Fusion woo

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Fusion woo refers to dreams of extracting energy from nuclear fusion in a simple, cheap, and safe way. Cold fusion is perhaps the most common recent example, but similar examples date throughout the history of nuclear science.

While fusion energy might one day be available, all the signs are that it will require large, complex, and expensive machines, will require the use of radioactive tritium as fuel, and will produce at least some radioactive waste. Fusion woo claims that a simple device using alternative fuels will avoid all of these problems. Such wishful thinking about simpler systems is popular because, given that fusion fuel resources range from large to effectively limitless, such a device would solve all of our energy headaches. If successful, such schemes would also provide very satisfying opportunities to say "I told you so" to the scientific establishment (which makes it irresistible to cranks).

Fusion woo has been fueled by two developments. First, there are in fact several ways to produce nuclear fusion in relatively simple devices, even in a hobbyist's garage. These include the Farnsworth fusor and pyroelectric fusion. Unfortunately, the laws of physics ensure that these devices will always consume more energy than they can produce, although they can still be useful as a neutron source. Second, the widely publicized claims of cold fusion raised hopes of producing nuclear energy in small household devices, free from the disadvantages of conventional, large scale nuclear power plants.

It's not easy to ascertain the goals of fusion woo proponents. Some of them might just be fraudsters out to acquire some venture capital funding and then disappear. Some of them may genuinely believe that their approaches will work.

History

Early woo

The history of controlled fusion research is rife with examples of fusion woo. The ultimate example is the first.

In 1951, Juan Perón called an enormous press conference in which he announced that scientist Ronald Richter had succeeded in producing a controlled fusion system at the experimental lab at Huemul. The news was front-page around the world. The descriptions of the system were ridiculed by other scientists. Edward Teller commented, "Reading one line one has to think he's a genius. Reading the next line, one realizes he's crazy". The results were later claimed to be nothing more than a misaligned diffraction grating in the system used to measure the plasma's temperature.

Ironically, the actual outcome of the system being roundly denounced was to launch the modern fusion establishment. The huge press surrounding the Richter affair led to politicians questioning physicists about the topic. They invariably responded with something similar to "yeah, his idea is bunk, but my idea..." Within months, new fusion projects had been launched in the US, the UK, and Russia, among others.

The golden age

At the time, basic calculations showed that the conditions needed for fusion were extreme, but doable using any number of solutions. So easy that D-D fuel was the favored solution - D-T was physically easier, but not enough to be worthwhile, especially when dealing with the resulting highly-energetic neutron radiation.

When the first machines were turned on, they all failed. It turns out that no one really understood plasmas at higher energies and densities. There are a bunch of inherent instabilities in plasma, and they occur as you try to increase its performance. In one example, which would repeat itself throughout the history of fusion woo, Teller pointed out that one particular instability appeared to doom the mirror and stellarator approaches. Neither saw any obvious evidence of this, so in the mirror case, they simply assumed it didn't actually happen. Others took these issues more seriously, and by 1956 it appeared there were solutions.

Another race ensued. In the UK, their work on stabilizing the pinch effect was paying off. Provided with steady funding, they began the construction of the world's largest fusion reactor, by far. ZETA began operations in the summer of 1957, and by the end of August, it appeared to be working. Test after test produced neutrons, and the excitement began to leak out of the labs. But the secrecy surrounding the entire fusion area, combined with an agreement with their US counterparts, delayed formal publication until January 1958. Front-page news around the world announced that fusion was solved.

Four months later, they were forced to admit the neutrons were not from fusion. There had been some inkling of this all along, but these objections were waved away as jingoism by jealous US researchers. In fact, the neutrons were from yet another instability, one that had not yet been seen because other more obvious ones were masking it. As those were solved and the machines were pushed to new levels, new forms of instability invariably arose.

The doldrums

There was one enormous upside to the ZETA story; the UK was so excited by the results that they demanded that the work be declassified. The USSR had given talks on the topic of fusion a year earlier, and the US was increasingly open to the idea as well. This culminated with the 2nd Atoms for Peace conference in 1958, where all of this work was released and everyone suddenly realized none of these systems were working.

