Tag: tokamak

ISRO Is Not Going to Mine the Moon for Helium-3

Multiple news outlets had quoted Sivathanu Pillai’s statements out of context. The last thing science reporting needs is fake news.

Multiple news outlets had quoted Sivathanu Pillai’s statements out of context. The last thing science reporting needs is fake news.

Credit: Ponciano/pixabay

Credit: Ponciano/pixabay

Bengaluru: On April 20, 2017, Livemint reported that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has plans to mine helium-3 from the Moon to help manage India’s energy needs. ISRO has no such plans. Even if we supposed that it did, they would be grossly premature. There is neither the technology anywhere in the world to use helium-3 to generate energy nor are the legal and logistical hurdles fully understood.

The report is referring to comments made by the noted space scientist Sivathanu Pillai at the Observer Research Foundation’s Kalpana Chawla Space Policy Dialogue 2017, held in New Delhi in February. Those who attended the conference say that Pillai had said mining helium-3 from the Moon was possible – but that he didn’t say anything about ISRO planning to do it.

One attendee put it thus: “He was describing the technological landscape. He reviewed the technology from a century ago and connected it to today, and then he gave a glimpse of the possibilities of tomorrow.”

According to multiple sources on the web, helium-3 is a valuable type of fuel for purportedly ‘cleaner’ nuclear fusion. However, nuclear fusion has not been achieved on Earth even with the lighter, and thus  more easily fuseable, atoms of deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen.

“Although helium-3 fusion may be an attractive alternative if sufficient quantities can be mined and transported at an economical rate, the main difficulty is technological,” Jayant Murthy, a senior professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, told The Wire. “Helium-3 fusion requires temperatures much higher than the deuterium-tritium fusion that is the basis of current fusion research. It would only be prudent to wait until the technology is mature before even planning for helium-3 extraction from the Moon.”

He added that there were still no commercial fusion reactors even if there have been promising results from attempts to achieve one. For example, the National Ignition Facility, California, has been stepping closer to achieving inertial containment fusion. On the other hand, the multibillion-dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), France (in which India has invested), continues to be delayed with the construction of its magnetic confinement reactor. Neither is designed to work with helium-3, however.

Then again, the technological barrier hasn’t deterred everyone. Public and private enterprises around the world have expressed interest in mining the Moon – either for helium-3 or for lunar water, and perhaps storing the former until a suitable reactor is built. This isotope of helium is not available on Earth because it is emitted by the Sun in its solar wind, and the wind is prevented from reaching Earth’s surface by our magnetic field. The Moon has no such shield and so its surface is believed to have been absorbing helium-3 for eons.

Even others have questioned the wisdom of using helium-3 for nuclear fusion altogether. The most prominent critique was penned by physicist Frank Close for Physics World in August 2007. He wrote that in a reactor like ITER’s tokamak – a donut-shaped hollow in which light atoms are confined by magnetic fields, heated to 150 million degrees C, made to form a plasma and then fused – “deuterium reacts up to 100 times more slowly with helium-3 than it does with tritium”. This is why, as Murthy said, the reactor has to reach temperatures far beyond what are currently being planned. Close concluded writing, “The lunar-helium-3 story is, to my mind, moonshine.”

The ITER tokamak will be used to generate and sustain a plasma (the pink tubular entity) for nuclear fusion. Notice the image of a man on the bottom-left for scale. Credit: US ITER

The ITER tokamak will be used to generate and sustain a plasma (the pink tubular entity) for nuclear fusion. Notice the image of a man on the bottom-left for scale. Credit: US ITER

And then there’s the jurisprudential barrier. According to Ashok G.V., an advocate and space law expert, Moon-mining is a “very, very dicey area”. He explained that the sole legislative document here is the Outer Space Treaty (OST). It permits mining on extraterrestrial bodies subject to a clutch of riders. For example, before it can begin work, ISRO will have to notify all stakeholders of its plans and also consult with those whose operations might be affected by ISRO’s.

And overall, as Ashok put it, “The traditional spacefaring nations have argued that what is not specifically prohibited by the OST is permitted. The resource-restricted agencies like India’s and others have argued that what has not been specifically permitted is prohibited.” The expanding grey area between these two points of view has resulted in calls for the OST to be overhauled.

None of this is to disparage ISRO’s plans to visit the Moon. It’s only that there is much more to explore about the satellite than is visible through the blinders of resource extraction. As Murthy said, “Going to the Moon is justification in itself – it doesn’t require manufactured reasons.”

Shortly after the Livemint story had come online, India TV quoted it in a report of its own, with not a detail changed. In fact, before either publication, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), a news syndication agency, had published an article on February 19, 2017, making the same claims: that Pillai had said helium-3 extraction was a “priority programme” for ISRO and that the agency would move to mine, transport and utilise the substance by 2030. This version had been picked up by Financial Express, India Today, Times of India and NDTV, among others. IANS once published a hollow claim that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is wrong. The last thing science reporting needs is fake news, and to think these four publications have a combined Twitter following of over 23 million…

The misinterpretation of Pillai’s comments also filled the void of ISRO’s silence, in keeping with its general lack of public engagement. If ISRO doesn’t act like an antibody and clarify its position when stories like these are being written, there is no surprise about the stories going viral.

The author of the Livemint report could not be contacted for comment. This article will be updated as and when a response becomes available.

Note: This article was edited on April 23 to better clarify the status of ITER.

Why the Road to Nuclear Fusion is Necessarily Bumpy

The takeaway is that despite its steep costs, we can’t afford to not support an idea like fusion.

The takeaway is that despite its steep costs, we can’t afford to not support an idea like fusion.

