Steven Cowley: Fusion is energy's future

in 1920 Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington of the British Association for the advancement of science hypothesized that fusion is the driving force of the Sun.

Steven Cowley believes that in fifty years the standard for power generation will be fusion, fission, and solar. He cautions us that solar still has a ways to go before it will be a completely viable technology. China, France, England, , and America are all building or have announced plans for building nuclear fission reactors. Mr, Cowley tells us that fission is the perfect energy source. It dose not take up much space. Has a virtually inexhaustible supply. It is safe. It dose not put any carbon into the atmosphere. It dose not leave any long lived radioactive waste. There is a catch however.

Mr Cowley says that fusion is very hard to do. People have been trying for fifty years to achieve fusion. He states that all atoms are attracted to iron which is in the middle of the periodic table. Large atoms like uranium like to split (fission) and small atoms like helium and and hydrogen like to join (fusion) on there way toward iron. This is what happens inside stars and we can extract energy from this reaction, but it is difficult because as we all know stars are very hot.

The easiest way to achieve fusion is between isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium, Derived from sea water is heavy hydrogen and Tritium which is super heavy hydrogen. When deuterium and tritium are far apart they are positively charged and when they are close they repel each other. But when you get them very close a thing called the strong force takes over and pulls them together. For a moment they become helium-5 then helium comes out, a neutron comes out, and lots of energy comes out. If you can get things to 150 million degrees this will start happening.

Energy powers fusion and beside the fact that you have to make things 150 million degrees there is another catch. Tritium does not exist in nature. It must be made. It comes from lithium. Lithium-6 plus a neutron will will generate tritium plus more helium. If you can make the fusion happen you've got an extra neutron to make this happen.

The fuel we have left is only a few tens of years of oil and perhaps a hundred years of fossil fuels such as gas and coal. Uranium has got about 150 years left before we have to switch to other sources to get it. Lithium is the fuel of fusion and there is about 30 million years worth of it in our sea watter.

Steven Cowley's project is able to make fusion happen at about the same cost as we currently pay for electricity. Jet is the only machine in the world that has actually made fusion happen. In 1997 Jet produced 16 mega watts of power making fusion a reality. In 2013 jet will be fired up again. However, that is not producing power. That is just making fusion happen. ITER is the next generation fusion reactor. It is designed to make 500 mega watts of power and is being built in the south of France. Seven nations and 10 billion dollars have been invested in this project, but it is still not a power generator. It will not be until perhaps the 2030's that fusion power generation will be viable.