Nuclear Fusion in the sun
already powers our lives

If you could compare all the different applications of clean technology (solar, wind, etc.) to horses in a race, I guess you could say that Nuclear Fusion is the ‘long shot’. It’s the old nag that everyone expects to come in last, if it comes in at all. But, as long shots do, if it does come in the pay-off would be huge.

Often slated to be a fifty year project, the time-frame has recently been chiselled down to a ‘modest’ thirty years – maybe.

What’s Nuclear Fusion? Take a look at the sun (actually, don’t do that…). The sun, if I am to believe what my teacher told me as a kid, is a great big ball of burning gas. When I was small I always wondered why it didn’t, as gas does, just explode or rapidly burn itself out. This is Nuclear Fusion. Under intense heat the nuclei of certain elements fuse together, with the new form being more stable than the original elements, and, wait for it, releasing significantly more energy than was originally evident (depending on the elements being fused).

When I say “significantly more energy” I’m speaking in a true British understated kind of way. A BBC report will help amplify:

One of the attractions of fusion is the tiny amount of fuel needed. The release of energy from a fusion reaction is 10 million times greater than from a typical chemical reaction, such as burning a fossil fuel.

A 1GW [gigawatt] fusion power station would burn about 1kg of deuterium and tritium per day, compared with a 1GW coal power station burning 10,000 tonnes per day of coal…

The raw materials to produce this reaction are water and lithium. Lithium is a common metal, in daily use in mobile phones and laptop batteries.

Used to fuel a fusion power station, the lithium in one laptop battery, complemented by deuterium extracted from 45 litres of water, would produce some 200,000 kWh of electricity – the same as 40 tonnes of coal and the equivalent of the UK’s current per capita electricity production for 30 years.

There is enough deuterium for millions of years of energy supply, and easily accessible lithium for several thousands of years. – BBC

What’s the downside you ask? According to the promoters of the technology, there aren’t any. Unlike traditional nuclear power stations (nuclear fission), Nuclear Fusion has no ‘runaway reactions’, and no radioactive waste (the byproduct of the process being helium, a harmless gas). We are also told, emphatically, that Nuclear Fusion will not contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

What’s the big hold up then? Well, there’s just that little issue of creating a sun-like environment, down here on planet earth:

To initiate the fusion reaction, hydrogen gas must be heated to over 100 million Celsius (10 times hotter than the core of the Sun), for the fuel particles to fuse rather than just bounce off each other’s electrical charge in the resulting plasma. – BBC

Yes, yes, I know. It sounds impossible, and impossibly expensive to boot. Hence the ‘old nag’ analogy above. But it seems necessity can be the parent of creativity. Although not managing to output more energy than input, the JET project in the UK (operating with worldwide cooperation) has made enough experimental headway that, with the additional pressure of recent climate-change activity worldwide, many world leaders are now willing to invest in further development.

With the time frames involved, especially in the context of recent scientific predictions about the state of the world in thirty to fifty years from now, I hope they won’t put all their money on the one horse – indeed, with world economies likely to tumble in the short term, there’s a good chance they’ll spend billions of dollars now, but never complete the task before funding vanishes….

The ETA for pulling this off is around thirty years or so, so, um… watch this space.

Further Reading: Fusion Basics

For those not familiar, this twenty chapter presentation is arguably the best effort I’ve seen to help people understand our current world predicament, with an emphasis on economics. It’s a must watch (in addition to ‘Money as Debt‘). Do share the link with your contacts.

Chapter 1 – Three Beliefs & Chapter 2 – The Three E’s

Chapter 3 – Exponential Growth & Chapter 4 – The Power of Compounding

Chapter 5 – Growth vs. Prosperity & Chapter 6 – What is Money?

Chapter 7 – Money Creation

Chapter 8 – The Fed & Money Creation

Chapter 9 – A Brief History of U.S. Money

Chapter 10 – Inflation (1 of 2)

Chapter 10 – Inflation (2 of 2) & Chapter 11 – How Much is a Trillion?

Chapter 12 – Debt (1 of 2)

Chapter 12 – Debt (2 of 2)

Chapter 13 – A National Failure to Save (1 of 2)

Chapter 13 – A National Failure to Save (2 of 2)

Chapter 14 – Assets & Demographics (1 of 2)

Chapter 14 – Assets & Demographics (2 of 2)

Chapter 15 – Bubbles (1 of 2)

Chapter 15 – Bubbles (2 of 2)

Chapter 16 – Fuzzy Numbers (1 of 2)

Chapter 16 – Fuzzy Numbers (2 of 2)

Chapter 17a – Peak Oil (1 of 2)

Chapter 17a – Peak Oil (2 of 2)

Chapter 17b – Energy Budgeting (1 of 2)

Chapter 17b – Energy Budgeting (2 of 2)

Chapter 17c – Energy and the Economy

Chapter 18 – Environmental Data (1 of 2)

Chapter 18 – Environmental Data (2 of 2)

Chapter 19 – Future Shock

Head to Chris’ site to view Chapter 20

Further Watching:

• Money as Debt
• The Money Masters

Click for full view Courtesy: Throbgoblins

Over the last few years the nuclear industry has used concerns about climate change to argue for a nuclear revival. Although industry representatives may have convinced some political leaders that this is a good idea, there is little evidence of private capital investing in nuclear plants in competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple: nuclear power is uneconomical.