The Wendelstein 7-X device. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Wendelstein 7-X device. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While the realisation of nuclear fusion power is often raked up as a fitting example of a sunk cost fallacy, the amount of work going into realising it someday is as necessary as it is intensive. When the first explosion by a nuclear fusion reaction was conducted in 1952, scientists were filled with optimism about harnessing the power of nuclear fusion in a controlled manner – for production rather than destruction, and for generating clean energy. But for years, the technological and scientific hurdles of this proved to be too much, leading many a pessimist to wonder: can we actually harness this stellar formula for producing energy on Earth?

On February 3, 2016, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed a button that switched the Wendelstein 7-X on. The 7-X possesses a design considered radical for sustaining fusion reactions – the more conventional options are the tokamak and using inertial fusion – and has already proved itself relatively worthwhile. According to Hans-Stephan Bosch, a division head for the 7-X project, “The device’s first hydrogen plasma has completely lived up to our expectations.”

Most of the world’s leading fusion energy projects employ a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped chamber that is made to hold the plasma in the grip of a strong magnetic field, in turn generated by strong electric currents. The plasma is a superheated state of matter that acts as a fuel-bed for the fusion reaction. The stellarator, while borrowing a similar doughnut shape, uses a system of coiled magnetic fields to contain the plasma, relying less on the strength of the current itself as well as proving itself less fragile than the tokamak. As a result, the stellarator can operate continuously rather than in short pulses.

In another major boost for the fusion community, just five days after the 7-X powered up, physicists in China announced that their homegrown tokamak fusion machine, Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), had successfully produced and contained plasma at a temperature of close to 50 million kelvin for an impressive 102 seconds, three orders of magnitude better than the 7-X’s quarter of a second (impressive in its own right). Does this mean the tokamak is better than the stellarator?

Matthew Hole, a senior fellow at the Centre for Plasmas and Fluids at Australian National University, told Gizmag, “These are impressive feats in their own right, but they are different geometric problems using different magnetic confinement concepts. One is twisted and one is a straight doughnut. They have different performance properties, but common to both of them, in addition to ultra-long pulses, is you want high temperature, high density and long energy confinement times.”

Both EAST and the 7-X were able to achieve the latter attributes – but both were shots in the arm for the tokamak and research communities, respectively. The tokamak provides scientists with critical data on plasma physics while simultaneously functioning as working proof of the ability of a stellarator and a tokamak to function as the core of a fusion energy power plant in the future.

In the case of fusion energy, experts reckon that we might be decades away from an operational plant. So then why are governments spending billions on such futuristic devices? Is the massive investment and overhead justified for a technology that may turn operational only in a few decades? John Jelonnek, a physicist whose team works on a critical component of the 7-X, puts it rather simply: “We’re not doing this for us, but for our children and grandchildren.”

According to the World Energy Council, we are already dangerously close to a point where the demand and consumption of energy by the existing population outweighs the available energy. Current technology is incapable of supplying the shortfall, at least not single-handedly. Nuclear fusion may just be that magic technology that solves this impending crisis. It has all the tropes that accompany an ideal energy source: it is reliable, has a seemingly never ending fuel-supply and, most importantly, is clean. Given our ongoing struggle with mitigating the effects of climate change, it’s imperative to back such an energy source.

As Michael Williams, head of engineering at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab, told Huffington Post, “Fusion is an expensive science because you’re trying to build a sun in a bottle.” Engineers have to come up with materials that can sustain large structural and thermodynamic loads along with radiation that can cause damage at the atomic level. Physicists have to figure out how to achieve maximum containment and control turbulence in plasma. And, ultimately, the undertaking has to continue to be funded.

Consider the the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.

It is a labour-intensive umbrella undertaking involving the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, China and the USA – with the final aim of using a fusion reactor to consume 50 MW and produce 500 MW. The project was initially seeded in 2006 with an estimated cost of EUR 5 billion and first plasma test in 2016. The cost today stands at EUR 15 billion and the first plasma test slated for around 2023. While construction for the test device has begun in southern France, the project schedule was advanced after a project’s governing council met last year. And while the official communiqué didn’t release an official date for the first plasma test, it is widely rumoured to be closer to 2025.

Why is ITER taking so much time to get off the ground? Elizabeth Surrey, head of fusion technology at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxfordshire, states that a commercially viable fusion power plant is such a complex integration of so many interconnected systems that “no single entity can be identified as the major obstacle”. In a recent interview, Thomas Klinger, project head of the 7-X, highlighted how some structures his team built weighed tonnes – but had been assembled with a level of precision of a few microns. “If we had known how difficult it would be to build, we might not have embarked on it in the first place,” he remarked.

ITER suffers because of the scale at which its collaboration operates. According to Michael Classens, the head of communications, “The main challenge for the project is not the science and technology itself, but the management as a whole, the way these 35 countries cooperate.” Even Osamu Motojima, former director-general of the ITER Organisation, admitted that “it’s a bottom-up process that integrates technical data and work schedules for different components made by different countries”. Another problem for the project is that some member states working on schedule end up funding an expensive delayed production schedule for a slacking member state.

But even as ITER soldiers labours, one can’t help but be optimistic. According to Steve Cowley, chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, “It can’t possibly be that we’ve got this close and we can’t see it through to the end. Once this problem is cracked, we’ll have [fusion energy] forever. It’s just taking a long time to get there.” Meanwhile, as a backup to the ITER design, there are groups across the world working on alternatives that could provide significant breakthroughs and data for the fusion energy community. China has EAST, Germany has the 7-X, and the US was able to recently achieve a breakthrough in inertial containment fusion.

The takeaway is that despite its steep costs, we can’t afford to not support an idea like fusion.