26.01.2023

Fusion is no solution

There has been much crowing over the recent breakthrough in nuclear technology. But Jack Conrad has his doubts about fusion being the ultimate terrestrial energy source

According to numerous reports in the mainstream media, the wondrous potential of nuclear fusion to provide “limitless” clean energy took that vital step forward on December 13 2022. For the first time, fusing atoms released more energy than had directly been put in. That required temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees - many times that generated at the centre of the sun. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had therefore won the fusion race (or so we are told) against fierce competition coming from Germany, France, Britain, China and Japan. Undoubtedly a remarkable technological achievement.

Completed in 1997, true, at four times the original budget, NIF is the most powerful research device for internal confinement fusion in the world. Its awesome array of laser drivers, optical switches, deformable mirrors, target chambers, hugely accurate monitoring, the precision engineering, the intellectual labour - all stand at the cutting edge of what we humans can do to mimic the inner workings of the sun.

Nonetheless, what had been decades away remains decades away. In other words, not much has changed since the 1980s, when a contained fusion reaction - ie, not from a bomb - was first achieved. Indeed the promise of economically viable, abundant energy generated by nuclear fusion is in all probability delusional. Certainly a big lie, when it comes to offering a solution to the danger of runaway climate change.

Let me begin the argument by saying that what is written here relies in good measure on people such as Brian Tokar, Karl Grossman and Linda Pentz Gunter and their recent CounterPunch articles. They are, to say the least, pretty convincing.¹

Anyway, let us ask how significant a breakthrough the NIF demonstration/experiment really was. True, 3.15 megajoules of energy came out, compared with the 2.05 megajoules put in. But this only counts the laser energy that actually struck the small, pea-sized, reactor vessel. However, the energy necessary to generate the temperatures of over a hundred million degrees was the product of an array of 192 high-powered lasers, “which required well over 100 times as much energy to operate.”² That is about 300 megajoules.

More sober reporters tell us that a fusion reaction would have to occur “many times a second” to produce usable amounts of energy.³ The spurt of energy that came from the NIF fusion reactor actually lasted one tenth of a nanosecond - ten-billionth of a second. Apparently other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction “many times” every second is way beyond anything that is feasible today. And that is what must happen if the dream of abundant, clean, safe, reliable nuclear fusion energy is to be realised here on this planet.

Land

A brief aside. Enthusiasts wax lyrical about how fusion looks “promising with respect to land use and scale”, compared with solar and wind power installations⁴ - the idea being that wind farms and solar arrays “are a blight on the landscape” and a threat to food supplies. Liz Truss, former UK environment minister and former prime minister, wanted to ban them from “prime farmland”.⁵ So, when it comes to the environment, a prime idiot.

Meanwhile, Mark Jacobson and his team at Stanford University have calculated that, if there is a total conversion to wind, water and solar power, it might use about the same amount of land as is currently occupied by the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure.⁶

As for the $3.5 billion NIF facility needed to house those 192 lasers and all the control equipment, well, it is the size of three football pitches. All that just to generate the equivalent of about 10-20 minutes of energy used by a typical town house. Clearly, an everyday rooftop solar system - directly harnessing the energy generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion - especially in locations below latitude 40° north and above latitude 40° south, can do far more than that already.

We are reliably told that, if electricity were ever to be supplied from nuclear fusion power stations, it would be hellishly expensive: between 10 and 30 times more than electricity coming from the existing generation of nuclear power stations.⁷ Solar and wind power is, of course, much cheaper than coal, oil or gas-generated power (which is much cheaper than power generated from nuclear fission plants). No wonder renewables are being adopted on an ever increasing scale. The International Energy Agency reports that “Solar PV’s installed power capacity is poised to surpass that of coal by 2027, becoming the largest in the world.”⁸ Last May, California was briefly able to run its entire electricity grid on renewable energy - a milestone that had already been achieved in Denmark and in south Australia. And we also know that a variety of energy storage methods, combined with sophisticated load management and upgrades to transmission infrastructure, are helping to solve the problem of intermittency of solar and wind energy.

