The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion L

The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion L. J. Reinders The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion 123 L. J. Reinders Panningen, The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-030-64343-0 ISBN 978-3-030-64344-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. Bertrand Russell Preface Science in this century has become a complex endeavour. As scientific knowledge expands, the goal of general public understanding of science becomes increasingly difficult to reach.1 Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the stars, including our own Sun. As soon as these stellar processes were understood (in the early 1920s), people started dreaming about harnessing their power both for the benefit and for the destruction of mankind on Earth. In the latter, we have succeeded. We now possess bombs that can destroy the Earth and all that is on it in a matter of hours or less. The other dream of an inexhaustible clean source of energy that will save mankind from the horrors of climate change and pollution has not yet become a reality. Will it remain a fantasy or is there a fair chance that the twenty-first century will see it come true? This book will tell the story, the history and content of the global efforts to realise this dream, an effort that has been going on now for close to seven decades without a solid trustworthy result being in sight. Should we despair or is it reasonable to continue to sink billions of dollars, euro, or yen into this effort? The quest for fusion power has a long history, and its failure to live up to its early promise has apparently also diminished the interest in properly describing its science and technology for the general public. I intended my book to fill this void and describe developments in nuclear fusion from the early beginnings up to and including the latest efforts with huge international collaborations like the Joint European Torus (JET) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and individual small-scale enterprises with small tokamaks and other devices. The book that I had in mind at first was supposed to be a plea for fusion, an urge to put more money into this seemingly promising venture in order to speed up the process. 1From the preface to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series in the delightful book by Victor Weisskopf (1991). vii viii Preface I was optimistic and started writing this book as a proponent of fusion. As many others who had read the same news items, I was taken in by the optimistic language and the multiple breakthroughs that were reported. Being mostly ignorant of the scientific and technical details and of its history, I saw nuclear fusion as one of the most promising ways of combating climate change. The hesitantly dawning pro- spect of an age of clean and affordable energy based on nuclear fusion as the world’s primary energy source seemed a good time for writing a book, accessible to the general public, which describes its history and explains and summarises the progress made so far, without hiding any of the difficulties and problems. In the course of writing, this all changed when I discovered from reading and studying some of the scientific literature that nuclear fusion was a fantasy pursued by single-minded individuals that were apparently unable to see reason and the fundamental failings of their efforts. The media only report the successes: record temperatures and confinement times which can be brought with a blazing headline like “China’s ‘artificial sun’ sets world record with 100 second steady-state high performance Plasma”, while the failures are ignored. When you only read the articles on fusion in the general press, it looks like a succession of breakthroughs without end, while the real situation kept hidden from the public mainly consists of failures. I felt fooled and decided to backtrack and write the book with a completely different message in mind: stop the way this is being done now, take some time to reflect on the facts and what they bear out. No longer continue to waste all this money and effort, which can be spent far better. Nuclear fusion, and research into nuclear fusion, nowadays only focuses on the production of (hopefully) cheap, but in any case inexhaustible and unlimited energy without carbon dioxide emissions, to combat climate change and whatever benefits for mankind you can further think of. The only resource needed is just plain water! At least that is the story that continues to be repeated over and over again. Even purely scientific papers often start in the introduction with some waffle about nuclear fusion and the great prospects that are in store for mankind if the process could be controlled, etc. The scientists pursuing this research are all drawn into such blabbering talk, while in their hearts and even in their minds they are not one bit interested in such goals. They don’t do science, at least I hope they don’t, with the goal of selling cheap or any other energy to society, or to advertise their activity as something that has such a mundane result. The great power of science has always been that it could be pursued for science’s sake without the promise of any ‘use’ in the short or long term. Had that been their goal in life, they would have been better advised to become oil merchants or power utility managers. Scientists do science to understand something about nature and that should be enough to obtain funding as long as their project proposals satisfy some clear standards. For instance, research in high energy physics, e.g. at CERN, has always been able to secure funding, even for hideously expensive accelerators, just by pointing out that it would be a great thing to find the Higgs or some other particle and get some further confirmation of the Standard Model. Nothing more was needed, and nothing more should be needed. So, also when studying nuclear fusion processes scientists hope to understand, for instance, how a plasma behaves, how the fusion processes in the Preface ix stars work and whether we can copy them here on Earth, not for the sake of getting power on the grid, but in order to understand these processes. This scientific attitude has been totally lost in today’s fusion research. It has become a completely utilitarian enterprise, an engineering problem. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, of course, but it happened even before the scientific stage had been completed. The understanding of the physics behind it, especially the physics of plasmas in the extreme conditions of a nuclear fusion reactor, is minimal. Somewhere along the line it has gone fundamentally wrong. In the USA, very sensibly, nuclear fusion research was traditionally viewed as scientific research, at least until the early 1970s when ‘terrible’ people (with an engineering degree) took over and wanted to build a nuclear fusion reactor, a power generating device without having even an inkling how to do this. Since then this goal has been pursued with an obstinacy verging on fanaticism, resulting in ever larger designs of reactors, culminating for the time being in the ITER monster under construction in the south of France. Since that time scientists and politicians have been fooled and are now getting company of venture capitalists, as we will see in this book. New arguments are invented along the way. Was nuclear fusion first touted as a means of delivering inexhaustible, cheap energy, now it is put forward as the solution to combat climate change. Something new has to be invented soon as it is crystal clear that energy production by nuclear fusion, if ever realised at all, will come far too late to contribute to this battle. It will in any case not happen in this century.

Load more