Prof. Gordon MacKerron of SPRU University of Sussex, Professor Bob Bingham of HiPER project (a European project attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of laser driven nuclear fusion) and Joe Kaplinsky (co-author of forthcoming book energise) will debate 'Is fusion the future of energy?'

This event will take place at Bellerby's College close to Brighton Station on Saturday 1st March at 6.30pm.

The debate is part of the Brighton Science Festival and will include short presentations by the speakers and an extended discussion from the floor.

The Sean Bell Diary

The Brighton Salon was fortunate to have a distinguished panel of experts on Saturday March 1 for its contribution to the Brighton Science Festival: a discussion about new technology that may provide cheap and renewable energy for the world.

Professor Bob Bingham of HiPER (the European High Power Laser Energy Research Facility) introduced the work that he and his colleagues believe has a good chance of delivering the long-anticipated benefits of nuclear fusion.

Joe Kaplinsky, currently-co-authoring a book on power called Energise, outlined the cultural barriers facing the kinds of technology with the ramifications of Professor Bingham's work.

Professor Gordon MacKerron of SPRU (the University of Sussex-based Science and Policy Research Unit) raised some fascinating questions in relation to the development of such large and ambitious projects.

The audience then had the opportunity to raise questions and make points on the many issues highlighted. What's new about fusion? Professor Bingham opened the event with a description of the new processes currently under development. He pointed out that one of the problems of working in fusion research is that the promises of the past, such as energy so cheap and clean that it was virtually free, were not delivered. This means that any claims now made incur suspicion so Professor Bingham carefully spelt out what new breakthroughs had been made and set out a timetable or road map of the work he hoped would make the long-anticipated results of successful fusion a reality in about 30 years.

Energy, Professor Bingham pointed out, has been described as the next big issue in the struggle for existence.

Over the next 25 to 30 years, the various forms of energy currently in use would have to be developed as the current burden on fossil fuels (coal and oil) was reduced. Hydroelectric, wind and solar energy sources had their roles to play, according to local climates, along with nuclear fission (the current type of nuclear power that produces a lot of radioactive waste).

If fusion could be made to work it promises many advantages that would be as usable and welcome in underdeveloped or developing countries as anywhere in the developed world. The fuels from which fusion energy is extracted originate in sea water and potentially offer energy in great quantities when engineering problems with the process of extracting the energy from them have been solved. Eye-popping comparisons of the potential of fusion with other forms of energy were made by Professor Bingham: One square kilometre of sea water could replace the entire reserves of oil on earth; a railway container of coal would provide energy for a power station for 10 minutes while a similar container of the deuterium extracted for fusion would power a reactor for seven years; and all without greenhouse gases or risks of meltdown associated with other forms of energy. So, what is fusion and why should we think about now? Concentrate, here comes the science bit

Professor Bingham outlined different strands of work related to fusion which have revolutionised the way it is thought about, and was able to bring those of us without scientific training to an understanding of its current state. Any inaccuracies or misunderstandings below are mine and the HiPER website (address below) will offer the interested reader a fuller and far more scientific explanation. Footage shot by Bright Media TV of the introductions will be available shortly.

High power lasers have already shown their potential by creating nuclear fusion here on earth with work originally carried out by the US defence programme on what is called inertial driven fusion. HiPER hopes to continue that work by developing those techniques into a feasible commercial power source.

