Nuclear fusion plant gets the all clear
An experimental nuclear fusion plant that mimics the way the Sun generates energy will be built in France, an international consortium has announced.
The project hopes to turn seawater into fuel by harnessing the energy released when atomic nuclei are forced together. This is the opposite of what happens in existing nuclear power plants, where nuclei are split apart.
Nuclear fusion is the Holy Grail for scientists trying to find a viable alternative to the world's depleting stocks of oil and gas.
And this quest to find a cheap and inexhaustible way to meet global energy needs comes after months of wrangling.
France defeated a bid from Japan and signed a deal to site the 10 billion euro (A$15 billion) experimental reactor in Cadarache, near Marseille.
"We are making scientific history," Dr Janez Potocnik, the EU's Science and Research Commissioner, said in Moscow, where the partners in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project were meeting.
Its backers say the fusion reactor would be cleaner than existing nuclear reactors, as nuclear fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions and low levels of radioactive waste.
But critics argue it could be at least 50 years before a commercially viable reactor is built, if at all.
Decades of research
Scientists have already harnessed energy from fusion in laboratories but they have so far been unable to build a commercially viable reactor, despite decades of research.
The 500 megawatt ITER reactor will use deuterium, extracted from seawater, as its major fuel and a giant electromagnetic ring to fuse atomic nuclei at extremely high temperatures.
One of the biggest challenges is to build a reactor that can sustain temperatures of about 100 million degrees C for long enough to generate power.
"I give it a 50:50 chance of success but the engineering is very difficult," says Professor Ian Fells of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering.
"If we can really make this work there will be enough electricity to last the world for the next 1000 to 2000 years."
Building the reactor is expected to take about 10 years, but some scientists say it could take three times that long. The sides have also yet to reach a final agreement on a number of issues, including financing, before the builders can move in.
After the construction program, experiments would start around the middle of the next decade and continue for some 20 years, testing ITER for technological feasability, safety, health and waste management.
The reactor would then be decommissioned.
If this experimental machine is successful, a demo fusion power plant would be built in the mid-2030s. And, if all goes well, the first commercial fusion plant would be created mid-century to assess economic feasability.
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace estimates that if the project yields results, it will not be until the second half of this century.
"At a time when it is universally recognised that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project," it says.