The entire field entered what was later called "the doldrums". Measurement after measurement and device after device were all reexamined and found to be nowhere near the required conditions. An example is the US mirror teams, which had looked and failed to find any hint of the instability that Teller had warned about some years earlier. Their measurements showed the plasma remained stable for the length of the pulse. At a meeting in 1961, a Soviet researcher asked an offhand question about how they accounted for the well-known delays in the instrument they used to make the measurement. They had not; the stable period was in fact the delay in the measurement and the plasma was actually becoming unstable as soon as the device was turned on.

This period, from 1958 through 1968, did lead to alternative approaches being studied. Many new designs saw development, including some that did show signs of longer-lasting plasma. None were close to the conditions needed, but perhaps, one day, they might.

In the 1960s, John Nuckolls began considering the amount of energy needed to spark fusion in a thermonuclear bomb and discovered that at very small sizes, on the order of less than a gram, the ignition could be achieved with a few kilojoules of energy. Thus started the inertial confinement fusion concept, which has since discovered that even four megajoules of energy aren't enough. In spite of this, hopes were so high in the early 1970s that Kip Siegel started a commercial effort to build an ICF generator, which flamed out when he died in 1975 after repeatedly defending himself against accusations of nefarious activity by the other nuclear labs.

Solved!

In 1969, a team from the UK known as the "Culham five" traveled to the USSR to measure the performance of the latest Soviet design, the tokamak. A year earlier the Soviets made unbelievable claims about it's performance, so unbelievable they knew no one would believe them, so they invited the UK to measure it themselves. The Culham team's results clearly demonstrated that the device was indeed working as claimed and putting out about 10 times the best results of anyone else.

Almost immediately the entire fusion establishment stampeded to the tokamak concept. In the US, with funding out the ears, a series of machines quickly pushed performance well beyond the Soviets. By the mid-1970s everyone was confidently predicting that breakeven would follow with the next generation of machines. Yet another race started, this time between three machines aiming specifically for breakeven, TFTR in the US, JET in the UK, and JT-60 in Japan (originally known as the Breakeven Test Reactor). All would come online in the early 1980s.

During this frenzy in the mid-1970s, Robert Bussard managed to convince Bob Guccione that tokamak-based devices were only years away from commercial production, and they began the development of the Riggatron. Reports prepared by other physicists for what was to become the DoE repeatedly showed it was highly unlikely this device would ever work, but development continued until Guccione was unable to secure the $150 million for a follow-on system.

By the mid-1980s the results were in: all of the big machines failed to achieve anything remotely close the breakeven. JET set the record, a decade later, at 0.67 (for a number of reasons, 5 is the minimum useful figure, and >20 is required economically). Once again the field descended into a new doldrums, and once again everyone started looking for alternatives.

And then the real woo

In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had produced fusion at room temperature, in what became known as cold fusion. Over a period of a month or two, it became increasingly clear this was another Huemul. Nevertheless, "research" in this field continues.

In the mid-1980s, Robert Bussard reappeared with a new device known as the polywell, and began working on them in the 1990s. After several rounds of development which have yet to produce results as good as ZETA, this system has become a touchstone for many in the fusion woo area, in spite of theoretical work that suggests there is no way it can ever work. The University of Sydney carried out an active polywell program through the 2010 to 2020 time period, which produced a 2019 paper suggesting all positive results to date were essentially wishful data interpretation. This paper has been called "the final nail in the polywell coffin".

Todd Rider's 1994 and 1995 papers on the energy balance in different fusion machines suggests that no system that is not in Maxwellian equilibrium (that is, evenly heated) can ever be energy positive. This is unfortunate, because it eliminates a major class of designs that fire "hot" fuel into "cool" plasma. Rider showed that the rate of energy loss through side-reactions in these systems would be much higher than the energy released by the possible reactions even under perfect conditions. In spite of this, many new non-equilibrium machines continue to be proposed and supported, like the polywell and fusor, with proponents simply dismissing Rider's work as not applicable.

