Prospects of Fusion Energy by Henry J.

Ramos
never-failing power of the sun - a plasma with energy to last 5,000 million years - vision behind the concept of nuclear fusion fusion research - aim is to use the inexhaustible fuel of the sea and to reproduce on earth the power of the sun to provide unlimited energy for the future At present, 6 billion people consume about .41 Q of energy per year, i.e., about 6.85 x 1010 barrels of oil (1 Q = 1.85 x 10 11 barrels of oil or about 15 terawatts 1 terawatt = 5 billion barrels of oil (BOE) To date, the world has consumed about 3% of known coal reserves and about 10% of the known petroleum and gas reserves At 0.4Q per year. The known total fossil fuel reserves would last about 80 years and the possible total reserve of 452Q will last some 1130 years Readily available cheap ores of uranium provide in comparison to conventional fuels a potential resource of 740 Q, some 22 times larger than the known 32Q of total fossil energy reserves. Fission (splitting of nuclei) of U235 , which is 0.71% in natural uranium ore) could generate the major part of the total electrical energy needs for at least several decades Cases against Nuclear Power: - hazards of strong radioactive wastes for as long as 250,000 years - irresponsible acts of vandalism on the part of the vandal, terrorist or thief - failure of component parts Plasma - a collection of charged particles which exhibits certain distinctive characteristics such as: non-degenerate gas whose behaviour is governed by classical statistics all particle populations of plasma have substantial degree of random motion characteristic dimension is large compared to the distance at which an individual particle feels the influence of interacting particles * Debye length = distance Plasmas include such naturally occurring devices such as: ionosphere hot gas which exists transiently within the channel of a lightning stroke solar flares, sunspots, and all other regions of the dun (including solar wind) Van Allen belts of energetic ionized particles trapped at high altitudes by the earths magnetic field Atmosphere and interiors of the majority of stars Planetary nebulae and interstellar gas regions. To produce a laboratory plasma, it is necessary to free electrons normally bound into atoms. A sufficient amount of energy supplied to a neutral molecule will free these electrons. This energy ordinarily emanates from collisions of one sort or another. The sun is the best example of a fusion reactor. There, the nuclear energy is released in the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to form helium. These reactions are too slow to be used in the fusion reactor.

deuterium (D) tritium (T) reaction - particularly attractive because this mixture has the lowest threshold energy (or the lowest ignition temperature 4 x 1070 C) To extract useful energy from the fusion reaction, there are 2 basic requirements that must be met: 1. Fuel must be heated to a very high temperature to reach the desired particle energies. 2. To enable the reactions to yield a net gain in energy, the particles must be confined for a sufficiently long time In magnetic containment, plasma is confined by a suitable shaped magnetic field. As the temp of the plasma, increases, confinement improves because the particles are tied to the magnetic fields lines and collisions are less frequent than at lower temperatures causing the particles to be less scattered away from the reaction region. For confinement, the plasma pressure must be less than the magnetic field pressure and the ratio = nkT <1 B 2/2 u0 Various Magnetic Confinement Schemes Pinches one of the simplest approach to fusion is the z-pinch. - a large rapidly-rising current is carried by the plasma and this current alone serves to heat and confine it - beset with unstable, small non-uniformities to produce regions of weak confinement Magnetic mirrors can reduce the end losses of the open magnetic field configuration by strengthening the magnetic field at the ends Tokamak plasma is confined in a toroidal vacuum chamber by a strong magnetic field running the long way around the torus together with a weaker field produced a current flowing through the ring of plasma itself Projected waste from the fusion reactor appears to be much less severe to the environment than those associated with the fission reactor. Some environmental advantages are: - fusion power require no burning of the worlds oxygen or hydrocarbons hence no releases of carbon dioxide or other combustible products to the atmosphere - no radioactive wastes are produced - thermal pollution will be similar to that for existing power plants - the rate of nuclear reactions is easily controlled by controlling the plasma temperature thus the reaction can be quenched, so there is no danger of it running out of control; there is no critical mass required for fusion

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