Ten Times Hotter than Sun

Two major fusion initiatives underway are making headway in the decades long battle to find the ultimate source of clean energy for a climate-changing world.

In Europe, seven nations continue to work hard at their ITER fusion collaboration in the south of France, outside Marseilles, according to Laban Coblentz, the head of communications and one of the top U.S. representatives at ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project.

He recently talked with Grid Talk, a podcast by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Previously, Grid Talk updated listeners as to fusion research breakthroughs at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California.

Both podcasts can be heard at smartgrid.gov/gridtalk.

Coblentz described the long quest for fusion and its implications.

“Fusion has the potential to give a baseload source of energy without the only a fraction of the waste concerns of fission, without the safety concerns of fission but with the ability to provide clean energy for a planet in a concentrated way.”

It will be safe and should not trigger many of the concerns of conventional nuclear reactors that have been around for decades, he said.

“The way that it gives you versatility is that because of the safety aspects, the fact that the physics don’t allow a meltdown or that kind of thing; you could in fact place it in greater proximity to cities, to industry if you get the local—if you get the regulatory authorities to agree,” Coblentz said.

It will nicely complement renewables, he said.

“If you look at the simple physics of it, renewables, which we strongly support, are using fusion energy but at a distance of from here to the sun. The sun is using fusion; that the stars use fusion. That’s why we have light and heat and life on earth. The difference is that because they are diffuse and because they are intermittent, you need a huge amount of land mass which actually only increases our impact on the planet.”

While costly, the pursuit of fusion pencils out as a prudent investment, Coblentz said.

“Europe imports $1 billion euros of petroleum products every day so if your cost at ITER is we say is around $25 billion, that would be paying for ITER in a month.”

Even though the European Union and the United States, two of the seven key players in ITER, now are fighting the Russians in

Ukraine, that contentious conflict does not manifest itself at ITER, Coblentz said.

“We drop our passports at home. We use them when we travel, but here, we’re just international civil servants working on a common goal...

“Why? Because ITER is not just a fusion device, it’s an exercise in what happens when the global community believes so much in a common goal and in a better future for our kids that we are willing to put aside our known ideological differences to try to pool our best expertise, something that science has done for a longtime.”

Meanwhile, the technology of fusion generates awe.

“It is 150 million degrees, 10-times the temperature of the center of the sun, in the middle of the Tokomak and a few meters away at ITER we will have magnets cooled to about four degrees kelvin, just four degrees above about absolute zero, the temperature of interstellar space. That creates huge engineering challenges and yes, it’s awesome to see it coming together and to just watch humans overcome all of these issues.”