Alberta businesses, scientists push for fusion power

Frontier technology could provide massive amounts of energy
By Dave Cooper, Edmonton Journal September 8, 2009

Link to original article

The U.S. National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco opened this spring.It aims to create fusion ignition using high-powered lasers.
 
The U.S. National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco opened this spring.It aims to create fusion ignition using high-powered lasers.
Photograph by: Supplied, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON — In oil country, the people who dream of future power plants being run by the science that powers the sun have had to maintain a sunny indifference to the word 'no.'

Despite their provincial government's recent rejection of a pitch to invest $21 million into a three-year project to study fusion power, supporters of fusion energy research in Alberta hope to bring top scientists together with industry and government in a public conference next year to raise awareness and understanding about this frontier technology.

The three-year Alberta/Canada Fusion Energy Program would have allowed Canadian scientists to participate in fusion work now underway in California.

The $2 billion U.S. National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco opened this spring. It aims to create fusion ignition using high-powered lasers within two years — proving that humans can control the power of the sun and fuelling further research.

Scientists aim to build a prototype reactor and a demonstration power plant in 20 to 25 years, so utility companies will be able to start replacing coal-fired plants with something that uses deuterium or lithium, common compounds found everywhere in the world.

At Livermore, 192 laser beams will simultaneously hit a target chamber — a thumb-sized gold cylinder — with about 1.8 million joules, or 500 trillion watts of power for a few billionths of a second.

This cylinder will then produce X-rays that — hopefully — will compress and heat a fusion capsule inside the cylinder to temperatures and pressures approaching those in the sun's core, igniting the fusion fuel in a self-sustaining reaction and creating a miniature star in the laboratory.

Livermore is designed to be able to repeat this process every five hours. A British-based laser project called HiPER, now in development, will repeat it every few minutes. A commercial system will need to repeat the process 10 times per second.

A standard coal-fired power plant each year requires 26,000 train car loads of coal, each weighing 100 tonnes. A year's fuel supply for a fusion plant could be delivered in a pickup truck.

A working fusion reactor would be a boon to an energy-starved world. Unlike current nuclear reactors, which work on the principle of atomic fission, a fusion reactor would produce no radioactive waste or emissions.

"You can tell the story of Utopia to the world at large, but when you are asking the Alberta government for funding you have to show what Alberta is going to get in return for its investment," said Perry Kinkaide, president of the Alberta Council of Technologies, a volunteer advisory group.

He heads a large steering committee made up of representatives from industry, government, research groups and the University of Alberta.

The crux of the problem, says Kinkaide, is pay-to-play: the only way to get a piece of cutting edge American fusion research for the Canadian economy is to fund Canadian researchers taking part in U.S. projects.

"People might say, 'What's the rush, maybe commercial products won't be possible for another 10 years, so Alberta won't have lost anything by waiting,'" he said.

"But our response is that you have got to be there on the ground to capitalize on the arrival of the expected new technologies, because if you aren't it will take too long to catch up, and you will lose your first position."

Dini Corbett-Lourenco, president of startup firm Sway Energy and a member of the steering committee, says fusion deserves a higher profile in the Canadian energy industry.

"If we believe this is an option for the future, why not put it out there and have people start to understand it? Let's have the conversation," she said.

The group may do a public forum on fusion first, or go straight to an international conference in Edmonton.

"We would draw people from the energy sectors, for instance, and start building that critical mass of interest. Big firms like Capital Power and TransAlta are always looking ahead at new technologies — they have to," she said.

"They'll watch, but not push. Our role on the committee is to promote, and explain. Fusion sounds so futuristic to so many people, and many confuse it with nuclear power." Thursday, September 10, 2009