This blog post starts with a press release from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
“…the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) announced that scientists performing an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiment at the National Ignition Faclility (NIF) just after 1 a.m. on Dec. 5 produced more energy from the self-sustaining fusion reaction than they put in to create the reaction: a condition known as ignition.
… speakers at the stunning announcement celebrated the achievement as the culmination of 60 years of exploration and experimentation in ICF by generations of scientists at LLNL and collaborators in industry, academia and other DOE national labs, including Los Alamos and Sandia. Officials from the DOE (US Department of Energy) and the OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) congratulated researchers on the milestone and said replicating ignition in the lab could set the stage for fusion to someday become a viable clean-energy option.
‘Last week, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition — creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process,’ said DOE Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm. ‘It's the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world — simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.’”
The entire concept of fusion power has always been fascinating to me. It also has a huge connection to project management, since the development of fusion power itself could be considered a collaborative program (note the number of organizations above just in the US working on this successful ignition). Many international efforts are also underway (more about that later in this Part 1 and in Part 2 of this post).
In this post, I just want to provide you with the background and whet your appetite for more about fusion projects and why you may want to be interested in it as a human and a project leader (they are not mutually exclusive!).
The 22-minute video below is most definitely worth a watch, although I will try to summarize it below.
The video starts by rationalizing all this effort with the simple statement that fusion is probably the only single source that can replace fossil fuels. Other forms of clean energy can, and must, contribute to the solution until then, because it will likely be decades before fusion power is commercially viable (although the LLNL proved that it is possible to generate a ‘net gain’ or ‘ignition’ as it was called in the announcement above).
Next, the video goes through some of the other international efforts to prove feasibility of fusion power; the Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxford, and the much larger ITER in the south of France. ITER itself is worth discovering check out this video below:
The Bloomberg video continues – it does a tremendous job explaining the science behind fusion power, using a (literally) glowing example we see (almost) every day – the sun. In the sun, hydrogen atoms are moving about very fast and crash into each other from time to time at high speeds, combining (or fusing) to form helium atoms. When they do, they lose a tiny bit of mass – and when they lose even this small amount of mass, it generates a whole bunch of energy. And this is happening millions of times.
If this sounds a little like Albert Einstein, it should: The combined hydrogen isotopes smash together to form a helium nuclei. Since the mass of the helium nuclei is slightly less than the combined mass of two fusing hydrogen nuclei, this extra mass is released as energy according to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2.
To attempt to duplicate what the Sun does all day long (even at night) here on Earth is tough. We don’t have the mass of the sun to provide that smashing power to cause fusion, so we need to get to the fourth state of matter – plasma. We all can think of ice (solid), water (liquid), steam (gas). Plasma is that fourth state – examples are lightning and neon gas when electrified, or the jagged line of blue that you see in a Jacob’s ladder. The thing about plasma is that it has to be contained and controlled. Tupperware® won’t work. What’s needed are extremely strong magnets. More about this in Part 2. For now, you can see the effects of magnets on plasma in this video:
To get fusion here on earth, we need to get to temperatures of 100 to 200 million degrees (ten times hotter than the Sun). It’s going to take plasma and a lot of energy input to get to those high temperatures. Now you can begin to see where ‘net gain’ comes into play. Just as in a project budget, it makes no sense to spend $300,000,000 if the project is only going to have a lifetime benefit of $250,000,000. And this what makes the recent announcement from the US on ‘net gain’ so important.
The promise of fusion power is that it is clean and is fueled by hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe and of course quite available on Earth (in the form of seawater).
So: a clean, (eventually) cheap, renewable source of power? Yes, please.
In the next post I will back up and talk more about the mysterious Tokamak, about the private companies that are working on projects to be first to reach commercial viability, and most pragmatically, the opportunities (jobs, careers) that already abound and will continue to grow for project leaders.
Very enlightening content, Richard. Our goals as citizens in the world community should be to seek updated forms of sustainability.
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
It's going to take decades before fusion becomes commercially viable. We also have to recognize that fusion can only provide us with energy in the form of electricity. (Don't expect to see fusion-powered cars.) In the meantime, we'll have to make do with other renewable energy sources.