Fusion is the process continually ongoing in the ultimate source of all power on earth, the sun, and part of the problem of fusion on earth is recreating the conditions found in our star. The US defence work showed that, under laboratory conditions, sophisticated lasers of incredible power could be used on a specially prepared pellet containing deuterium to create the extreme conditions under which fusion occurs. HiPER and its related projects aim to carry forward this work (which Professor Bingham emphasised has no weapons spin-off, an important consideration in relation to the spread of successful fusion power) and bring together new developments in laser, plasma and magnetic containment technology by demonstrating the power gains of the process within the next three years. It takes a huge amount of energy to 'kick-off' a fusion reaction, and the techniques that show there is a big net gain in usable power must be demonstrated. The project would then progress toward the contruction of the first facility designed to produce power by about 2014. Commercial use is to follow by about 2040. The PETAL laser, in France, is the forerunner of the machine needed to produce fusion. When fired at a fuel pellet for millionths of a second it can produce pressures that compress the fuel and enable it to be ignited in way similar to the sun, analogous with an internal combustion engine. An even more high-powered laser is used as a spark plug that raises the temperature of the fuel so that fusion can occur. This process, Professor Bingham said, has been much modified by technological advances from the fields of plasma and radar and even the cost and complexity of the fuel pellets themselves is much reduced. The heat released from fusion would be harnessed to create steam that drives turbines to create, hopefully, 100 times more electrical power than has been expended in starting the process. Furthermore, the control of these huge forces already promises exciting spin-offs for the research of astrophysics and atomic and nuclear physics by recreating extreme conditions in laboratories that otherwise cannot exist on earth. Turbulence flow at incredible speeds, quantum vacuum research and the features of ultra-strong electric and magnetic fields can be investigated. Relativistic particle beam studies would not require immensely long accelerators if the engineering problems can be solved. Professor Bingham's introduction clearly impressed people in the audience with the realistic potential for creating a clean, safe, renewable and even democratic form of energy that goes a long way to solving many of the problems associated with current forms of energy.

Is cheap energy a problem?

Joe Kaplinsky commended the science and the ambitious nature of current work on fusion but drew out some of the cultural barriers that the technology faced. In a social atmosphere that reacts to the problems of climate change with a sense of catastrophe we have seen, for example, the emergence of concepts such as the carbon footprint that seek to minimise the impact that human activity makes upon the environment. Any large-scale attempts to revolutionise the production of power, however clean or safe, cannot ultimately reduce the impact of human beings on the earth because the power liberated increases the capacity for us to change the nature of things around us. While he himself did not see this as a reason to limit the production of power he pointed out that others would. Influential points of view exist that see unlimited energy as a dangerous thing. An 'excess' of power, beyond what could be abstractly described as being strictly needed, is regarded by many as a source of further danger to the environment. The uses to which cheaper, cleaner power might be put stand in opposition to today's social climate of the need to minimise impact upon the world. Indeed, assuming all the advantages of fusion could be harnessed, there would still exist opposition to its development that saw only the potential for the misuse of an abundance of power in the form of a greater impact on the world by an irresponsible humanity.

Joe Kaplinsky rejected the characterisation of humanity as a collection of energy junkies trampling over the earth and instead recommended the view that humanity's activities added to the earth and its possibilities. He felt that for fusion, and other big projects, more than the ability to demonstrate the superiority of the technology over existing development was required. Without being able to argue for the benefits of human activity more generally, he felt that ambitious projects could be blocked by the consensus of limits that exists.

'A very complicated way of boiling water'? Professor MacKerron also praised the science and the ingenuity that Professor Bingham had demonstrated. However, he took the discussion in yet another direction by placing the search for fusion in the context of other possibilities for power production and the pressing problems of climate change and CO2 reduction.

Emphasising the development costs and complexity of fusion, and the fact that it could not be brought online for at least 30 years, Professor MacKerron felt concentration on fusion as the solution to these problems would divert resources away from urgently required developments in both other forms of power, such as geothermic and solar, and technology such as CO2 capture.

While he did not want to halt fusion research, he pointed out that there were still problems associated with the disposal of radioactive waste, although much less than with fission. Development of solar energy might also offer far more of a contribution to power needs than currently and be more readily available. The technology required to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and find ways to store it is a more urgent project, he argued, even if fusion could be brought online in the timescale envisaged.

Professor MacKerron said that the costs associated with fusion would likely prevent some of the resources required in these areas being found. To summarise the contributions from the panel: Fusion is no longer a scientific ideal that promised much but delivered nothing in the past, but a realisable goal within the timescales associated with the exhaustion of fossil fuels; fusion technology is highly desirable but, along with other ambitious scientific projects, faces serious social barriers to its development; and fusion is well worth investigating but is unlikely to deliver urgently required solutions to more pressing problems of power production and climate change and may even divert resources away from them.

