Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Oxford in the UK. Construction of the Iter reactor began at Cadarache in
southern France and is likely to take almost ten years to complete. The goal
of the project, which in 2009 had a projected cost of €10bn, is to produce
power of up to 500 megawatts for up to 1,000 seconds - as compared to
JET, which only produced 16MW for less than a second.
In view of the incredible demands of high temperature fusion, it was
not surprising that when two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley
Pons, announced in 1989 that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room
temperature, they created a sensation. Fleischmann and Pons reported
producing nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment involving electrolysis
of heavy water with a palladium electrode. They suggested that this had
produced excess heat on a scale that only a nuclear procress could explain.
They also reported a small amount of the by-products of a nuclear reac-
tion. Unfortunately cold fusion turned to confusion, when other scientists
tried, but failed, to replicate the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. It was
ultimately concluded that the excess heat the two scientists reported was
the result of a chemical reaction, not nuclear fusion.
Despite being a member of Iter, the US government is hedging its bets.
It is funding research into an alternative form of hot nuclear fusion using
lasers and has set up an institution called the National Ignition Facility at
the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California. The central experiment
The Joint European Torus tokamak - with overlay showing it in operation.