The "safe" part: aneutronic fusion

Of all the possible fusion reactions, the one with the largest cross section, which also releases the second most energy per reaction, is

$_{1}^{2}{\text{H}}+\,_{1}^{3}{\text{H}}\rightarrow \;_{2}^{4}{\text{He}}+\,_{0}^{1}{\text{n}}$

⁴He, an alpha particle, is basically just helium. The "n" stands for neutron. The two reactants on the left are isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium, which is stable and behaves itself; and tritium, which is highly radioactive and trouble. Its half-life is 12.3 years, so it does not occur naturally in any significant quantity because it decays away before you can get to it. It has to be "bred" from lithium using neutrons produced by the fusion reaction.

Breeding would probably work, but it complicates the reactor, and the mathematics of breeding is borderline. The radioactivity also makes tritium a health hazard, especially since hydrogen is volatile and biologically active. The neutrons (n) produced are also a problem. First, they require about 1 meter of shielding to protect the magnets. Second, they get absorbed by the structure of the reactor and make it radioactive. But, with the proper choice of structural material, the radioactivity can be minimized such that it is safe to recycle in about 100 years.

Those are all very good reasons to give serious consideration to alternative fusion reactions, of which there are several. As a rule, if you want to reduce your radiation headaches, the cost is even bigger headaches making your reactor work at all. There are three reasons for this.

1. The required temperature is higher.
2. The fusion power relative to power loss channels, especially Bremsstrahlung radiation, is lower, so you can tolerate less inefficiency.
3. The energy density is lower, making the capital cost per MW higher.

For advocates of fusion woo, it makes little difference whether they ignore science and engineering constraints marginally or in a big way, so they usually go straight for the reaction which produces the fewest neutrons:

$_{1}^{1}{\text{p}}+\,_{5}^{11}{\text{B}}\rightarrow 3\;_{2}^{4}{\text{He}}$

p is a proton (garden variety hydrogen). ¹¹B is the most common isotope of boron, which is itself a reasonably common element. Note that none of the reactants or products are radioactive or rare. In particular, no neutrons are produced, so you could put a reactor into your basement and take it to the dump when you're done with it, right? Well, first you have to make sure that not too much deuterium or ¹⁰B gets into your fuel since they will also fuse and produce neutrons. But even with isotopically pure fuel there are several nasty side reactions, including these:

$_{5}^{11}{\text{B}}+\alpha \rightarrow \;_{7}^{14}{\text{N}}+\,_{0}^{1}{\text{n}}$

$_{5}^{11}{\text{B}}+{\text{p}}\rightarrow \;_{6}^{11}{\text{C}}+\,_{0}^{1}{\text{n}}$

$_{5}^{11}{\text{B}}+{\text{p}}\rightarrow \;_{6}^{12}{\text{C}}+\gamma$

The first two produce neutrons (albeit low-energy) and the third produces hard gamma rays. The upshot of it is that even the "aneutronic" p-¹¹B reaction would produce enough neutrons to require heavy shielding and disposal of radioactive waste, it would be about a thousand times less than the D-T reaction, which already has orders of magnitude lower problems with radioactivity than nuclear fission.

The figure of merit usually considered most indicative of the overall quality of a plasma confinement device is the product of the pressure and the energy confinement time (nTτ, the "triple product"). For p-¹¹B fusion, the triple product would have to be 500 times larger than that required for D-T fusion. After 80 years of effort (as of 2020) we have not managed to achieve D-T breakeven, so it would seem unlikely a solution for p-B will be available any time soon.

Worse yet, while one might imagine finding a way to increase the confinement time by plugging one hole after another, there is one sort of loss that is essentially impossible to stop: Bremsstrahlung radiation. The standard calculation under the most optimistic conditions indicates that in a p-¹¹B plasma, the Bremsstrahlung loss will always be higher than the fusion power produced. The plasma cannot "burn", but will fizzle out. Some people have spent a lot of effort trying to find a way around this, for example by keeping the electrons colder than the ions, or by keeping the ions or electrons from relaxing to a Maxwellian (thermal) velocity distribution, but the energy required to maintain these special distributions is always greater than the fusion energy produced.

