. After heat could affect fusion too.
Fusion reactors would produce a safe helium ash that’s a lot simpler to dispose
than the radioactive waste from today’s nuclear fission power plants. And no
matter what happens, the reactor’s plasma chamber would contain no more than
four seconds of fuel at any one time but fusion also makes neutrons that bombard
the chamber’s wall that would make the wall radioactive and that contamination
would also spread to the reactor’s supporting structure but compared to a
fission power plant where the thing has that much energy inside this thing
really hasn’t got the energy to not only damage itself but damage a containment
building and end up moving out it’s it it doesn’t you feed the fuel in very
slowly into a fusion power plant you don’t keep it there the way you have to in
a fission power plant all the time that’s if engineers build it right the
challenge of material science is to develop metals and compounds that resist
radioactivity the material of the first wall cannot work in such big neutron
fluxes 30 years it must be changed after some three or four years and therefore
such a reactor must stop and must be repaired and the first wall must be
changed. That is not a commercial kind of machine. We might even be able to make
a wall that lasts 30 years and there are other possibilities too. We may go to a
fuel cycle that doesn’t involve tritium, for example. Then the neutron flux on
the wall goes down a lot. A safe fusion fuel cycle might involve a little
travel, like a trip to the moon. The moon is loaded with Helium-3, an isotope
not found here on Earth. Burning deuterium and lunar helium would be a lot safer
than tritium. Both Soviet and American space programs plan some lunar mining
missions, possibly to bring back Helium-3.
Engineers think a fusion reactor might look something like this. There’d be a
concrete igloo to contain radioactivity. Robotics would be needed to maintain
the reactor structure. Such a reactor could be up to 50 years away. But the
promise of fusion provides fuel for imagination. It could not only power our
utilities, it could run our rocket ships too. On almost every count, fusion
would seem to be superior to fission. The only catch is that we don’t have it
yet. But Isaac Asimov uses fusion all the time. His noted science background
helps him dream of worlds that turn from today’s heavy chemical rockets to
tomorrow’s faster fusion rockets that burn lighter hydrogen fuel, meaning a trip
to Mars that would take us months today might only take a few days tomorrow.
We’ll be able to pack more energy into a spaceship so that we can have more bang
for a buck. What we really need to make my science fiction work is faster than
light travel. But I don’t consider that much of a possibility at all.
Still, with fusion alone, we ought to be able to reach any point in the solar
system we want without too much trouble and maybe if we take a little trouble
reach some of the nearest stars i must admit that i had rather thought that we’d
have done it some time ago the fact that we haven’t done it yet is a little
disheartening that disappointment is felt by a growing number of scientists as
well as the very industry that would sell fusion power at this point there’s a
significant risk in whether or not fusion will actually work. Ken Mattson works
for the New Jersey utility that supplies the energy that runs Princeton’s TFTR.
Utilities don’t supply much more than that to support today’s fusion research.
Beset by problems plaguing the nuclear fission industry, they’re waiting for
more promising results in fusion before jumping in.
If you had fusion that worked, but you couldn’t maintain it economically, or you
couldn’t operate it economically, then it isn’t a viable technology, even though
it works. It’s not a viable technology for our ratepayers. That doesn’t mean
power companies forget. Nestled beneath California’s purple foothills lay
sprawling research. Microchip manufacturers, computer firms, laboratories, they
checker flatlands south of San Francisco, appropriately called the Silicon
Valley. Among the science centers here, the Electric Power Research Institute,
a think tank supported by the American power industry. They think a lot here
about nuclear physics.
But Dr. David Wurlidge also thinks about fusion, a much different type than
current research. The technique here is to try to avoid the use of plasmas, or
at least to try to avoid the use of very high energy. It’s called muonic
catalytic fusion, in which a bulky heavy electron acts like a powerful glue,
bonding deuterium and tritium a lot more tightly than a normal electron would.
So tight, the nuclei run a better chance of fusing. And instead of super hot
plasmas, particle accelerators would generate muons at low temperatures. It’s an
old idea littered with technical problems, but EPRI sees new promise. We’re
interested in this process because at a very low level of funding with very
small scale experiments, one has an opportunity perhaps to participate in a
breakthrough perhaps in the next five years we may need a breakthrough on any
type of alternative energy source for more reasons than we realize most
commercial power plants today not only make energy they make pollution too the
fossil fuels they burn send gases into the air
And it’s not just power plants.
Anything that burns also pollutes. They fill our skies with carbon dioxide and
nitrogen oxide, along with other man-made pollutants, chlorofluorocarbons and
methane, gases that have come to be known as the greenhouse gases. Greenhouses
trap sunlight and heat, an efficient way to make plants grow better. It works
well for botany, but it’s not so good for humanity. As greenhouse gases encircle
the earth, trapped sunlight raises temperatures making climates change.
Professor Ned Rees teaches meteorology at New Jersey’s Rutgers University in New
Brunswick. He’s accustomed to tracking weather patterns like winds, rain, and
humidity. But lately, he’s been tracking something else. What we’re looking at
here is the global average concentration of carbon dioxide for the last 23
years, beginning in 1958 and extending up through 1981, and the ups and downs
that you see here are the variations over the course of each year. Carbon
dioxide increases and decreases with season, but the important thing to see is
that the general trend has been upward, and it shows that during those 23 years
there has been something like a 10% global worldwide increase of carbon dioxide
that has taken place.
