In the 1940s, attempts by the UK and the US to build the hydrogen bomb had a few useful byproducts, such as technologies that were able to use the power of the atom to generate electricity. The process of nuclear fission, which produces dangerous waste, was developed, and has been used since then to produce power the world over. Sadly, the other technological byproduct of the hydrogen bomb—nuclear fusion, which uses abundantly available fuel sources and emits no harmful radiation—never quite made the cut.
But this is fast changing. After the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, conventional nuclear plants that use fission technology are being shuttered in many parts of the world. The rush for the Holy Grail has begun. Activity to prove that fusion is feasible and economically viable has picked up, and new breakthroughs are speeding things up.
India, with its huge power deficit, is among the countries that have taken the lead in developing these technologies. The government has sealed its commitment through a sanction of Rs 2,500 crore to seed research of nuclear fusion. The funds are expected to be increased, as the work spearheaded by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), grows. At the focus of much of this activity is one reactor being built in the south of France.
The $20 billion project that aims to generate just 500 MW, which could indeed change the world, is called Iter (Latin for ‘the way’). It is being built by a consortium of seven partners—the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, Korea, Japan and India—to demonstrate the viability of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion on the scale of a power station.
Before this project, electricity from nuclear fusion has been produced only in laboratories. As the host-partner of the project, the EU is the largest contributor with a 34 percent stake. India has taken up 9 percent, which will be executed by the Gandhinagar-based Iter-India, a division of the Institute of Plasma Research. The seven partners will contribute in kind by bringing components to the project. In India, a lot of this work will be done by the private sector.
“Indian companies—both in the public and private sectors—with capabilities in nuclear and space industries are being awarded contracts,” says Shishir Deshpande, Iter-India project director. Nine large components, amounting to almost a tenth of the project, will be fabricated and sourced from India. The biggest of these, to build the cryostat—a 3,800 tonne pressure chamber the size of a 10-storey building—was awarded to Larsen & Toubro in August. The component, worth over Rs 1,000 crore, will be built in India and shipped to France in sections.
(This story appears in the 26 October, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
To give all 10 billion people expected to live on the planet in 2050 the level of energy prosperity we in the developed world are used to, a continuous average use of power of 6 kilowatts per person as is typical in Europe, we would need to generate 60 terawatts as a planet—the equivalent of 900 million barrels of oil per day. In view of the enormous amount of deuterium available, it is important that we learn to use the D-D fusion reaction in the long term, and Thorium Ignited PACER Fusion is the most practical form of fusion today that is capable of economically supplying large Gigawatt levels of power safely without requiring decades of additional development. The time since the earth first formed = 4.54 billion years. The time until the sun burns out = 5 billion years. The deuterium in the sea is capable of completely powering planet earth at a level of 60 Terawatts for 8.33 billion years (longer than the earth has existed or the sun will burn) Note: There is a practical U-233 Ignited molten salt fusion technology pioneered at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Labs capable of generating huge amounts of energy from D-D fusion. This system called PACER and could be used today to produce power from the Deuterium in the sea while generating only non-radioactive helium as its nuclear waste. It is not necessary to wait 50 years to produce energy from fusion, PACER fusion is practical fusion that requires no scientific or engineering breakthoughs and can be prototyped today with minimal cost and technical risk. More Info available at http://www.yottawatts.net
on Oct 23, 2012You write: \"Before this project, electricity from nuclear fusion has been produced only in laboratories.\" In fact, fusion research experiments never produced electricity! Although fusion neutrons were detected in TFTR and JET, energy from fusion neutrons was never used to boil water and generate electricity.
on Oct 22, 2012With aneutronic fusion, the electricity can be produced directly because most of the energy produced by aneutronic fusion is in the form of charged particles instead of neutrons, which can be converted directly into electricity by various methods: inductive, based on changes in magnetic fields; or electrostatic, based on making charged particles work against an electric field. http://youtu.be/ro5-QYqqxzM
on Oct 22, 2012