Less attention has been paid to the energy density, although it would also be a dramatic problem, even if you could solve the confinement problem somehow. For a given pressure with otherwise comparable conditions and reasonable approximations, the power density for p-¹¹B would be 2,000 times lower than that for D-T. If the capital cost of a fusion reactor scales linearly with the plasma volume (a reasonable first cut), then electricity from p-¹¹B would cost around 2,000 times more than electricity from D-T (though if we take into account that p-¹¹B plasma may allow more efficient energy conversion, that could fall to "only" 400 times more). Even if you could make p-¹¹B fusion work, why would you not choose to put in D-T fuel instead and produce hundreds of times more power for the same investment?

All of these considerations — the residual radioactivity, the low power density, but especially the Bremsstrahlung losses — make aneutronic fusion the biggest fusion woo. Except for cold fusion, of course.

The "simple and cheap" part: alternate concepts

A tokamak interior

Once cold fusion and aneutronic fusion are off the table, most of the rest has a scientific kernel deep down inside, but the PR department oversells the potential in a manner somewhere between "aggressive" and "criminal".

The best hope of producing net energy from nuclear fusion is the tokamak. It probably really will work, but it may also prove to be an order of magnitude more expensive than alternatives, whether they be nuclear fission, solar plants in desert regions, or burning coal and living with climate change. The best argument for continuing the research anyway is that it could turn out to be better than expected, and it will only cost a tiny drop to find out, compared to our expenditures on energy supply.

It is clear that the tokamak concept as seen in the ITER cannot possibly be economically competitive, a fact that has been well documented within the industry. This has led to renewed interest in alternatives like the spherical tokamak and the stellarator.

The former is essentially a normal tokamak with the inside section of the magnets, those in the "donut hole", reduced to a single pole. This has positive effects on the stability of the plasma and the overall strength of the field. However, it also leaves basically no room to provide shielding, so this section will be exposed directly to the full neutron flux, which eliminates a whole lot of possible solutions. While it may make for a good plasma experimental device, it seems difficult to imagine it as a commercial system.

The stellarator actually pre-dates the tokamak and is now often derided as an expensive tokamak without currents. It uses only magnets to shape its plasma, not the current (there is current, its just not used for confinement), so a host of potential instabilities are removed. On the downside, the magnets needed to generate the desired field are fantastically complicated and relatively large. This means that stellarators have "large aspect ratios", precisely the opposite of what is desired as this implies extremely large and horribly expensive machines. For comparison, the MAST spherical tokamak is 1.3 times wider than it is tall, the ARIES-CS stellarator design is 4.4 times as wide, and ends up being enormous as a result. In spite of this well-known problem, stellarators are constantly introduced in press articles as the big new thing.

Among the factors that make tokamaks (and their less popular brothers the stellarators) expensive is that they are toroidal (big and complex), and that the plasma pressure is only about a tenth of the magnetic field pressure. Most of the alternatives try to attack both of these issues. A toroidal field is really a good idea because it's the only way to avoid loose ends, but if you could produce it in a cylindrical machine, you might be able to make it a lot smaller and cheaper. This avenue is called a "compact toroid", of which there are two major lanes: Field-Reversed Configurations (FRC) and Spheromaks. FRCs also have the advantage of inherently having a plasma pressure nearly as high as the magnetic field pressure. (Don't let anybody tell you the plasma pressure can be higher than the magnetic field pressure. The mathematical proof of that fact is called the "virial theorem".)

How to recognize fusion crankery

"Look ma, no peer review!"

