In Cadarache, in the South of France, construction has started on a multi-billion dollar project called ITER. It aims to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of nuclear fusion power.

Freelance writer Ciaran Walsh reports for RT.

This ambitious project, whose name has been shorted from the original: International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, has been undertaken jointly by the EU, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA. It is the biggest scientific experiment in the world and its scale is only matched by the importance of its potential success.

In a world where energy has become an international security issue – where the price and supply of oil and gas can lead to ‘energy wars’ – this huge $10 billion mega-experiment could provide the peaceful answer by producing energy of the stars, like our own sun, with little or no emissions.

Catherine Ray, the European Commission spokesperson for Science and Research, explains the importance of the project: “The idea was based on the principle that the EU and the world had to develop alternative sources of energy. It is a big project, very ambitious, and could not be achieved by just one country. It is the first type of combined international research on this scale. The timeline is quite broad – the plan is to have a new source of energy by 2050… We know it’s not going to be an immediate alternative source for us – it’s really on the long-term perspective.”

But will it actually work? The science involved is at the very forefront of our current understanding and with estimates that the Earth’s supply of fossil fuels could have already run out by 2050, is this fusion gamble worth the risk? Those behind the ITER project plan to switch on the reactor for the first time only in 2018. Bearing in mind that the project will only demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power as opposed to actually supplying it – it remains an impressive feat to have 50 per cent of the world’s population (in the form of the parties undertaking the experiment) signed up.

What is fusion?

Fusion naturally occurs within the stars. Hydrogen nuclei, under conditions of extreme heat and pressure, combine with each other to form helium atoms – releasing huge amounts of energy. This process of fusion, ongoing for billions of years, has provided a constant supply of light and warmth on earth. But this process, which comes naturally to the sun, is not so easy to reproduce in a lab.

Neil Calder, Head of Communication for the ITER project, explains that although the science involved is at the forefront of possibility, the idea of fusion – and trying to get it under control – is half a century old: “The idea of getting energy by getting two atoms and forcing them together in conditions of extreme temperature so that they fuse and in this process release lots of energy is something that has been understood since the post war period. This ITER idea was first mooted in ‘85 between Gorbachev and Regan who said that the world should get together and build this machine – but it was only in 2001 that the decision was made to go ahead.”

It is only recently that breakthroughs in this area have been made. While the general public may have long given up on the idea of fusion – as opposed to fission – as an answer to the energy crisis, plasma scientists have been making significant progress: “We have made leaps and bounds in progress,” explains Calder, “and we are now at the stage where a machine in England can produce as much energy as they put in – but not for a very long time…there is a machine in France that showed it could be done for a long period of time but not produce much energy so using the knowledge gained from all these experiments around the world we are now building an ultimate machine, like ‘deep thought’, that we are sure will demonstrate that using fusion to produce large scale energy is possible.”

A clean and safe source of energy?

But are there any dangers involved? Could this power plant turn out to be a powder keg?

“The great thing about fusion, from a safety point of view, is that it’s really hard to do so if any tiny parameter goes wrong, the machine just stops, the chances of any explosion or runaway is just zero. It’s the other way round – keeping the machine going is the problem,” explains Calder.

One group that is not excited by the ITER project is Greenpeace. They are angry with the amounts of money involved, the timescale given, and claim that the process is not clean. Jan Beránek, the Nuclear Energy Project leader for Greenpeace, says: “We don’t see how ITER can contribute to reduction on carbon or greenhouse gases in the needed time. We need to cut green houses gases by 20 percent by 2020 and cut them to zero by 2050 and we think ITER is missing the time window in which we need to act to save the planet. If it was the only solution we would jump in and support it but there are other options for renewable energy sources – it does not make sense to wait for 50 years for a technology that might not come.”

“We are also concerned about high emissions of tritium from the proposed ITER plant,” continues Jan Beránek, “we estimate ITER would release 10 times more tritium than all of Germany’s nuclear power plants put together.”

It’s a claim that is refuted by Neil Calder of ITER. He maintains that ITER is a clean way of producing abundant energy – although not exactly 100 per cent clean: “ITER produces no CO2, produces no nuclear radioactive waste, OK, the machine itself will become radioactive over the years and we will have several thousand tonnes of radioactive material when we have to take it apart but this is stuff that becomes clean after 20-30 years, you could make toys out of it,” he explains. “We can’t say its 100 per cent clean but…as for tritium – yes, it’s one of the fuels we use, but we burn it, we don’t produce it – we are actually reducing the global levels of it.”

Money well spent?

Günther Hasinger is the new director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. He understands the concerns over the cost and timescale of the mega-project but he is firmly behind the plan and is quietly confident of success: “I don’t think the money is huge in respect to the potential benefit that can come out if it,” he says, “the international space station is more expensive than ITER yet if ITER works it will be more important than that. Consider the risks that we are running with fossil fuels and put that into financial value.”

It’s clear that the ITER project is important to secure the energy needs of a world that is close to exhausting its current fuels. If successful, ITER will show that abundant and relatively clean energy can be produced. It will be an answer for all – not just a select few – and its safety marks it out as a viable long term plan. However, the physics involved is complex; as Professor Hasinger says, the plasma created is difficult to control: “It’s like carrying marmalade around in a net – a lot of it has to be calculated by trial and error.”

The money involved is also vast and the timescale could run close depending on how the future unfolds. We can only hope that breakthroughs continue to be made and the gamble pays off. Imagine the potential for peace in the world if the question of how and where we get our energy are no longer of concern.

Ciaran Walsh reports for RT