Nuclear Energy
The release of nuclear energy can occur at the low end of the binding
energy curve (see accompanying chart) through the fusion of two light nuclei
into a heavier one. The energy radiated by stars, including the Sun, arises
from such fusion reactions deep in their interiors. At the enormous pressure
and at temperatures above 15 million ° C (27 million ° F) existing there,
hydrogen nuclei combine according to equation (1) and give rise to most of
the energy released by the Sun.
Nuclear fusion was first achieved on earth in the early 1930s by bombarding
a target containing deuterium, the mass-2 isotope of hydrogen, with
high-energy deuterons in a cyclotron (see Particle Accelerators). To
accelerate the deuteron beam a great deal of energy is required, most of
which appeared as heat in the target. As a result, no net useful energy was
produced. In the 1950s the first large-scale but uncontrolled release of
fusion energy was demonstrated in the tests of thermonuclear weapons by the
United States, the USSR, the United Kingdom, and France. This was such a
brief and uncontrolled release that it could not be used for the production
of electric power.
In the fission reactions discussed earlier, the neutron, which has no
electric charge, can easily approach and react with a fissionable
nucleus—for example, uranium-235. In the typical fusion reaction, however,
the reacting nuclei both have a positive electric charge, and the natural
repulsion between them, called Coulomb repulsion, must be overcome before
they can join. This occurs when the temperature of the reacting gas is
sufficiently high—50 to 100 million ° C (90 to 180 million ° F). In a gas of
the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium at such temperature, the
fusion reaction
occurs, releasing about 17.6 MeV per fusion event. The energy appears
first as kinetic energy of the helium-4 nucleus and the neutron, but is soon
transformed into heat in the gas and surrounding materials.
If the density of the gas is sufficient—and at these temperatures the
density need be only 10-5 atm, or almost a vacuum—the energetic helium-4
nucleus can transfer its energy to the surrounding hydrogen gas, thereby
maintaining the high temperature and allowing subsequent fusion reactions,
or a fusion chain reaction, to take place. Under these conditions, “nuclear
ignition” is said to have occurred.
The basic problems in attaining useful nuclear fusion conditions are (1) to
heat the gas to these very high temperatures and (2) to confine a sufficient
quantity of the reacting nuclei for a long enough time to permit the release
of more energy than is needed to heat and confine the gas. A subsequent
major problem is the capture of this energy and its conversion to
electricity.
At temperatures of even 100,000° C (180,000° F), all the hydrogen atoms are
fully ionized. The gas consists of an electrically neutral assemblage of
positively charged nuclei and negatively charged free electrons. This state
of matter is called a plasma.
A plasma hot enough for fusion cannot be contained by ordinary materials.
The plasma would cool very rapidly, and the vessel walls would be destroyed
by the extreme heat. However, since the plasma consists of charged nuclei
and electrons, which move in tight spirals around the lines of force of
strong magnetic fields, the plasma can be contained in a properly shaped
magnetic field region without reacting with material walls.
In any useful fusion device, the energy output must exceed the energy
required to confine and heat the plasma. This condition can be met when the
product of confinement time t and plasma density n exceeds about 1014. The
relationship tn≥ 1014 is called the Lawson criterion.
Numerous schemes for the magnetic confinement of plasma have been tried
since 1950 in the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and
elsewhere. Thermonuclear reactions have been observed, but the Lawson number
rarely exceeded 1012. One device, however—the tokamak, originally suggested
in the USSR by Igor Tamm and Andrey Sakharov—began to give encouraging
results in the early 1960s.
The confinement chamber of a tokamak has the shape of a torus, with a minor
diameter of about 1 m (about 3.3 ft) and a major diameter of about 3 m
(about 9.8 ft). A toroidal (donut-shaped) magnetic field of about 50,000
gauss is established inside this chamber by large electromagnets. A
longitudinal current of several million amperes is induced in the plasma by
the transformer coils that link the torus. The resulting magnetic field
lines, spirals in the torus, stably confine the plasma.
Based on the successful operation of small tokamaks at several laboratories,
two large devices were built in the early 1980s, one at
Princeton University
in the United States and one in the USSR. The enormous magnetic fields in a tokamak subject the plasma to extremely high temperatures and pressures,
forcing the atomic nuclei to fuse. As the atomic nuclei are fused together,
an extraordinary amount of energy is released. During this fusion process,
the temperature in the tokamak reaches three times that of the Sun’s core.
Another possible route to fusion energy is that of inertial confinement. In
this concept, the fuel—tritium or deuterium—is contained within a tiny glass
sphere that is then bombarded on several sides by a pulsed laser or heavy
ion beam. This causes an implosion of the glass sphere, setting off a
thermonuclear reaction that ignites the fuel. Several laboratories in the
United States and elsewhere are currently pursuing this possibility. In the
late 1990s, many researchers concentrated on the use of beams of heavy ions,
such as barium ions, rather than lasers to trigger inertial-confinement
fusion. Researchers chose heavy ion beams because heavy ion accelerators can
produce intense ion pulses at high repetition rates and because heavy ion
accelerators are extremely efficient at converting electric power into ion
beam energy, thus reducing the amount of input power. Also in comparison to
laser beams, ion beams can penetrate the glass sphere and fuel more
effectively to heat the fuel.
Progress in fusion research has been promising, but the development of
practical systems for creating a stable fusion reaction that produces more
power than it consumes will probably take decades to realize. The research
is expensive, as well. However, some progress was made in the early 1990s.
In 1991, for the first time ever, a significant amount of energy—about 1.7
million watts—was produced from controlled nuclear fusion at the Joint
European Torus (JET) Laboratory in England. In December 1993, researchers at
Princeton University used the Tokamak fusion Test Reactor to produce a
controlled fusion reaction that output 5.6 million watts of power. However,
both the JET and the Tokamak fusion Test Reactor consumed more energy than
they produced during their operation.
If fusion energy does become practical, it offers the following advantages:
(1) a limitless source of fuel, deuterium from the ocean; (2) no possibility
of a reactor accident, as the amount of fuel in the system is very small;
and (3) waste products much less radioactive and simpler to handle than
those from fission systems.
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