Can seawater power the world?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0286
In an 11 July New York Times op-ed, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory director Steward C. Prager predicts nuclear fusion “will transform the world’s energy supply.”
However, he writes, making fusion a reality “will take significant investment from the government at a time when spending on scientific research is under threat.” He offers a “rough estimate ... that it would take $30 billion and 20 years to go from the current state of research to the first working fusion reactor,” but argues that “in perspective, that sum is equal to about a week of domestic energy consumption, or about 2 percent of the annual energy expenditure of $1.5 trillion.”
Prager summarizes the fusion process and its potential benefits, and then reports what he calls the “catch": the “development of fusion energy is one of the most difficult science and engineering challenges ever undertaken,” requiring, among other things, the “production and confinement of a hot gas—a plasma—with a temperature around 100 million degrees Celsius.” As emerging “potential solutions to these daunting technical challenges,” he mentions magnetic fusion and a “second approach [that] resembles an internal combustion engine, with multiple mini-explosions (about five per second).”
He continues:
Once a poorly understood area of research, plasma physics has become highly developed. Scientists not only produce 100 million-degree plasmas routinely, but they control and manipulate such “small suns” with remarkable finesse. Since 1970 the power produced by magnetic fusion in the lab has grown from one-tenth of a watt, produced for a fraction of a second, to 16 million watts produced for one second—a billionfold increase in fusion energy.
He goes on to explain the ITER project of the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US. But thanks to the connotative toxicity of the word thermonuclear, no doubt, he leaves Times readers uninformed about that name’s origin: International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
And he laments that what “has been lacking in the United States is the political and economic will,” asserting that we “need serious public investment to develop materials that can withstand the harsh fusion environment, sustain hot plasma indefinitely and integrate all these features in an experimental facility to produce continuous fusion power.’
