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A fusion solution to the energy problem

Pallavi Aiyar

The eventual success of China's EAST project would have enormous benefits for the country and the world.

ANHUI, A landlocked and impoverished province in central China, is best known in the rest of the country for the legions of women who travel to wealthier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai to work as domestic help. A less known fact is that the province, in particular its capital city of Hefei, is also emerging as the unlikely centre for cutting-edge research into physics, including an ongoing fusion project that aims to eventually convert seawater into energy by constructing an "artificial sun" on earth.

The researchers working at the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP), part of the sprawling green-lawned campus of the Chinese Academy of Science, claim that although it will be a long-term process the eventual success of the fusion project would have enormous benefits for China and the world, helping provide a solution to the pressing need for large quantities of clean energy.

In January, the IPP reached a milestone in global-fusion research when it obtained the first controlled plasma from its fully-superconducting tokamak — EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) — the world's first such device.

The outlook was grim when Wu Songtao, the Deputy Director-General of EAST, began to introduce the project to journalists on a recent afternoon in mid-May. "There will be things you will not understand in my presentation and I am sorry I cannot explain them either. This is no one's fault," he announced rather ominously at the outset. However, a modicum of perseverance was rewarding and grasping the basic elements of EAST proved more engrossing than anticipated.

Complex process

Fusion, Dr. Wu explained, is the process that powers the sun and other stars. While fusion's more familiar nuclear sister, fission, consists of the breaking up of heavier nuclei such as uranium and plutonium into lighter ones, fusion is when lighter nuclei combine or fuse to form a heavier element. Large quantities of energy are released during both processes.

Most fusion experiments fuse hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is found in high concentrations in seawater and, according to Dr. Wu, one litre of it produces 30 mg of deuterium, which could produce energy equivalent to 300 litres of oil. The production of deuterium from seawater involves the separation from it of heavy water (D2O) — or water where the hydrogen atoms of normal (or light) water (H2O) are replaced by deuterium. The heavy water is then subjected to electrolysis to yield deuterium. While tritium is rarely found on its own in nature it is usually produced in nuclear reactors by the action of neutrons on lithium.

The catch is that fusion requires extremely high temperatures of over 100 million degrees Celsius — similar to those found at the core of the sun. Moreover, to produce energy that can be exploited for commercial purposes this fusion reaction must be controlled and sustained over a long period of time.

This is achieved by heating the hydrogen isotopes and creating a plasma that then must be confined in a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak.

China's EAST is the world's first fully superconducting tokamak that can potentially sustain the generated plasma for 1,000 seconds, compared to the tens of seconds that most tokamaks elsewhere can manage. For fusion to become commercially viable in the future it is necessary to develop ways of sustaining this plasma for far longer.

An ongoing project that is seen by the global scientific community as the main hope of achieving this is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project. With a $10 billion price tag, ITER is one of the world's largest international collaborative research and development projects, comparable to the Space Station. The project's design was finalised in 2001 and it is expected to be functional within the next decade. Also a fully superconducting tokamak, ITER is designed to produce about 55 MW of power from a plasma that is sustained for 400-500 seconds.

EAST, which took just over five years to build, is basically a smaller version of ITER and Dr. Wu says the hope is that it will enable ITER fusion researchers to get a head start on learning to tame plasmas for longer periods of time. Just how tough this is is demonstrated by the fact that EAST's first plasma in January lasted a mere nine seconds.

China is not alone in its fusion ambitions. India and South Korea are also both currently working on next generation tokamaks. India's Steady State Superconducting Tokamak (SST-1) is a smaller version of EAST, but South Korea's Superconducting Tokamak Reactor (KSTAR), which is aiming for its first plasma in 2008, will rely on superconductors made from alloys that are even more advanced than those used in EAST.

China, India, and South Korea are all also signatories to ITER along with the United States, the European Union, Russia, and Japan.

For its supporters, fusion holds the key to solving what is possibly the greatest challenge facing the world today: meeting ballooning energy needs in a pollution free manner that is independent of fossil fuels.

Like fission, nuclear fusion does not result in the release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Moreover, unlike fission it does not produce hazardous waste and tokamaks have in-built safety measures that make fusion a much safer process. Fusion also requires only small quantities of raw material. One gram of fusion fuel can produce as much energy as 10,000 kg of fossil fuel.

For its critics, however, generating infinite quantities of clean energy from seawater is simply a pipe dream. Thus while it was only a three-year wait between the discovery of fission and its being put to use as a power-source, fusion is still to make that transition more than half a century since its discovery. Dr. Wu says it will be another 30-50 years before the world can expect fusion to begin to generate commercial results.

In China, it is clear that over and above the pure research value of fusion there is a strong nationalistic element to the country's desire to invest in science and hence achieve pre-eminence in cutting-edge scientific research. A large Chinese national flag proudly sits atop EAST, serving to underscore this point.

Increased investments

In the 2007 budget, the central government stepped up investment in science and technology to the tune of RMB 88.12 billion ($11.4 billion), an increase of over 20 per cent from the previous year. The 2006 science budget had itself been a 20 per cent increase from that of 2005.

EAST's budget was a modest $37 million but Dr. Wu says that sharply increasing awareness of global warming in recent times is likely to lead to a scaling up of Beijing's funding for fusion research over the next few years.

This is in contrast to the West where many governments have cooled in their enthusiasm for fusion research given the heavy investment and long-term payoff. Thus a cost-conscious U.S. Congress killed a $750 million Tokamak Physics Experiment in 1995 that Princeton University had been about to undertake. The resultant gap in fusion research is being filled by Asian countries such as China and India and it is clear that the global balance of power, when it comes to fusion at least, is increasingly leaning East.

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