France gets nuclear fusion plant

[YankeyMCC]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4629239.stm

So is this a pipe dream? Is it even a worthwhile pipe-dream? I suppose we can't really say if a Fusion based reactor would be safer than a Fission based reactor until they work out the details of how commercial reactors will be built and operated.

Sounds like all this decision has done is give local French politicians something to make them look good to constituents and money to corporations involved in the construction. We may get some valuable scientific data out of the effort but it doesn't sound like anything practical will come from this for decades if ever.

[Up2Late]

1. France is picked for nuclear fusion site ( IHT/NYT)

France is picked for nuclear fusion site

By Craig S. Smith The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2005

PARIS France has won an international competition to be the host of the world's first nuclear fusion reactor, an estimated $10 billion project that many scientists see as a key to solving the world's future energy needs.

"It is a great success for France, for Europe and for all the partners in ITER," President Jacques Chirac of France said in a statement released Tuesday after an international consortium chose the country as the site for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

Japan, which had lobbied hard for the project, dropped out of the bidding. The six-member consortium, which includes the United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the European Union, agreed in Moscow to build the facility in the southern French city of Cadarache.

Nuclear fusion is the process by which the atomic nuclei are forced together, releasing huge amounts of energy, as with the sun and stars or, in manmade form, the hydrogen bomb. The process has long been studied as a potential energy source that would be far cleaner than burning fossil fuels or even nuclear fission, which is used in nuclear reactors today but produces dangerous radioactive waste.

<http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/29/news/fusion.php>
(more at link above)

[phantom power]

2. These particular reactors run on tritium.

Tritium can only be produced inside of fission reactors. So, any fusion industry based on this technology would be dependent on a fission industry.

They still might be useful in that capacity, but they aren't as compelling as the holy grail of being able to fuse regular hydrogen nuclei, since we have an effectively infinite and free supply of those. Supplies of tritium are limited, and expensive, comparitively speaking.

Some by-products of fusion are also radioactive, but their half-life is shorter. They also cannot melt down. However, the risk of meltdown in modern fission reactors is very small.

As I understand it, tritium-based fusion is not necessarily much of a win over modern fission technology, although since some fission reactors produce tritium as a byproduct, this would be a way to use it for something useful.

If you are interested, the Environment/Energy forum has pretty frequent discussions of these topics.

[Tesha]

3. Unfortunately, you're wrong about the source of the tritium.

While it is true that ITER will burn a deuterium/tritium mix, the
tritium will be derived directly within ITER as a result of neutrons
being absorbed into the lithium "blanket", transmuting the lithium
into tritium.

See: http://www.fzk.de/fzk/idcplg?IdcService=FZK&node=0800〈=en



Tesha

[phantom power]

4. In that case, I would say I was "fortunately" wrong :-)

[Tesha]

5. :-). (NT)

[aeolian]

6. Well, they would be inherently safer in one major way

no "hot" waste. Just some Helium.

Although the chamber that contains the reaction may itself become radioactive, by absorbing stray particles from the fusion core, it won't be anything like the leftovers from fission reactors.

Who knows, maybe someday we'll know enough to push the reactions further, into making carbon, neon...hell maybe all the way to Iron! Then we would be talking about some potentially long-lived radioisotopes as waste. But by then, I'd imagine we'd also know enough to deal with them.