Surely this is where the future lies, not nuclear fission, let alone nuclear fusion.

Safety and supply

Then there are the questions of safety and supply. We all know the horrible history of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Chernobyl, etc. Nor should we trust the ‘new generation’ of mini-nuclear fission reactors currently being touted. However, fusion attracts huge government hand-outs and accompanying hype about “bringing the power source of the stars down to earth”.⁹

While some lazy reporters insist on painting a picture of nuclear fusion reactors running on seawater, the actual fuel consists of two unique isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium - which has an extra neutron in its nucleus - and tritium - with two extra neutrons. Deuterium is stable and somewhat common: approximately one out of every 5-6,000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is actually deuterium, and it is a necessary ingredient (as a component of heavy water) in conventional nuclear reactors.

Tritium is, however, radioactive, with a half-life of 12 years, and is typically a costly by-product (£24,000 per gram) of an unusual type of heavy-water nuclear reactor design known as CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium). Developed in the late 1950s and 60s by a Canadian public-private consortium, they were exported mainly to South Korea and India (the latter detonating a nuclear bomb in 1974). With half the operating CANDU reactors due to be phased out this decade, available tritium supplies will likely peak before 2030 and, once the new International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor starts operating, there will be, by the 2050s, a “shortage” of tritium. The conclusion of Daniel Clery’s article on fusion that appeared in Science last June - well before the latest hullabaloo.¹⁰

Incidentally, the ITER (‘iter’ being Latin for ‘the way’) is currently under construction in Cadarache in southern France, and comes with an estimated price tag of between $25 billion and $65 billion; needless to say, rather more than the original $5.6 billion estimate. Such eye-watering costs help explain why NIF and other such facilities attempt to promote as much media excitement as possible: otherwise gaining government funding would be considerably harder. Public opinion simply would not buy it. Design work on ITER began in 1988, building work in 2013 and the first results are due in late 2025 (though, as with almost everything nuclear, expect severe delays).

ITER is not meant to generate electricity into the grid, despite the fact it has 10 times the plasma capacity of anything operating today. No, as it says on the can, ITER is ‘experimental’. The aim is to sustain nuclear fusion for 30-second periods - in other words, far more than the one tenth of a nanosecond NIF achieved - and thereby test the technical viability of a nuclear fusion power plant.

The engineering challenges involved in that are truly immense. Crucially there is the question of how to convert an experimental setup that produces energy for seconds into a continuous source of electricity that operates 24 hours a day and 365 days per year. To do that, fusion reactions should occur several times each second, each second of the day, each day of the year. As of this moment, the lasers can fire only once a day at a single target. To move from that to what is required will need an improvement by a factor of over 500,000 (assuming around six shots per second).

But it is not just about firing lasers. Each of these operations produces debris, which must be removed. And then a new deuterium-tritium pellet has to be placed with utmost precision at the very spot where the lasers can once again focus their beams.

If one suspends one’s disbelief for a moment and assumes that the engineering challenges can be overcome, there still remains the even more difficult challenge: how to reduce the costs of nuclear fusion, so that they are comparable to renewables, fossil fuels or even nuclear fission - which is a far easier process in comparison to fusion. It cannot be done.

Anyhow, while the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has made some progress toward potentially recycling tritium, fusion researchers remain highly dependent on rapidly diminishing supplies. Alternative fuels for fusion reactors are under development, based on radioactive helium, or boron, but that requires temperatures of “one billion degrees” to trigger a fusion reaction.¹¹ Various European labs plan to experiment with new ways of generating tritium, but the expectation is that they will significantly increase the radioactivity of the entire process and a tritium gain of only 5%-15% is anticipated. The more downtime between experimental runs, the less tritium they will produce.

However, as Daniel Jassby pointed out a few years back, there are many more problems involved in scaling up fusion reactors than supplies of tritium. Indeed he warned that fusion power “is something to be shunned”. For the record, Jassby was head of Princeton’s lab for 25 years (retiring in 1999). It, along with researchers in Britain, the European Union, Japan and the Soviet Union, led the development of the now standard device for achieving nuclear fusion - a doughnut-shaped spherical vessel, which is filled with highly ionised gas, known as a tokamak (from the Russian word for ‘ring’).

