U.S. AID EXPANDED ON FUSION RESEARCH
By States News Service
Published: April 19, 1987
WASHINGTON— THE nation's fusion-energy program began in 1951 at Princeton University, but fusion-generated power may not be available commerically until 2051. However, every long journey begins with a first step, and Congress appears ready to take it.
In January, the Reagan Administration approved the start of the next phase of the Federal project when it requested $16 million for the Magnetic Fusion Energy Program. But it will take $341 million more before a new fusion test reactor - the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) - is assembled at Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory.
At recent Department of Energy budget hearings in Congress, the Magnetic Fusion Energy Program was lauded, and scientists are optimistic that Congress will totally finance the CIT, said Dr. Harlan Watson, on the staff of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
The financing means Princeton would remain the headquarters of the Federal fusion effort. It also would mean some job security for the 1,000 employees at the Princeton laboratory, said Anthony DeMeo, a university spokesman.
Department of Energy officials say that financing the program satisfies America's commitment to basic research and lays the groundwork for greater energy independence.
''These funds are an investment in the nation's future energy security,'' said Representative Marilyn Lloyd, Democrat of Tennessee and head of the House Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development.
Financing the new fusion reactor also is a step in fulfilling an agreement reached by President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to expand cooperation in fusion research.
Joint work on fusion will not begin in full until the next generation of reactors is on line, probably around the year 2000, Administration officials say.
American, Soviet, Japanese and European officials recently met in Vienna to discuss cooperative work on the ''ultimate power reactor,'' the Engineering Test Reactor (E.T.R.). The multibillion-dollar device financed by the various nations is expected to be the prototype for commercial application of fusion.
Meantime, Congress and American scientists are concentrating on the CIT, the mid-step device, with experiments scheduled to begin in 1993.
It was Lyman Spitzer Jr., a Princeton astrophysicist, who in 1951 thought up the design for containing plasma, the key ingredient in the fusion process. He took his idea to what was then the Atomic Energy Commission, which gave him a one-year contract to pursue his theory.
For 16 years, the Princeton laboratory has concentrated on tokamak devices, although the basic concept was designed by two Russians, Andrei D. Sakharov and Igor Tamm, both Nobel Prize winners.
In a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped machine containing a magnetic field, a superheated gas - plasma - is confined by the strong pull of magnetic fields. At plasma temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees C, fusion reactions convert mass to energy.
Princeton's current machine, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (T.F.T.R.), is one of the world's largest fusion research devices. It has reached several major milestones, including last summer's attainment of a record plasma temperature of 230 million degrees C. But before the research and work yield a practical level, much higher temperatures will have to be reached, first in the CIT and subsequently in the E.T.R.
About half the size of the T.F.T.R., the CIT is expected to generate about 10 times the fusion power because of improvements in confinement technique. Both the T.F.T.R. and the CIT are designed to use small quantities of plasma fuel comprising a mixture of deuterium and tritium, a fuel likely to be used in commercial reactors.
Some scientists were disappointed with the decision to construct the CIT, suggesting instead that it be skipped in lieu of the more ambitious international effort.
The CIT ''should be seen as a stepping stone to a true fusion Engineering Test Reactor to be built in the 1990's,'' said Dr. Stephen O. Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a Maryland-based fusion-advocacy organization.
While Dr. Dean clearly does not oppose financing the CIT, he did reflect the concerns of many scientists who believe that a $357 million CIT, followed by a multibillion-dollar E.T.R., will nudge out other fusion experiments under way that could yield equally beneficial results.
''It is more important than ever to maintain a program of innovation on smaller experiments,'' Dr. Dean said.
Dr. Watson said that opposition was ''based upon arguments that the tokamak will probably never be a commercial producer of electrical power, that it always will be too expensive'' and that scientists should be looking into other ''creative designs'' for fusion research.
''The rebuttal to that,'' he said, ''is that you never know what you are going to get with basic research. A comparable argument is that the Wright Brothers should have skipped what they were doing and gone straight to building the jet instead.''