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Powering the Future
AUGUST 2005
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Powering the Future
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By Michael Parfit
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Photographs by Sarah Leen
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FUSION: THE FIRE SOME TIME
Fusion is the gaudiest of hopes, the fire of the stars in the human hearth. Produced when two atoms fuse into one, fusion energy could satisfy huge chunks of future demand. The fuel would last millennia. Fusion would produce no long-lived radioactive waste and nothing for terrorists or governments to turn into weapons. It also requires some of the most complex machinery on Earth.
A few scientists have claimed that cold fusion, which promises energy from a simple jar instead of a high-tech crucible, might work. The verdict so far: No such luck. Hot fusion is more likely to succeed, but it will be a decades-long quest costing billions of dollars.
Hot fusion is tough because the fuel—a kind of hydrogen—has to be heated to a hundred million degrees Celsius or so before the atoms start fusing. At those temperatures the hydrogen forms a roiling, unruly vapor of electrically charged particles, called plasma. "Plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe," says one physicist, "but it's also the most chaotic and the least easily controlled." Creating and containing plasma is so challenging that no fusion experiment has yet returned more than 65 percent of the energy it took to start the reaction.
Now scientists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are refining the process, learning better ways to control plasma and trying to push up the energy output. They hope that a six-billion-dollar test reactor called ITER will get the fusion bonfire blazing—what physicists call "igniting the plasma." The next step would be a demonstration plant to actually generate power, followed by commercial plants in 50 years or so.
"I am 100 percent sure we can ignite the plasma," says Jerome Pamela, the project manager of a fusion machine called the Joint European Torus, or JET, at Britain's Culham Science Center. "The biggest challenge is the transition between the plasma and the outside world." He means finding the right materials for the lining of the ITER plasma chamber, where they will have to withstand a bombardment of neutrons and transfer heat to electric generators.
At Culham I saw an experiment in a tokamak, a device that cages plasma in a magnetic field shaped like a doughnut—the standard design for most fusion efforts, including ITER. The physicists sent a huge electrical charge into the gas-filled container, a scaled-down version of JET. It raised the temperature to about ten million degrees Celsius, not enough to start fusion but enough to create plasma.
The experiment lasted a quarter of a second. A video camera shooting 2,250 frames a second captured it. As it played back, a faint glow blossomed in the chamber, wavered, grew into a haze visible only on its cooling edges, and vanished.
It was—well, disappointing. I had expected the plasma to look like a movie shot of an exploding automobile. This was more like a ghost in an English paneled library.
But this phantom was energy incarnate: the universal but elusive magic that all our varied technologies—solar, wind, biomass, fission, fusion, and many others large or small, mainstream or crazy—seek to wrestle into our service.
Taming that ghost is not just a scientific challenge. The ITER project has been held up by a seemingly simple problem. Since 2003 the participating countries—including much of the developed world—have been deadlocked over where to build the machine. The choice has come down to two sites, one in France and one in Japan.
As all energy experts will tell you, this proves a well-established theory. There's only one force tougher to manage than plasma: politics.
Although some politicians believe the task of developing the new energy technologies should be left to market forces, many experts disagree. That's not just because it's expensive to get new technology started, but also because government can often take risks that private enterprise won't.
"Most of the modern technology that has been driving the U.S. economy did not come spontaneously from market forces," NYU's Martin Hoffert says, ticking off jet planes, satellite communications, integrated circuits, computers. "The Internet was supported for 20 years by the military and for 10 more years by the National Science Foundation before Wall Street found it."
Without a big push from government, he says, we may be condemned to rely on increasingly dirty fossil fuels as cleaner ones like oil and gas run out, with dire consequences for the climate. "If we don't have a proactive energy policy," he says, "we'll just wind up using coal, then shale, then tar sands, and it will be a continually diminishing return, and eventually our civilization will collapse. But it doesn't have to end that way. We have a choice."
It's a matter of self-interest, says Hermann Scheer, the German member of parliament. "I don't appeal to the people to change their conscience," he said in his Berlin office, where a small model of a wind turbine turned lazily in a window. "You can't go around like a priest." Instead, his message is that nurturing new forms of energy is necessary for an environmentally and economically sound future. "There is no alternative."
Already, change is rising from the grass roots. In the U.S., state and local governments are pushing alternative energies by offering subsidies and requiring that utility companies include renewable sources in their plans. And in Europe financial incentives for both wind and solar energy have broad support even though they raise electric bills.
Alternative energy is also catching on in parts of the developing world where it's a necessity, not a choice. Solar power, for example, is making inroads in African communities lacking power lines and generators. "If you want to overcome poverty, what do people need to focus on?" asks Germany's environment minister, Jürgen Trittin. "They need fresh water and they need energy. For filling the needs of remote villages, renewable energy is highly competitive."
In developed countries there's a sense that alternative energy—once seen as a quaint hippie enthusiasm—is no longer alternative culture. It's edging into the mainstream. The excitement of energy freedom seems contagious.
One afternoon last year, near a village north of Munich, a small group of townspeople and workers inaugurated a solar facility. It would soon surpass the Leipzig field as the largest in the world, with six megawatts of power.
About 15 people gathered on a little man-made hill beside the solar farm and planted four cherry trees on the summit. The mayor of the tidy nearby town brought out souvenir bottles of schnapps. Almost everyone had a swig, including the mayor.
Then he said he would sing to the project's construction supervisor and a landscape artist, both American women. The two women stood together, grinning, with the field of solar panels soaking up energy behind them. The German mayor straightened his dark suit, and the other men leaned on their shovels.
Fifty years ago, I thought, there were still bombed-out ruins in the cities of Europe. The Soviet Union was planning Sputnik. Texas oil was $2.82 a barrel. At the most, we have 50 years to make the world over again. But people change, adapt, and make crazy new stuff work. I thought about Dan Shugar talking about disruptive technologies. "There's a sense of excitement," he had said. "There's a sense of urgency. There's a sense that we cannot fail."
On the hilltop, the mayor took a deep breath. He sang, in a booming tenor, without missing a note or a word, the entire song "O Sole Mio." Everyone cheered.
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