Jassby’s article, ‘Fusion reactors: not what they’re cracked up to be’, is compelling and well worth quoting to further the argument.¹² “Fusion reactors have long been touted as the ‘perfect’ energy source,” he wrote in 2017. And “humanity is moving much closer” to “achieving that breakthrough moment when the amount of energy coming out of a fusion reactor will sustainably exceed the amount going in, producing net energy”.

“As we move closer to our goal, however,” continued Jassby, “it is time to ask: Is fusion really a ‘perfect’ energy source?” Despite working on nuclear fusion experiments for decades, he came to the view that “a fusion reactor would be far from perfect, and in some ways close to the opposite”.

“Unlike what happens” when fusion occurs on the sun, “which uses ordinary hydrogen at enormous density and temperature”, here on earth “fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have by-products that are anything but harmless”, he said.

After discussing how, because of tritium, nuclear fusion is, in fact, reliant on nuclear fission, he located five additional “regrettable problems”:

1. high radioactivity, huge temperatures and pressures and the likely breakdown of components;
2. hazardous radioactive waste in the form of titrated water;
3. the need for biological shielding;
4. immense demands for water for secondary cooling;
5. the potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239 - thus adding to the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening it, as fusion proponents claim.

“And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.” Eg, fusion reactor operations require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants - such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste. Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems, including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics.

Fission reactors in the US typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000. In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants and other power sources.¹³

On top of that, there are multiple recurring expenses, including “the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually”. Then there are the high costs associated with decommissioning any nuclear plant, as well as the periodic disposal of radioactive wastes.

To sum up, the “harsh realities of fusion” belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy”. Terrestrial fusion energy is “not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters”, declared Jassby.

Weapons

Putting the laser-mediated fusion reaction achieved at NIF aside for the moment, it is surely significant that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a long history with nuclear weapons. It is where, under the theoretical physicist, Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb was developed. He is often described as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”,¹⁴ which utilises fusion, while the atomic bomb, which Teller earlier worked on at Los Alamos National Laboratory, utilises fission. The development of atomic bombs at Los Alamos led to a nuclear offshoot: civilian nuclear-power fission plants, which, in fact, provide useful cover for the nuclear weapons industry, along with maintaining the necessary cadre of scientific expertise.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s own webpages openly admit that it is an integral part of the military-industrial-academic complex:

LLNL’s Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI) Directorate works to ensure the remaining deterrent remains safe, secure and reliable. WCI accomplishes this through the Stockpile Stewardship Program - an ongoing effort to apply a science-based fundamental understanding of nuclear weapons performance - from the development of enhanced warhead surveillance tools that detect the onset of problems to manufacturing capabilities that produce critical components. Using the laboratory’s tools and talents, the nation has been able to assess and certify the safety, security and reliability of the stockpile each year without a return to nuclear testing for more than 20 years.¹⁵

We further read:

With NIF, researchers have a new opportunity to explore weapons effects for a range of detonation parameters. NIF provides a laboratory setting for scaled experiments that recreate the energy density generated by a nuclear explosion without using any nuclear materials or generating radioactivity, apart from transient X-rays. “When we started the EPEC experiments, the question was whether we could use NIF to make measurements that in the past could only have been acquired in an above-ground nuclear test,” says Livermore physicist Kevin Fournier … “We learned that tiny non-nuclear experiments inside the NIF target chamber scale well to the conditions encountered in the actual nuclear tests of decades ago.”¹⁶

Professor MV Ramana of the University of British Columbia, whose recent article on the fusion breakthrough was posted on The Wire Science, explains that the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program was the “ransom paid” to the US nuclear weapons laboratories for forgoing the right to test after the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1996.¹⁷ It is “a way to continue investment into modernising nuclear weapons, albeit without explosive tests, and dressing it up as a means to produce ‘clean’ energy”.

