Nuclear Fusion Power - a fascinating potential

What's happening today....

It's like this: if we want to go on living the way we are right now, we will need energy for so many things, energy in the form of electricity, heat, etc... Pretty much everything we do needs energy. Coming to think of it, our lives revolve around the use of energy. We eat food (that's cooked using gas/electricity), we travel (in vehicles that use gasoline, CNG, electricity), we need heat/cooling for our houses as the seasons change, we need electricity to power our computers and workplaces. I could go on like this and never stop. But what many of us are oblivious to is the fact that we are never going to be able to continue to live the way we live today. Our demands and needs are bound to grow and the limited fuel reserves of the world are going to exhaust. Unless we all take vows of poverty and austerity like the religious maharishis, monks and priests, we face a bleak energy future. So to be able to meet our needs, we go have begun exploring new frontiers for fuels that can give us the energy we need - coal, petroleum, natural gas, wood, etc. And these are all derived out of the bounties of mother earth. Unfortunately, when mother earth packed these goods with energy, she put in a lot of carbon with good foresight, lest greed overtake us in our quest to becoming satisfied beings.

We all know the story of climate change today, may not be in all it high falutin detail, but at least to the high-school level of understanding. The atmosphere is so choked with poisonous gases (like CO2, NOx, SOx) that it can't even complete its own natural cycle of replenishment and cleansing. I know this is true for Delhi where I live today; in the past few days I've been experiencing excessive heartburn and sometimes I gag at the smoke and pollution on the roads. Delhi has been found to report high levels of ozone too - a gas that's good only if it up there iin the sky, but bad if it close to the surface as it affects human health. The only way we can stop climate change from going into a runaway mode where it's beyond rectification is by going green - living, eating, sleeping green. That doesn't mean eating veggies all the time! One must make a conscious effort to become aware of how the things we do daily affect the climate and our health.

What can we do...?

Power generation sector and the process industry is the biggest emitter of green house gases (GHGs) today. We need the electricity and the industries to cater to our needs and the needs of our future generations, so we can't do anything drastic like phasing out all fossil power plants, or dismantling process industries. Not yet, at least. What can be done is mandating all future plants to be strictly green in nature - like wind mill farms, solar plants, hydro plants, ocean thermal plant, geothermal plants and nuclear power plants (and by the way, nuclear plants are not going to explode in your faces, so there's no need to be scared of them). These are pretty much the only available options today for large scale power generation, but all these have their limitations. For example, wind farms depend on availability of high speed wind all through the year, and we know that's not possible; hydro plants need good reservoir levels of water all through the year, solar plants need large areas of land that are also blessed with good sunlight through the year (but the night plays spoil sport). So there are limitations to these approaches. Nuclear fission power plants on the other hand have matured and become quite competitive to coal-based power plants, both, in terms of cost of electricity and operational availability. Nuclear plants do stand a good chance of being the ideal replacement to fossil fuel based plants (gas, coal, diesel, naphtha).

But there have been incidents in the past that make this decision of going nuclear a very difficult one. Three-mile Island and Chernobyl were mishaps in the past that cannot possibly occur today. Nuclear plants have reached operational levels where processes are automated and computer-controlled reducing the risk of unreliable manual controls. The only problem is the availability of fuel (like in the case of India, for which the Nuclear Deal with the USA was signed) and safe disposal of radioactive wastes. High level nuclear waste is today disposed off either through deep geological disposal or vitrification and shallow geological disposal. India follows the latter approach, as we have very little high level waste from our plants because of the method of reprocessing wherein spent radioactive fuel is reused by a scavenging process called reprocessing. India's ambitious 3-stage programme is in fact a good model that is based on indigenous technology-development and self-reliance for fuels beyond a point of time. That is when it hopes to exploit the large thorium reserves it is blessed with.

But I thought you were going to talk about Nuclear Fusion......

Another option that could very well save the day is nuclear fusion plants. Nuclear fusion depends on Deuterium and Tritium as it primary fuels and these are found in plenty in ocean water. Lithium, another substance required for the coolant is found in plenty in rocks. So the basic operating needs of the plants are sorted out by availability of these resources. The fusion plant, as a result of its operating processes doesn't emit any GHGs. The only GHGs released are during its construction phase in the making of steel, mining for iron ore, making of cement, etc., all of which depend on coal/gas for thermal energy. But in future, when fusion power plants begin to supply power to these very industries, like cement, steel, etc., the entire life-cycle of the fusion plant will be free from GHGs and totally "green".



Not only is it the abundance of fuel that makes fusion power attractive, even the size of the plant as per design requirement, has to be of a min. capacity in the 1000MW range. Thus, these plants will be able to supply large quantities of electricity unlike the renewable energy plants like wind, solar and geothermal plants which are not only small but intermittent too.

These are futuristic plants that are currently under development with joint participation from many countries. India too has its own nuclear fusion research programme underway and is also contributing to the international effort in constructing the world's first largest fusion plant at Cadarache, France. The future of this programme depends very much on the success of the interim device that is being constructed at France to demonstrate that fusion is possible and can be used for power generation.

What can be done to see the success of Fusion?

Now all that remains to be done is for nations to come up with a good action plan of how they shall meet their energy demands until 2050 when fusion power plants are likely to become available on a commercial scale. But nations will also have to commit to developing a good research base in terms of funds, manpower and technological facilities for nuclear fusion development. This means allocation of more funds, in spite of a financial crunch that is taking over the world. Financial crunches like these usually tend to make people rash and negligent about things like the environment and the future impact of GHGs, by shortening their focus from possible future issues to those at hand. Although this is required, it may end up making us oblivious of the path of self-destruction we have taken - fossil fuels.

Fast depleting reserves of oil and coal are also playing havoc on the prices and sentiment thus affecting world markets. Nuclear fusion will not only be distant in its impact on market sentiment, but will be a reliable source of power. Also, the problems that plague nuclear fission plants (radioactive leaks and waste disposal) are not going to be of the same scale for fusion plants. Radioactive wastes produced in fusion plants are of relatively short half-lives thus requiring shorter periods of disposal (some hundred years) as compared to nuclear fission waste (many thousand years). Also, radioactive leakage from a fusion plant is unlikely in the remotest of possibilities as the plant's operation depends on perfect shielding and thermal isolation. Without which the plant will automatically shut down.

So 2050, the age of fusion power!!!

Image Source: ITER (www.iter.org)