FUSION ENERGY FOR ELECTRICITY
By
Dr Abu Bakar Mhd Ghazali
1. Introduction
It is well known that the source of energy at the sun and stars are produced from
nuclear fusion reactions. Research into controlled fusion, with the aim of
producing fusion power for the production of electricity, has been conducted for
over 60 years. It has been accompanied by extreme scientific and technological
difficulties, but resulted in steady progress [1]. Controlled fusion reactions have
been demonstrated in a few tokamak (magnetic confinement fusion) type
reactors around the world and resulted in producing workable design of the
reactor which will deliver ten times more fusion energy than the amount of energy
needed to heat up its plasma to required temperatures for continuous nuclear
fusion reaction [1]. ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) to
be built at Cadarache, France as shown in Fig. 1 is an international tokamak
research/engineering experimental project. It is designed to produce
approximately 500 MW of fusion power sustained for up to 1000 seconds by the
fusion of about 0.5 gram of deuterium-tritium mixture in its approximately 840 m3
reactor chamber and the first plasma operation from this reactor is expected in
2018. This program is anticipated to last for 30 years — 10 for construction, and
20 of operation — and costing involved is approximately US$ 9.3 billion.
Although ITER is expected to produce (in the form of heat) 5 - 10 times more
energy than the amount consumed to heat up the plasma to fusion temperatures,
the generated heat will not be used to generate any electricity but it is dedicated
for research and development.
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Fig.1: Artistic view of ITER shows 18 Toroidal
Field coils to produce 11.8 Tesla each for
confining the plasma to move in a circle.
If it is used for continuously supply for electricity, the problem is to quickly
reloading the fuel into the reactor after each shot. It is estimated that an
implosion of fuel capsule for every 10 seconds could produce 300 MW fusion
energy [1].
Another method is to use inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The National
Ignition Facility (NIF) as shown in Fig. 2 is a laser-based ICF research device
under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA. NIF
uses powerful 192 individual laser beamlets to heat and compress a small
amount of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place
[2]. Its construction started in 1997 with estimated cost is US$ 4 billion. It will
create a single 500 terawatt (TW) flash of light that reaches the target of
deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel from numerous directions at the same time, within a
few picoseconds. The construction is expected to complete in 2010. The baseline
design allows for a maximum of about 45 MJ of fusion energy release, due to the
design of the target pellet of about 2 mm in diameter, chilled to about 18 degrees
above absolute zero temperature and lined with a layer of solid DT fuel.
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Fig. 2: NIF's basic layout. The laser pulse is
generated in the room just right of center,
and is sent into the beamlines (blue) moving
into the amplifiers at the top (purple). After
several passes through the amplifiers the
light is cleaned up in the filters (blue) and
sent into the "switchyard" (red) where it is
aimed into the target chamber (silver).
Three football fields could fit inside NIF.
Hydrogen bomb (Fig. 3) is an example product of nuclear fusion reaction. In
Teller–Ulam design [3], it has two stages of the process where the primary is a
fission bomb triggered to produce x-ray radiation implosion in the chamber for
compressing and heat the secondary fusion fuel (Lithium Deuteride) before
igniting it. The result is a very powerful nuclear weapon such as the ‘Tzar Bomba’
that was tested on October 30, 1961 at Artic sea to have a yield of 50,000
kilotons of TNT as compared to a fission bomb named as ‘Fat Man’ dropped at
Nagasaki, Japan with 20 kilotons of TNT only.
Fig. 3: Foam plasma mechanism firing sequence in Teller–Ulam design:
A. Warhead before firing; primary (fission bomb) at top, secondary (fusion fuel) at
bottom, all suspended in polystyrene foam.
B. High-explosive fires in primary, compressing plutonium core into supercriticality and
beginning a fission reaction.
C. Fission primary emits X-rays which are scattered along the inside of the casing,
irradiating the polystyrene foam.
D. Polystyrene foam becomes plasma, compressing secondary, and plutonium sparkplug
begins to fission.
E. Compressed and heated, lithium-6 deutheride fuel produces tritium and begins the
fusion reaction. The neutron flux produced causes the U-238 tamper to fission. A fireball
starts to form.
