• Question: how likely is it that fusion will actually emerge as the most used energy source on the planet?

    Asked by mendelev69 to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 17 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Tom Branson

      Tom Branson answered on 15 Mar 2013:

      Quite unlikely, at the moment anyway. There is not enough knowledge or control over these things yet. Fusion is how the sun makes energy and it would be pretty difficult to control a small sun in a factory! But the people working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, are trying to smash particles together with one aim to see if it is possible to understand fusion better.

    • Photo: Jack Heal

      Jack Heal answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      Nuclear fusion is a very difficult thing to achieve, and to sometimes seems like it’ll be forever “30 years away”. When very small atoms (eg hydrogen) come together they release energy. Like Tom said, this is what happens in the sun. That’s what nuclear fusion is – sticking two atoms together and harnessing the energy that is released.
      It’s difficult because the when the atoms come fairly close to each other they push each other away, like two south poles on a magnet. It’s hard to get the same poles of a magnet to touch and you have to push really hard to make it happen. With small atoms it’s like that, but you have to push a lot harder. To “push atoms harder” you heat them up and this means that you create a lot of pressure, so it needs to happen in a container which is really strong. And it needs to be super super strong because it needs to be able to stay together when the energy is released when the atoms collide (otherwise you just have a hydrogen bomb!). You need to be able to control the energy that comes out.

      So that’s why it’s difficult. But things are getting better an progress is being made. If we can get it to work then there are lots of advantages like: there’s loads of fuel and there’s no risk of “meltdown” so it’s safer than fission (“nuclear power”).

      I think that given time (sorry this is vague – see below!) then we will be able to harness nuclear fusion. Once it can be reliably controlled then yes, I think it will eventually become the most used energy source. For that to be achieved, a lot of work needs to be done. One of the reasons it’s hard to predict how long it will be depends a lot on how much it gets funded and therefore how many people are working on it.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      The people at the main UK research centre (http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/Research.aspx) reckon it’s only going to be part of the solution to the world’s energy problems – and they know far more about it than me! No-one’s managed to get it to work on a large scale basis – and it’s taking more energy to do the fusing than the end product gives out. Until that can be reversed, it’s not going to happen.

    • Photo: Jon Marles-Wright

      Jon Marles-Wright answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      I think it will emerge one day, but at the moment we aren’t putting enough funding into research on fusion power. We actually have some of the most advanced fusion research in the world being done at a place called Culham near Oxford. The problem is they just don’t have the money to take the research all the way to getting ‘energy payback’ yet. Scientists in America and Oxford are working on powerful lasers to use to start fusion in the hydrogen fuel used for fusion, but this research is quite a long way off being useful.

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