What is Fusion power?

Internal view of the JET tokamak superimposed with an image of a plasma taken with a visible spectrum video camera. © EFDA-JET

Fusion Power maybe the next generation power source for man kind. Plasma is very useful in this Fusion Power, it shield the heat from the nuclear fusion.

Fusion power refers to power generated by nuclear fusion reactions. In this kind of reaction, two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus and in doing so, release energy. In a more general sense, the term can also refer to the production of net usable power from a fusion source, similar to the usage of the term "steam power." Most design studies for fusion power plants involve using the fusion reactions to create heat, which is then used to operate a steam turbine, similar to most coal-fired power stations as well as fission-driven nuclear power stations.

The largest current experiment is the Joint European Torus [JET]. In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1 MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10 MW sustained for over 0.5 sec. In June 2005, the construction of the experimental reactor ITER, designed to produce several times more fusion power than the power put into the plasma over many minutes, was announced. The production of net electrical power from fusion is planned for DEMO, the next generation experiment after ITER.

Fuel cycle

The basic concept behind any fusion reaction is to bring two or more atoms very close together, close enough that the strong nuclear force in their nuclei will pull them together into one larger atom. If two light nuclei fuse, they will generally form a single nucleus with a slightly smaller mass than the sum of their original masses. The difference in mass is released as energy according to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc². If the input atoms are sufficiently massive, the resulting fusion product will be heavier than the reactants, in which case the reaction requires an external source of energy. The dividing line between "light" and "heavy" is iron. Above this atomic mass, energy will generally be released in nuclear fission reactions, below it, in fusion.

The Sun is a natural fusion reactor.

Fusion between the atoms is opposed by their shared electrical charge, specifically the net positive charge of the nuclei. In order to overcome this electrostatic force, or "Coulomb barrier", some external source of energy must be supplied. The easiest way to do this is to heat the atoms, which has the side effect of stripping the electrons from the atoms and leaving them as bare nuclei. In most experiments the nuclei and electrons are left in a fluid known as a plasma. The temperatures required to provide the nuclei with enough energy to overcome their repulsion is a function of the total charge, so hydrogen, which has the smallest nuclear charge therefore reacts at the lowest temperature. Helium has an extremely low mass per nucleon and therefore is energetically favoured as a fusion product. As a consequence, most fusion reactions combine isotopes of hydrogen ("protium", deuterium, or tritium) to form isotopes of helium (³He or 4He).
Perhaps the three most widely considered fuel cycles are based on the D-T, D-D, and p-11B reactions. Other fuel cycles (D-³He and ³He-³He) would require a supply of ³He, either from other nuclear reactions or from extraterrestrial sources, such as the surface of the moon or the atmospheres of the gas giant planets. The details of the calculations comparing these reactions can be found here.

Diagram of the D-T reaction

D-T fuel cycle
Diagram of the D-T reaction
The easiest (according to the Lawson criterion) and most immediately promising nuclear reaction to be used for fusion power is:


D + T → 4He + n


Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen and as such is universally available. The large mass ratio of the hydrogen isotopes makes the separation rather easy compared to the difficult uranium enrichment process. Tritium is also an isotope of hydrogen, but it occurs naturally in only negligible amounts due to its radioactive half-life of 12.32 years. Consequently, the deuterium-tritium fuel cycle requires the breeding of tritium from lithium using one of the following reactions:


n + 6Li → T + 4He
n + 7Li → T + 4He + n


The reactant neutron is supplied by the D-T fusion reaction shown above, the one which also produces the useful energy. The reaction with 6Li is exothermic, providing a small energy gain for the reactor. The reaction with 7Li is endothermic but does not consume the neutron. At least some 7Li reactions are required to replace the neutrons lost by reactions with other elements. Most reactor designs use the naturally occurring mix of lithium isotopes. The supply of lithium is more limited than that of deuterium, but still large enough to supply the world's energy demand for thousands of years.
Several drawbacks are commonly attributed to D-T fusion power:
It produces substantial amounts of neutrons that result in induced radioactivity within the reactor structure.
Only about 20% of the fusion energy yield appears in the form of charged particles (the rest neutrons), which limits the extent to which direct energy conversion techniques might be applied.


The use of D-T fusion power depends on lithium resources, which are less abundant than deuterium resources.
It requires the handling of the radioisotope tritium. Similar to hydrogen, tritium is extremely difficult to contain and is expected to leak from reactors in some quantity. Estimates suggest that this would represent a fairly large environmental release of radioactivity.[1]
The neutron flux expected in a commercial D-T fusion reactor is about 100 times that of current fission power reactors, posing problems for material design. Design of suitable materials is underway but their actual use in a reactor is not proposed until the generation after ITER. After a single series of D-T tests at JET, the largest fusion reactor yet to use this fuel, the vacuum vessel was sufficiently radioactive that remote handling needed to be used for the year following the tests.
On the other hand, the volumetric deposition of neutron power can also be seen as an advantage. If all the power of a fusion reactor had to be transported by conduction through the surface enclosing the plasma, it would be very difficult to find materials and a construction that would survive, and it would probably entail a relatively poor efficiency.

D-D fuel cycle
Though more difficult to facilitate than the deuterium-tritium reaction, fusion can also be achieved through the reaction of deuterium with itself. This reaction has two branches that occur with nearly equal probability:


D + D → T + p

→ ³He+ n


The optimum temperature for this reaction is 15 keV, only slightly higher than the optimum for the D-T reaction. The first branch does not produce neutrons, but it does produce tritium, so that a D-D reactor will not be completely tritium-free, even though it does not require an input of tritium or lithium. Most of the tritium produced will be burned before leaving the reactor, which reduces the tritium handling required, but also means that more neutrons are produced and that some of these are very energetic. The neutron from the second branch has an energy of only 2.45 MeV, whereas the neutron from the D-T reaction has an energy of 14.1 MeV, resulting in a wider range of isotope production and material damage. Assuming complete tritium burn-up, the reduction in the fraction of fusion energy carried by neutrons is only about 18%, so that the primary advantage of the D-D fuel cycle is that tritium breeding is not required. Other advantages are independence from limitations of lithium resources and a somewhat softer neutron spectrum. The price to pay compared to D-T is that the energy confinement (at a given pressure) must be 30 times better and the power produced (at a given pressure and volume) is 68 times less.

p-11B fuel cycle
If aneutronic fusion is the goal, then the most promising candidate may be the proton-boron reaction:


p + 11B → 3 4He


Under reasonable assumptions, side reactions will result in about 0.1% of the fusion power being carried by neutrons. At 123 keV, the optimum temperature for this reaction is nearly ten times higher than that for the pure hydrogen reactions, the energy confinement must be 500 times better than that required for the D-T reaction, and the power density will be 2500 times lower than for D-T. Since the confinement properties of conventional approaches to fusion such as the tokamak and laser pellet fusion are marginal, most proposals for aneutronic fusion are based on radically different confinement concepts




History of research
The idea of using human-initiated fusion reactions was first made practical for military purposes, in nuclear weapons. In a hydrogen bomb, the energy released by a fission weapon is used to compress and heat fusion fuel, beginning a fusion reaction which can release a very large amount of energy. The first fusion-based weapons released some 500 times more energy than early fission weapons.
Civilian applications, in which explosive energy production must be replaced by a controlled production, are still being developed. Although it took less than ten years to go from military applications to civilian fission energy production,[2] it was very different in the fusion energy field, more than fifty years having already passed[3] without any energy production plant being started up