Can nuclear fusion solve our energy problem?

January 29, 1992
Issue 

By Phil Shannon

The announcement of the world's first sustained nuclear fusion reaction in England on November 10 was greeted with silence on the left, but it is worth asking whether it deserves our plaudits or placards.

Nuclear fission rightly has no admirers on the left, but the same can not be said for nuclear fusion, where the old refrain about nuclear energy being cheap, clean and inexhaustible is still heard. The Democratic Socialist Party's Socialism and Human Survival, for example, contains a breathless account of how nuclear fusion could be a "long term solution to the world's energy needs" because there is a "practically limitless" supply of the fuel (deuterium — an isotope of hydrogen) in the world's oceans "to maintain the current annual global energy consumption for 35 billion years!". If there are any technical, social or political problems with nuclear fusion, they are not mentioned in this document.

Earlier this century, Leon Trotsky praised nuclear fission, but he can be partially excused for uncritically accepting the claims of the nuclear scientists because the problems of radioactivity, waste disposal and meltdown were not all apparent. Marxists today can not afford to be so trusting of the nuclear fusion claims because there is a steep downside to fusion energy.

The researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) plant in Oxfordshire produced a fusion reaction using deuterium and tritium (DT fusion), in which the nuclei of these two isotopes of hydrogen are forced together under extreme heat (100 million degrees), releasing neutrons whose energy is converted to heat.

The $1 billion machine, attended by its 500 scientists, produced 1 Mw of power for 2 seconds, with a peak of 2 Mw (about the same as a windmill in a moderate breeze). This is well below the 15 Mw break-even point, where the energy produced exceeds that required to produce and maintain the deuterium/tritium mix.

Radioactive

There are other problems with DT fusion which were not heard above the popping of champagne corks. DT fusion produces radioactivity because tritium is radioactive.

The JET researchers had avoided using tritium for the eight years of their project because of this (it will now take three months for the radioactivity to dissipate sufficiently for the plant to be used again). As some cynics observed, they added the radioactive tritium now because they needed a result to ensure further funds for the design and construction of an experimental reactor core. The cheque, for $5 billion, was duly signed a few days later by the governments of the EEC, the Soviet Union, Japan and the

Tritium does not occur naturally and must be derived by bombarding the metal lithium with neutrons. Lithium is also radioactive, and its mining and handling are thus dangerous. A commercial DT fusion plant will produce some 250 tons of radioactive waste per year and will itself become radioactive and a disposal problem after a life span of only 20-25 years.

Fusion proponents who acknowledge radioactivity as a problem argue that deuterium-deuterium fusion (DD fusion) will avoid this problem because deuterium is not radioactive. But although deuterium is not radioactive, DD fusion produces not only the harmless elements hydrogen and helium, and energy, but also some tritium. If not completely consumed in the reaction, this tritium will be free to escape and wreak havoc with us.

DD fusion also releases neutrons which are a form of ionising radiation, very destructive of human tissue, although with a short range. This neutron discharge (the central element of fusion energy production) will make the reactor and plant radioactive.

Although the radioactivity dangers of DD fusion are of a lesser magnitude than DT fusion, other problems are much greater. Whereas DT fusion requires a temperature of (only!) 100 million degrees, DD fusion requires 3 billion degrees (one quarter of the temperature of the sun's core). The difficulties in producing a reactor that can withstand these temperatures are enormous, and the prospects for reaching energy break-even point are much more bleak than even DT fusion, whose supporters are not forecasting a commercial start-up date before 2050.

Non-renewable

Neither DT nor DD fusion are inexhaustible sources of energy. They both suffer from limitations imposed by their requirement for the use of non-renewable, scarce or rapidly depleting resources.

Lithium is non-renewable, and the isotope of lithium suitable for production of tritium constitutes less than 10% of all lithium reserves. The lithium isotope is almost as scarce as uranium, and although it can be extracted from the ocean, no-one is saying how easily. Niobium, necessary to contain the corrosive lithium, is also relatively scarce (as well as being radioactive). Vanadium and molybdenum are also essential to fusion and also scarce. In addition, each fusion plant requires about three million tons of copper (a rapidly depleting resource).

Fusion proponents who concede these limiting resource constraints point (with more hope than certainty) to laser fusion, in which laser beams are fired onto pellets of deuterium/tritium and in which no supporting cast of non-renewable resources is required. However, this method is less advanced than hot fusion because it is even more difficult. The earnest proselytes of nuclear fusion treat it as a clean, perpetual motion machine. It isn't. It is the hard technology path involving complex technology to provide energy that is available from cheaper, cleaner, safer processes such as photovoltaic cells and other renewable energy sources. As Amory Lovins has put it, nuclear fusion is like using a chain saw to cut butter.

It is also an undemocratic technology, the domain of a scientific elite. People can much more easily have control over renewable energy technology — you only need know how to tell one end of a hammer from another to be able to maintain a windmill, but mastering the theory and practice of fusion requires a lifetime of nuclear physics and engineering.

Yet nuclear fusion continues to be the Holy Grail of the technological optimists, those who search for a technological fix to the problems of energy use under capitalism (pollution, resource depletion etc).

The right wing are Grail-seekers because they do not want to challenge the underlying economic structures of capitalism, with its imperative to keep the production and consumption curves forever rising. Those on the left are attracted to fusion because of the orthodox, 19th century Marxist goal of the conquest of nature (a tradition from which only a few Marxists, like William Morris, have stood aside).

Technological optimism involves a faith that science can solve all our environmental ills because of the "ultimate resource" of human creativity (to use the phrase of the right-wing Herman Kahn/Julian Simon school).

Doubters are reminded of the sceptics who dismissed robots, rockets and airplanes as science fiction. No-one, however, is saying that fusion is science fiction. It has been achieved (if briefly) as JET showed in November, more human and financial resources could speed up its development and overcome some of its design problems, the radioactivity problems of DD fusion might be safely contained, laser techniques may solve the problem of natural resource limitations, socialist citizens might perhaps all become experts at sub-atomic physics.

'Soft' technology

All this is possible but there are a lot of mights, mays and perhapses. Why choose something risky and uncertain when the soft technology path is simpler and safer?

More fundamentally, the question goes to the heart of the sort of society, and relationship to nature, we want. Do we want, or need, an abundance of energy powering an abundance of gadgets for an abundance of people, driven by nuclear fusion and a destructively exploitative attitude to nature? Whilst we should be taking the political path of Marxists like Trotsky, can we or the Earth afford his attitude towards the exploitation of nature in a classless society:

"The proper goal of communism is the domination of nature by ination of technology by planning so that the raw materials of nature will yield up to mankind all that we need and more besides."

That Trotsky, so intelligent and keen minded in his analysis of political and human affairs, could express such an uncritically "religious" faith when it comes to our relationship to nature, is indicative of a problem with this particular aspect of classical Marxism, one which is overdue for reappraisal in the light of the new scientific and ecological knowledge which we possess but which Marxists like Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels did not have. They were rarely ones to let dogma rule reality. We have the same responsibility.

Rather than conquering nature, turning it into a super-factory powered by nuclear fusion, would it not be better to have a more human-scale world where we use but don't abuse nature? Adopting the concept of "enough" rather than "more" doesn't mean becoming a supporter of an ideological front for capitalist austerity in our present societies. It does mean taking environmentalism seriously in the socialist project.

There is one valuable nuclear fusion reactor operating today, and that's a safe 150 million km away, supplying us with clean, inexhaustible, renewable energy. We should get the placards ready if they try to conquer the sun and set up a human-made one in our backyards.

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