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2. Nuclear fusion reaction theory
When a nucleon such as a proton or neutron is added to a nucleus, the nuclear
force attracts it to other nucleons. At very short distances the nuclear force is
stronger than the electrostatic force. The activation energy for fusion is so high
because protons in each nucleus will tend to strongly repel one another. It has to
be 100x10-13 m near where it undergoes quantum tunneling past the electrostatic
barrier, i.e. nuclear force is greater than electrostatic force to allow them to fuse
[4].
Fig. 4: The repulsion (electrostatic force)
between positively-charged nuclei is strong at
short distances, but at a very short distance, the
nuclear force is much stronger than the
electrostatic force.
As such, the main technical difficulty for fusion is to get the nuclei close enough
to fuse. Theoretical studies have shown that it can be achieved by high
temperature and high magnetic confinement. Using deuterium-tritium (DT) as
fuel, the resulting energy barrier, also known as Coulomb barrier, is about
10 keV. So it is required to heat these nuclei to gain energy and eventually have
enough heat to overcome this 10 keV barrier in order to ignite the nuclear fusion
reaction. This fusion reaction rate increases rapidly with higher barrier energy
and its peak is at 70 keV. Equation for this reaction is D + T 4He + n with
released energy of 17.6 MeV which is far larger than ignition / barrier energy. The
neutron carries 14.1 MeV and the helium-4 nucleus has the remaining 3.5 MeV.
This energy is calculated by E = mc2 where m is the mass different between
before and after the reactions and c is the speed of light. Moreover, the Lawson
criterion [5] defines the conditions needed for a fusion reactor to reach ignition,
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that the heating of the plasma by the products of the fusion reactions is sufficient
to maintain the temperature of the plasma against all losses without external
power input. For the self-sustaining reactions, the Q value should be greater than
5, meaning that more fusion energy releases as compared to the amount of
energy needed to heat up its plasma to required temperatures. Converting the
units between electronvolts (eV) and kelvins shows that this 10 keV barrier would
be overcome at a temperature in excess of 120 million kelvins or 1.2x107 oC,
which is obviously a very extreme high temperature. Containment vessels melt
and explode at these temperatures, and therefore the plasma has to be kept
away from the walls using magnetic confinement. Once fusion has begun, the
high energy neutrons will radiate from the reactive region of plasma, crossing
magnetic field lines easily because it has no charge. Energy absorbed from these
neutrons is extracted and passed into the primary coolant to power the turbine in
the electric generating plant. The heat produced from the nuclear fusion such as
the X-ray implosion and the neutron energies has to be properly channeled to a
turbine generator of the power generating plant to produce electricity as shown in
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5: Fusion energy converting into electricity
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It is essential that the temperature at the plasma shall be maintained above a
certain temperature in order to maintain the event of the fusion reaction. Although
at higher temperature, preferably above the DD energy barrier, the fusion
reaction is more effective, i.e. more neutrons and heat are produced, but the
fusion can still happen with less effective at lower temperature as shown in Fig. 6
where the peak is at 70 keV for DT gases. Moreover, the heat produced from this
setup is enough to maintain the nuclear fusion reaction and therefore the
temperature (energy) inside the tokamak chamber shall be efficiency high in
order to transform this energy to move the turbine.
Fig. 6: The fusion reaction rate increases
rapidly with temperature until it maximizes and
then gradually drops off. The DT rate peaks at a
lower temperature (about 70 keV, or 800
million kelvins) and at a higher value than other
reactions commonly considered for fusion
energy.
3. Achievement and future planning
In 1997, the Joint European Torus [JET] located in UK has produced a fusion
power of over 10 MW sustained for over 0.5 seconds [6] using a Tokamak
reactor. On May 9, 2006, the JAEA announced that the JT-60 (the Japanese
Torus) also based on Tokamak reactor had achieved a 28.6 second plasma
duration time with Q = 1.25 and hold the world record of the fusion triple
product achieved of 1.77×1028 K·s·m−3. In June 2005, the construction of the
experimental reactor ITER, designed to produce several times more fusion power
than the power put into the plasma over many minutes, was announced. DEMO
(DEMOnstration Nuclear Fusion Power Plant) has been proposed to build upon
the expected success of the ITER. It is planned to produce 2 GW thermal output.
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4. References
[1] [Link]
[2] [Link]
[3] [Link]
[4] [Link]
[5] [Link]
[6] [Link]
