The Fusion Myth

But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen.

It turns out you can't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense. Right?

Is the European Union imploding?

Fusion is very hard to do.

France is now rushing to construct the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, (ITER), which is supposed to show that nuclear fusion can be used to power nuclear power stations. ITER is often presented as the long term solution to the problem of global warming, because nuclear fusion can provide an infinite and clean source of energy.

We can do fusion. In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997.

Steven Cowley Fusion is energy's future

(2) It was then decided to change the technology and use polypropylene instead.

Smart material types include piezoelectric polymers, conductive polymers, piezoelectric and electrostrictive ceramics, electrorheological fluids, magnetorheological fluids, electrochromic coatings, magnetostrictive materials, micromachined integrated devices, and biomimetic polymers and gels, shape memory alloys and polymers.

And that energy is what powers fusion.

And in fact we can make fusion happen.

That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer.

The key question is, When are we going to get fusion?

We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor.

This legislation establishes a system of prior authorization for the exercise of the import, export, production, possession, transfer, use or transport of fusible, fissile or fertile nuclear material or any material, with the exception of ore, containing one or more fusible, fissile or fertile elements.

In the fission reactions that nuclear power generation relies on today, heavy elements such as uranium break into smaller ones, while in nuclear fusion small elements such as hydrogen stick together and form heavier elements (helium). Both fission and fusion produce a lot of energy.

When people say fusion is 30 years away, and always will be, I say, Yeah, but we've actually done it. Right?

But, while the fusion process has produced some power (16 million watts of it, to be specific), scientists have yet to create a self sustaining fusion burn. Indeed, unlike nuclear fission, which went from the laboratory to the power grid within two decades, fusion has proved a tough nut to crack.

In the middle of stars, you're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon, to make oxygen, all the things that you're made of are made in the middle of stars.

Some political leaders explain that nuclear fusion is at work in the sun, and that, thanks to ITER, we will harness it. They often add that, since fusion burns hydrogen, which can be found in seawater, it is an infinite source of energy.

It's really been a long time since we've known about fusion.

It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion.

In order to study it, it has been decided to build the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) in Japan. Some scientists have argued that the neutron irradiation in IFMIF won t be the same as in fusion reactors, but it should be noted that its cost, at one billion euros, will be one tenth that of ITER.

When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form.

We've known about fusion since 1920, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that's why the sun shines.

But small atoms want to join together, small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron.

In spite of large international research programmes such as Joint European Torus (JET) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the future practical utilization of fusion energy remains uncertain.

Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth.

79. Conductive polymers can change colour and conductivity in response to chemical and electronic stimuli.

The expected profits can be held down by allowing exchange rates to be changed before speculative pressures build.

And there is one reaction that's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do.

Everybody can get it. That's why we want to do fusion.

It's going to cost us 10 billion. And we'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power.

Just the family circle.

We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement.

Other designs are emerging to join the race for fusion power. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory s National Ignition Facility in California is getting impressive results by firing high powered lasers at capsules of fuel, crushing the particles together to trigger fusion reactions.

Okay. What is fusion? Here comes the nuclear physics.

But we can't abandon it now we have to push forward, get fusion to happen.

So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless.

We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant.

The ITER international experimental reactor is considered to be the next major step in fusion research.

In the 1970s, American researchers estimated that getting fusion power on the grid would demand investment of 2 3 billion annually in research and development until anywhere from 1990 to 2005 (depending on the amount of effort applied). They also estimated a minimum level of investment, below which funding would never be sufficient to build a fusion power plant.

Listen, why don't we all get together?

Machines all over the world are reaching fusion temperatures and extending our technological capabilities. The ITER experiment, when it starts up in the early 2020s, will embody those advances, achieving the long awaited fusion burn and place us just one step away from the ultimate goal of getting fusion power on the grid in an affordable manner.