In an excellent recent analysis, “The Nuclear Illusion,” Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm at 7¢ per kilowatt hour. This comparison includes the costs of fuel, capital, operations and maintenance, and transmission and distribution. It does not include the additional costs for nuclear of disposing of waste, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning the plants when they wear out. Given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can succeed only by unloading these costs onto taxpayers. If all the costs of generating nuclear electricity are included in the price to consumers, nuclear power is dead in the water.

To get a sense of the costs of nuclear waste disposal, we need not look beyond the United States, which leads the world with 101,000 megawatts of nuclear-generating capacity (compared with 63,000 megawatts in second-ranked France). The United States proposes to store the radioactive waste from its 104 nuclear power reactors in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The cost of this repository, originally estimated at $58 billion in 2001, climbed to $96 billion by 2008. This comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor–almost $1 billion each—assuming no further repository cost increases. (See data at www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78_data.htm).

In addition to being over budget, the repository is 19 years behind schedule. Originally slated to start accepting waste in 1998, it is now set to do so in 2017, assuming it clears all remaining hurdles. This leaves nuclear waste in storage in 121 temporary facilities in 39 states–sites that are vulnerable both to leakage and to terrorist attacks.

One of the risks of nuclear power is a catastrophic accident like the one at Chernobyl in Russia. The Price-Anderson Act, first enacted by Congress in 1957, shelters U.S. utilities with nuclear power plants from the cost of such an accident. Under the act, utilities are required to maintain private accident insurance of $300 million per reactor–the maximum the insurance industry will provide. In the event of a catastrophic accident, every nuclear utility would be required to contribute up to $95.8 million for each licensed reactor to a pool to help cover the accident’s cost.

The collective cap on nuclear operator liability is $10.2 billion. This compares with an estimate by Sandia National Laboratory that a worst-case accident could cost $700 billion, a sum equal to the recent U.S. financial bailout. So anything above $10.2 billion would be covered by taxpayers.

Another huge cost of nuclear power involves decommissioning the plants when they wear out. A 2004 International Atomic Energy Agency report estimates the decommissioning cost per reactor at $250–500 million, excluding the cost of removing and disposing of the spent nuclear fuel. But recent estimates for some reactors, such as the U.K. Magnox reactors that have high decommissioning waste volumes, decommissioning costs can reach $1.8 billion per reactor.

In addition to the costs just cited, the industry must cope with rising construction and fuel expenses. Two years ago, building a 1,500-megawatt nuclear plant was estimated to cost $2–4 billion. As of late 2008, that figure had climbed past $7 billion, reflecting primarily the scarcity of essential engineering and construction skills in a fading industry.

Nuclear fuel costs have risen even more rapidly. At the beginning of this decade uranium cost roughly $10 per pound. Today it costs more than $60 per pound. The higher uranium price reflects the need to move to ever deeper mines, which increases the energy needed to extract the ore, and the shift to lower-grade ore. In the United States in the late 1950s, for example, uranium ore contained roughly 0.28 percent uranium oxide. By the 1990s, it had dropped to 0.09 percent. This means, of course, that the cost of mining larger quantities of ore, and that of getting it from deeper mines, ensures even higher future costs of nuclear fuel.

Few nuclear power plants are being built in countries with competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple. Nuclear cannot compete with other electricity sources. This explains why nuclear plant construction is now concentrated in countries like Russia and China where nuclear development is state-controlled. The high cost of nuclear power also explains why so few plants are being built compared with a generation ago.

In an illuminating article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider projects an imminent decline in world nuclear generating capacity. He notes there are currently 439 operating reactors worldwide. To date, 119 reactors have been closed, at an average age of 22 years. If we generously assume a much longer average lifespan of 40 years, then 93 reactors will close between 2008 and 2015. Another 192 will close between 2016 and 2025. And the remaining 154 will close after 2025.

But only 36 nuclear reactors are currently under construction worldwide–31 of them in Eastern Europe and Asia. Although there is much talk of building new nuclear plants in the United States, there are none under construction.

What these numbers indicate, Schneider points out, is that plant closings will soon exceed plant openings–and by a widening margin in the years ahead. The trend is clear. From 2000 to 2005, an average of 4,000 megawatts of nuclear generating capacity was added each year. Since 2005, this has dropped to only 1,000 megawatts of additional capacity per year.

Even if all reactors scheduled to come online by 2015 make it, the projected closing of 93 nuclear reactors by then will drop nuclear power generation roughly 10 percent below the current level. Unless governments start routinely granting operating permits for reactors more than 40 years old, a half-century of growth in world nuclear generating capacity is about to be replaced by a long-term decline.

Despite all the industry hype about a nuclear future, private investors are openly skeptical. In fact, while little private capital is going into nuclear power, investors are pouring tens of billions of dollars into wind farms each year. And while the world’s nuclear generating capacity is estimated to expand by only 1,000 megawatts this year, wind generating capacity will likely grow by 30,000 megawatts. In addition, solar cell installations and the construction of solar thermal and geothermal power plants are all growing by leaps and bounds.

The reason for this extraordinary gap between the construction of nuclear power plants and wind farms is simple: wind is much more attractive economically. Wind yields more energy, more jobs, and more carbon reduction per dollar invested than nuclear. Though nuclear power plants are still being built in some countries and governments are talking them up in others, the reality is that we are entering the age of wind, solar, and geothermal energy.