It is quite easy to recognize fusion woo. The following things are big red flags:

• No neutron production, especially when claiming to use pure deuterium as fuel. D-D fusion produces tritium in half of its reaction; the tritium then undergoes D-T fusion to produce neutrons. The other half of D-D fusion reactions produces ³He and a neutron. Genuine aneutronic fusion reactions require exotic fuels (such as helium-3) and conditions far more extreme than those achieved at the largest 'Big Science' fusion facilities.
• Use of particle accelerators as the primary means of sustaining the plasma. There are fundamental reasons which prevent such systems from ever generating net power.
• Use of fuel other than a deuterium-tritium mixture, in particular proton-boron fuel. The conditions required for p-¹¹B fusion are so extreme that Bremsstrahlung losses would dwarf any power produced from fusion.

Examples

• CrossFire Fusion Reactor
• Tri Alpha Energy - A California company developing aneutronic fusion machines
• Focus Fusion - while the approach is a variant of the "mainstream" magnetic confinement fusion and might not be completely useless, its proponents make claims of being able to eventually achieve net energy gain from proton-boron fusion, which is strongly suspected to be physically impossible.

"Soft" woo

The National Ignition Facility's target chamber being moved to the target bay

These are items that, while not overtly being woo themselves, are often presented by their promoters in ways that make them woo.

• ICF — Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), where extremely powerful laser pulses are focused on tiny pellets of fuel to implode them. This closely models the processes happening in thermonuclear weapons. The primary goal of these facilities is to make it possible to design new nuclear weapons and verify the reliability of existing ones without the need for test explosions. It's highly unlikely such a device would ever be used for power production, but describing these projects as energy research rather than stockpile maintenance is far more politically acceptable. ICF facilities include the National Ignition Facility in the U.S. and the Laser Mégajoule in France. It is the claims of being energy research that result in ICF being classified as soft woo; NIF uses 422MJ of electricity to power its laser, and, to date, has generated a maximum output of 13 kJ of fusion.

• Focus Fusion — Also known as dense plasma focus (DPF) fusion. This approach definitely achieves fusion, and has been claimed to produce 4 times the fusion events per unit energy of an ICF device at 1/12,000^th the power level using D-D and not the more expensive but better D-T fuel. Thus, if the results are real, it has been empirically shown to be closer to net energy generation than ICF, although ICF itself is far from reaching break-even.
  DPFs may be useful as an X-ray or neutron source independent of fusion energy production. There is much speculation that the device is woo because the group pursuing it eventually wants to burn p-¹¹B fuel and features this fuel prominently, although their device currently burns D-D fuel. Additional criticism is levied at the group's leader, Eric Lerner, for his rejection of the mainstream consensus regarding the Big Bang, which leads to more doubt as to the group's legitimacy.

Will it ever work?

The prospects for any such low-cost fusion technology look very bleak. Back in 1995, a graduate physics student at MIT, Todd Rider, wrote an extensive Ph.D. thesis which investigated many possible ways of producing energy from fusion in plasma far from thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. in a way that does not require sustained extremely high temperatures and pressures. None of the dozens of approaches he studied could be expected to generate net power, even under highly optimistic assumptions. However, this paper does have a loophole in that it does not investigate "transient nonequilibrium burning systems which try to produce enough fusion power before the particle distributions equilibrate". There is of course some small chance that he made serious errors that were not spotted by him nor his reviewers, or that there is some approach he did not consider, and energy gain from a steady state fusion system far from thermodynamic equilibrium is possible after all.

Some of the devices produced by fusion woo companies could find applications in places where intense neutron sources are required — for example, in the transmutation of nuclear waste.

Non-woo approaches

The approach to fusion power which receives the majority of funding is magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), which uses powerful superconducting magnets to create a spiral magnetic field to stabilize the plasma and may not be woo. This approach is used in the ITER facility under construction in France, which could produce net power within the next decade. Commercial application, however, is still far in the future (after 2050). The Polywell, the brainchild of Robert "interstellar ramjets" Bussard, is also a kind of magnetic confinement fusion; the jury is still out on the Polywell's efficacy, but the U.S. Navy has continued to show an interest in it.

The second approach is inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where extremely powerful laser pulses are focused on tiny pellets of fuel to implode them. See above.

External links

• Nuclear fusion gets boost from private-sector startups — Science News review private research

See also

• Science woo
• Eugene Mallove