• Question: How far away do you think we are from using nuclear fusion to get energy?

    Asked by Julius Caesar to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      There was an interesting debate on radio 4 about this the other day (yes i’m a geeky old man sometimes!)

      We’re not that far away in some respects but very far away in others.

      one of the issues is that at the moment we can’t get as much energy as we should be able to out of the reaction due to various problems such as stopping the materials from hitting the walls of the reactor and cooling down a little.

      We actually put more energy into the process than we get out at the moment but each time we build a new reactor or run a new experiment we’re getting better and I would say we’re about 50 years away from having a few of our own man-made suns on earth 🙂

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      We have actually done this….a thermonuclear bomb has an element of fusion when it explodes.
      In terms of controlling the releases of energy we have also done it…but only at a very small scale and it took more energy that it made!
      Smashing two atoms together takes a lot of energy…you only get energy back as some of the matter of the fusing atoms are converted to photons, which is energy. How much energy you get back depends on the size of the atoms you fuse – the smaller they are the better – and if you can control it in a big enough reactor that runs the reaction we could do it.
      I think 20 to 30 years and we will have this licked.

    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      Currently there’s a group working on a reactor in France called ITER. The idea is for this, within the next ten years or so,to get to the stage where if they hooked up a generator to it it would be usable as a power source. If that all goes to plan then they aim to build an actual fusion power station in the 2030s.
      The main problem I can see, apart from lots of technical difficulties, is the cost ITER is currently predicted to cost around 50 billion dollars. If they can’t get the cost down, then it will never be a useful power source regardless of how good it is otherwise.

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