Ken Silverstein, EnergyBiz Insider
Editor-in-Chief

Representatives of nations that are kicking in $12.8 billion to build a nuclear fusion reactor commemorated the start of the so-called International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France to be erected near the southern city of Marseille. French President Jacques Chirac hosted the event in late November, which involved representatives from other European nations as well as Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States.

"If nothing changes, humanity will have consumed, in 200 years, most of the fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years," says Chirac, in a public statement. "It is the victory of the general interest of humanity." The reactor will get built in eight years, although a demonstration project is unlikely before 2040.

Global energy consumption is expected to rise by 60 percent over the next two decades -- a product of industrialization and population growth, particularly in China and India. The issue is compounded as more than three-fourths of the world's energy is produced by burning fossil fuels. As a greater emphasis is placed on limiting greenhouse gases associated with such combustion, there's now a need to come up with environmentally benign technologies.

Enter nuclear power and specifically nuclear fusion. Fusion is responsible for powering the sun and stars. So, the goal is to imitate that process on earth, although it is extremely difficult and expected to take as much as 50 years to do.

Today's nuclear reactors use fission that produces energy when atoms are split apart. In contrast, fusion releases energy as atoms are combined -- a process that thus far consumes more energy than it generates. The aim is to heat hydrogen gas to more than 100 million degrees Celsius so that the atoms will fuse together instead of bouncing off one another. The end result of that fusion process is the production of 10 million times more power than a typical chemical reaction, such as the burning of fossil fuel.

That's why the consortium of 31 nations has come together, all to try and get over the hurdles. The costs will be split among the participants, with the United States expected to ante up about 10 percent, or $1.2 billion. Existing experiments have shown it is possible to replicate the suns energy here on earth, the participants emphasized.

"There is no possibility of a runaway reaction and because the gas will be so dilute, there is not enough energy inside the plant to drive a major accident and not much fuel would be available to be released to the environment if an accident did occur," says Kaname Ikeda, ITER's director-general, in a piece written for the BBC of London.

No Guarantees

Without a doubt, success is anything but certain. Because hydrogen plasma is heated to 100 million degrees Celsius, it will damage the vessel that contains the substance. Those are expensive parts that would often have to be replaced.

An article in the journal Science argues that scientists can spend more time and money trying to solve that plasma problem and other engineering issues. But, the reality is that nuclear fusion will never come to pass. That's despite four decades of research and $20 billion already spent. Beyond that, fusion power may be 50 years off and the energy landscape could look drastically different by then.

"The history of this dream is as discouraging as it is expensive," wrote William Parkins, in Science magazine. He has passed away but he was chief scientist at Rockwell International and a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Proponents of nuclear fusion beg to differ with that viewpoint. They say that the current global energy market is now valued at $3 trillion a year -- an amount that will expand proportionately as developing nations modernize their economies. Much of that consumption is fossil fuel-fired and any energy source that can displace that value would help better the human condition and the environment, they say.

At the same time, those advocates go on to say that efficiency efforts and renewable energy -- while essential -- will not diminish in a major way the world's reliance on coal, natural gas and oil. A large scale nuclear project with an eye toward the future is therefore necessary and practical.

"I was less convinced 30 years ago [that fusion could become practical] but we have made incredible progress," Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told New Scientist. "The science is going to work," he says, "and the rest is economics."

Nuclear energy currently comprises 16 percent of the global energy mix. But the International Atomic Energy Agency says that environmental concerns over fossil fuels and the fact that they are a depleting resource mean the use of reactors that use nuclear fission will grow. It predicts such power will generate 27 percent of all worldwide energy by 2030, although most of the growth will occur in Asia where 22 of the last 31 plants have been built.

In the coming decades, scientists and other researchers are designing fission reactors that are expected to be increasingly sophisticated. Longer term, however, many of those experts have their eye on nuclear fusion -- a technology that they argue is critical not just to nuclear development but to all of power generation.