Livermore scientists, administrators and PR spokespeople are well practised in the art of changing their language, depending on their audience. Speaking to the Pentagon, they talk about atoms for war; speaking to media, they talk about atoms for peace.

NIF might even help with developing new kinds of nuclear weapons. Ramana cites a 1998 article by Arjun Makhijani and Hisham Zerriffi that argued how one aim of laser fusion experiments is to try to develop a “pure fusion” bomb that does not require a conventional fission bomb to ignite it, potentially eliminating the need for highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which currently constitute the main obstacles to making nuclear weapons.¹⁸ In short, the real agenda of NIF and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab revolves around nuclear weapons.

Cindy Folkers can be cited too:

The NIF experiment … closely resembles the process of a (very tiny) thermonuclear warhead. Since the US has not tested nuclear weapons since 1992, the data from experiments like these can be used in computer simulations to make sure that atomic weapons will remain reliable, despite decades mercifully idle. The radiation from these experiments can also be used to test components to make sure they perform as anticipated. While not testing atomic bombs in the open environment is good, abolishing them altogether would be far better.¹⁹

And, as high-energy physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists tweeted on December 13, following the NIF announcement, “There seems to be a disconnect between … the NIF briefing and what many people wanted to hear. This achievement will be far more useful for US nuclear weapon maintenance and ‘modernisation’ than for generating clean energy in the foreseeable future.”²⁰

The tremendous media attention garnered by NIF amounts to “a distraction - and a dangerous one at that” (MV Ramana). As the history of nuclear fusion since the 1950s shows, this hugely complex technology is not going to produce cheap and reliable electricity to light bulbs or power computers any time in the foreseeable future.

But nuclear fusion falls even shorter, when we consider the climate crisis and the need to cut carbon emissions to net zero. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given a 2050 target date, but other, less conservative, less constrained voices, insist on much earlier dates: eg, Extinction Rebellion, 2025,²¹ the rightwing Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, 2030.²² Given this timeline, spending billions on the sure-to-fail attempt to develop fusion power amounts to diverting money and resources away from renewable energy sources and associated technologies. Bad news for the planet.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to rise and nuclear fusion experiments like those at NIF heighten the risk of nuclear war posed by the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons: USA, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Luckily the world has avoided nuclear war - so far. There have, though, been many near-miss moments: eg, the 1962 Cuba missile crisis. But with Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine and the Russian Federation making nuclear threats, with the US drive to encircle China, this luck cannot hold forever.

We call for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but programmes such as NIF, which involve nuclear weapons modernisation, are just a means to ensure Mutually Assured Destruction.

This year, on January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight - the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

1. CounterPunch December 14, December 23, December 28 2022.↩︎

2. CounterPunch December 28 2022.↩︎

3. Archie Bland in The Guardian December 14 2022.↩︎

4. A Turrell The star builders: nuclear fusion and the race To power the planet New York 2022, p42.↩︎

5. theconversation.com/solar-farms-a-blight-on-the-landscape-research-shows-they-can-benefit-wildlife-191222.↩︎

6. web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf.↩︎

7. www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/05/12/fusion_ten_times_more_expensive_than_nuclear_power_776839.html.↩︎

8. www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2022/executive-summary.↩︎

9. ccfe.ukaea.uk/fusion-energy/fusion-in-brief.↩︎

10. D Clery, ‘Out of gas’ Science June 2022.↩︎

11. Ibid.↩︎

12. D Jassby Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists April 19 2017.↩︎

13. Ibid.↩︎

14. See P Goodchild The real Dr Strangelove: Edward Teller Cambridge MA 2004.↩︎

15. www.llnl.gov/missions/weapons.↩︎

16. str.llnl.gov/september-2013/fournier.↩︎

17. thewire.in/the-sciences/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-celebration.↩︎

18. ieer.org/resource/disarmamentpeace/dangerous-thermonuclear-quest.↩︎

19. beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/12/15/whats-all-the-fuss-about-fusion.↩︎

20. twitter.com/nucsafetyucs.↩︎

21. extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/demands.↩︎

22. www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/climate-change/zero-carbon-london/pathways-net-zero-carbon-2030.↩︎