The discussion

It would be over-ambitious to do justice to all the threads of discussion raised, but a number of themes emerged from people's questions and contributions. Fusion is always 30 years away, isn't it? How safe is such a centrally organised power system that would require so few power stations? How can we be sure that fusion can deliver the promised power gains when so much power is required to create it? Why is there so little discussion of fusion in relation to the problems of other power sources that it seeks to address? With the overarching concern of CO2 production, isn't fusion potentially more of a problem than a solution? How green is it really when it would encourage more use of power? Would it be more irresponsible to avoid the risks of fusion considering its potential benefits?

Reactions from the audience ranged from spirited support of the HiPER programme, to cautious optimism, to great concern about the potential dangers of unlimited power. A retired nuclear physicist also raised more technical questions that I'm afraid I could not follow. Below I summarise their responses to these questions. Professor Bingham said that fusion was not meant to be pursued at the cost of other forms of alternative energy. It has made advances in both its power efficiency and costs that could genuinely offer benefits to the extent that all the European countries had signed up for the first stages of its development, and more governments of other countries would be approached. The use of fusion would reduce the amount of CO2 going in to the atmosphere.

The claims of past fusion projects weigh heavily on those working in the field today, but work carried out right now was justified because it could be shown to have beneficial impacts on finding new sources of energy, climate change and CO2 build-up. Fusion needs to have backing from both governments and the people they represent in the future if it is to be successfully developed and those benefits made available.

Sometimes the things that science creates are used badly in society but there is much evidence that science can make very useful things as well.

Joe Kaplinsky said that there was an underlying resistance to all central projects, citing the example of Californians, who tend toward decentralisation in their power projects. The root of this, Joe argued, was essentially anti-social in the sense that there was a suspicion about depending on other people or even big government for one's essential needs. It is by no means just the highly influential green outlook that is risk-averse.

Fusion needs a social consensus behind it to be developed. One of the difficulties of the current thinking and policy on CO2 build-up is that it conceptually builds in limits to human activities. Once these are accepted it becomes very much easier to simply ration and reduce the resources available to people as a general policy, rather than spend on developing projects such as fusion.

Malthus was right about one thing in that humans are not like animals, said Joe. We create resources for ourselves and new possibilities that are far preferable to simply doing less, sitting watching the electricity meter ticking round more slowly.

Professor MacKerron said that because fusion has always been 30 years away it has not attracted attention and funding, particularly in periods when resources for many things have been reduced by successive governments. Nuclear fission, as shown by recent and varied government positions, does not really have a policy at all.

The association of the green agenda with guilt is a peculiarity of British society that was less apparent in other European and North American countries. He felt that environmentalism and its ideas are far less influential than many assumed.

It is possible that energy production could become less of a problem, but the pressing issue was still the build-up of CO2. Scientists of many disciplines faced a great deal of distrust from the public, who feel that they are being misled, and there is a history of this relationship of distrust. There were many problems to solve, but not all of them are on the same scale.

Professor MacKerron said that the choice of which way forward was not between a guilt-ridden reduction of resources used on one hand, and a 'thoughtless' use of energy on the other. The discussion should not be polarised around either prohibition or unlimited freedom to use energy to sell us more things. Energy certainly makes things possible and its better, improved use needs to be developed by consensus. It is important that the public is involved in discussions around such a social issue.

As usual, the discussion advanced in various directions at the pub afterwards.

The Brighton Salon would like to thank (in order of appearance) Professor Bob Bingham of HiPER (see www.hiper-laser.org for more information on these fascinating projects), Joe Kaplinsky, co-author of Energise (further details on availability of the book to follow) and Professor Gordon MacKerron of SPRU (follow the links from www.sussex.ac.uk for further information).

The Brighton Salon would also like to thank Bellerbys College once again for hosting the event (see the link on the right-hand side of this homepage) and Bright Media TV for recording the proceedings (see www.bright-media.tv ). When the footage is edited I'll publish a link to their site where introduction and contributions can be viewed. Fusion: cheap power for all? was organised and chaired by The Brighton Salon chairman, Dr Robert Clowes, as part of the Brighton Science Festival (see www.brightonscience.com/07home.php )