There are signs that the greenhouse effect is taking its toll. Some
meteorologists point to recent heat waves and a costly Midwestern drought.
There’s evidence of desert migration in Africa that’s gobbling up the already
limited farmland. And if the greenhouse keeps up, scientists fear some melting
of the polar ice caps will make the oceans rise, triggering beach erosion and
floods. It’s possible that some of the things that have taken place in the
Sahara Desert regions, the droughts that we’re seeing now, could be some of the
first manifestations of that, kind of a forerunner of things to come.
But the time range that we’re talking about where the effects are going to
become incontrovertible is going to be in the next few decades. It’s going to
be very, very difficult to do anything about it because the fossil fuel
combustion is something that has been an integral part of our civilization for a
very long time.
The most important thing that we could do would be to try to go to some
alternative types of fuel, but building a few nuclear power plants, nuclear
fusion facilities around the U.S., for example, probably wouldn’t have too much
of an effect. It would have to be a very large-scale type of a thing to really
make a difference. Now, there’s speculation in how strong those effects are and
how much carbon dioxide it takes to create that sometimes called greenhouse
effect. But it’s only prudent that we look to other forms of power generation
which don’t create carbon dioxide for the long run so that we do manage to
maintain our environment in a form that we find both productive, comfortable,
and otherwise acceptable.
Presidential science advisor Dr. William Graham works in the old executive
office building next to the White House. His office is down the corridor from
the room where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall,
shredded Iran-Contra documents.
But for Dr. Graham, that nearby modern American history is hardly as significant
or pressing as what man’s doing to Earth. These aren’t short-term effects I’m
talking about. Earth’s a big place. It’s got a big atmosphere.
But over the long run, we want to be careful that what we put in the atmosphere
doesn’t have undesirable side effects. And fusion can help in that. Our sun
has been burning for over four billion years.
It’s only in the last hundred years that we’ve really come to understand why.
Perhaps in the next hundred years, we’ll also learn how to harness the sun’s
energy here on Earth. On paper, fusion energy sounds like a clean, safe,
limitless source of power. But to make a son of man here on Earth will take
some hard decisions. After 40 years of expensive research, can we afford the
cost of 40 more? can we afford the risk that maybe it won’t work? If you ask
the scientist you’ll be told we can’t afford to wait. With a growing human
family we’re going to need more energy to power the world and there just aren’t
that many sources of energy around. I looked up the population figures the other
day and at the time that the fusion program started there were two billion
people in the world, 1953.
Today there are five billion people in the world. That’s three, you it’s more
than doubled. By the time we find out whether or not we can really build a
fusion reactor say shortly after the turn of the century there probably be
another 3 billion people in the world, and by the time we can start producing
energy with fusion or any other new technology we’re talking about 10 to 15
billion people in the world. There’s just simply no way you can support that
population with conventional energy sources. Fusion of course is designed not
for us but for our children’s future because we know that in the 21st century
the world is going to run out of coal and oil and what are we going to do when
that happens if we don’t do the work now we won’t be in a position to ensure our
children’s energy future and their standard of living in the 21st century the
time when there will be a lot of fusion power being commercially applied when
when fusion takes over a good share of the power requirement, will be sort of
2040, 2050.
That seems like a very long time away. But if you draw a little graph on when
the crunch really hits, the rising power requirements around the world with the
growing population and the rising standards of living crossing over with the
falling fossil fuel resources, you find that the crunch hits in 2050. So that
is not a bad time to be able to shoulder a big piece of the load. Because if
fusion mostly depends on our brain, not from the resources and other, in the
modern time, high technology win. In such case, I am sure we win. But how fast
is the question?
Fusion is so important to the future of the world, to the populations, to
civilization, that it’s a technology that we have to develop. We can’t afford
to overlook any options. It will be something that’s useful for mankind, maybe
my grandchildren. My own children now are of an age that this won’t happen in
their lifetime. It’s like working on the first layers of a pyramid. pyramid
you can see the final product in your mind but it will be generations after my
generation that will actually finish this I’m going to be confident within a few
years we will know that the laws of physics make it possible to to extract
energy from fusion for the welfare of mankind we have no right to have another
Chernobyl. Plasma, what is plasma? That’s not part of your blood. That’s not
what we’re talking about. A plasma is a fourth state of matter. They could be
future plasma physicists, but today they’re only visitors. Princeton’s plasma
physics lab runs hundreds of tours each year. This one is no different. As
always, the lab’s auditorium rings with curiosity and questions. When this
thing’s running, what’s the radiation level on the floor? Very high.
While chasing the fusion mystery, plasma physicists often find themselves
splitting time between science and public relations. They know how good PR
helps save federal funding, but it also helps educate and inspire. it may take
two more generations of plasma physics before the world enters the fusion era
that was the last balance shot that we had with 795 is that good enough to try
to get a temperature or is that for nearly four decades science has been
struggling to make fusion work there are still decades to go before 2030 when
the first fusion reactor may go online those future fusion scientists will get
their cues from the Rob Goldston generation and its dedication to mastering the
atom sometimes down on the shore when the Sun is out and it’s very hot and I
have my little boy with me I’ll explain to him that the power that’s coming out
of the Sun is one of the sort of fundamental powers that the universe has and
it’s that kind of power that we’re trying to harness for fusion energy and I
think he gets a kick out of seeing that that’s what his dad is working on
