I recently saw a news article1 on The Guardian web site that literally made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. As I read it, I thought to myself, 'This changes everything.' The report, which was tucked away towards the bottom of the long Guardian site, and which was apparently not thought of as being particularly ground-breaking or earth-shattering, was about an apparent breakthrough in nuclear fusion. There's also a smooth video2 that accompanied the report.
Essentially, Lockheed Martin has announced that it has the concept for a breakthrough in fusion power, that this could result in a working fusion reactor that would 'fit onto the back of a truck' and that it could produce 100MW of electric power within five years. The company has apparently noticed that the current breed of experimental fusion reactors - all of which have been set up by international collaborations of teams of scientists and engineers who are building extremely large fusion reactors - are just too big to work. Lockheed Martin is banking on the possibility that this technology works best when it is small - 'Compact Fusion' as it is termed. As one worker on the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works Compact Fusion project, Dr Thomas McGuire, says, "This is a high beta concept - it uses a high fraction of the magnetic field pressure and uses all of its potential. That means that we can make our devices ten times smaller. Instead of something the size of a building, we have something the size of a large truck. The smallness is the reason why we can do this quickly." If something is small, he says, you can build it fast. "It doesn't take five years to design it, it takes three months. We can design it, build it, test it within a year. We think we can get to a prototype within five years." He goes on to say that the world already generates 40GW of electricity from gas turbines each year. That's 50% better (less polluting) than coal, but it's still not clean, according to McGuire. The new design can replace the gas with a heat exchanger coming off a Compact Fusion plant and 'take it all the way.'
As a quick recap, current nuclear power stations use fission reactions, where atoms are split apart in controlled chain reactions, giving off heat energy (and massive amounts of radioactivity). In fusion energy reactors, gases are heated to extremely high temperatures (typically by firing multiple high-powered laser beams at tiny targets, both heating and compressing the materials in the target at the same time, to temperatures and pressures akin to those found in the heart of a star). In these 'stellar' conditions, the blown-apart atoms can fuse together again, giving out colossal amounts of energy. So far, the challenge in the big experiments has been to contain the super-hot plasma generated for long enough to be able to take out more energy than was put in. Although the plasma has been contained for about a second in the most sophisticated experiments, around three seconds will be required for there to be a positive energy balance (and for the reactor to 'make' energy). As sceptics have said for the last several decades, 'Fusion power is always about 30 years away.'3
By shrinking the entire reactor, Lockheed's Skunk Works department thinks it can bypass many of the problems with the larger reactors and bring Compact Fusion into being within 10 years (for military applications, perhaps for fitting into aircraft carriers) and 20 years for civilian applications. Maybe fusion is (nearly) still 30 years away after all.
The potential impact that this technology would have for the gypsum industry is large. In an increasingly carbon-constrained world, coal-fired power generation is becoming increasingly unpopular (even though it is the cheapest form of electricity generation - excluding environmental costs). If coal could be replaced by economical fusion power generation, then dirty coal plants will be among the first to be shut down. That's a great result, but it has the corollary that those coal plants will no longer be producing synthetic gypsum. As we heard at the recent Global Gypsum Conference, coal-fired power stations are being rapidly phased out in Europe already. With rapidly dwindling supplies of FGD gypsum, the global gypsum industry will be forced to revert back to the use of natural gypsum, even faster than it looks likely to have to already. Some (the natural gypsum producers, perhaps) might say that's no bad thing. Others will no doubt point out that recycled gypsum will increasingly be used in wallboard and plaster manufacture.
Cheaper, cleaner electricity? Yes please! However, for gypsum, there is a down side. It just goes to show that you should be careful what you wish for...
1 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/15/lockheed-breakthrough-nuclear-fusion-energy
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM (Lockheed Martin: Compact Fusion Research & Development)
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWWTegfPO6g (Lockheed Martin's Fusion Concept Basically An Advertisement)
