Fusion: Beware the snake oil salesmen
Posted: 16th December 2022
NFLA media release, 15 December 2022, For immediate use
Fusion: Beware the snake oil salesmen
To the UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities, recent claims made by US Government officials and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that they have achieved a ‘major break-through’ in fusion are akin to those made by their forebears in the Old West who sold snake oil as a medicinal cure for all ailments.
Here’s the science bit: the $3.5-billion National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory uses a process called ‘inertial confinement fusion’, in which the world’s largest 192-beam laser is used to bombard a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma superheating it to 100 million degrees to fuse two light nuclei together to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy. Fusion reactions, akin to the process that lights our Sun, would, if mastered by humankind, theoretically be able to release infinite amounts of energy, but the science involved is fiendishly tricky, and one of the biggest challenges has always been finding a way to initiate a fusion reaction using less energy to start it than has been released.
The US Department of Energy has claimed that scientists on 5 December had done just that by achieving ‘scientific energy breakeven’, meaning their experiment ‘produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it’[i]. However, Oxford- and Cambridge-based scientists, whilst conceding the development represents progress, have been somewhat more sober in their assessment.
For the reality is that 500 Megajoules of energy was required to power the laser used to send a beam of 1.8 MJ to the target, and this only led to the release of 2.5 MJ of power, so stripping away the hype the actual fusion energy released represents just 0.5% of the initial energy used to power the lasers! And this can only be achieved once per day for a split second when an operational fusion reactor would have to do so ten times per second[ii].
The press release (13 December) from the US Department of Energy was more of a litany of requests for further funding, amounting to countless more billions, to enable the experimentation to be advanced, but it was also revelatory in identifying the link between civil nuclear and military nuclear applications. For that department was joined by officials of the National Nuclear Security Administration to talk up the application of the work in ‘nuclear warhead stewardship’, in other words its use in maintaining the viability of the US nuclear arsenal without the requirement to carry out physical nuclear tests in readiness for its possible operational deployment in the future.
Councillor Lawrence O’Neill, Chair of the NFLA Steering Committee, said in response to the news: “Once more when it comes to fusion, the latest announcement amounts to a lot of hyperbole and not much substance. To summarise it in layperson’s terms, the US scientists have expended billions of US taxpayer dollars to create a facility which incorporates the world’s largest laser to heat a pellet using two hundred times the energy it generates, enough to boil 15-20 kettles[iii] and then only for a split second and once only. That is the world’s most expensive tea party!”
“In the meantime, our citizens face ever increasing fuel bills based on the burning of fossil fuels that causes our planet to slowly overheat and our sea levels to ever rise. Fusion will never be the answer to the energy crisis and the climate emergency we face right now – it will decades more, if ever, before any such technology could work and would be commercially viable. As the NFLA has said before fusion is a delusion. Renewables are the solution; we can already successfully utilise the power of the sun using solar technology.”
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