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A New Hampshire company is playing a part in a multibillion-dollar, international research project that aims to prove there’s a way to replicate the power of the sun for use on Earth. The ITER project hopes to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy, using sea water to create an inexhaustible, environmentally friendly energy source. The acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor also means “the way” in Latin. The project is being designed and built by a partnership of the European Union, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. The device will be constructed at Cadarache in southeastern France on nearly 100 acres of land. Some of the prototype parts are being manufactured by New England Wire Corporation in the North Country town of Lisbon, west of Franconia Notch State Park. The specialty cable manufacturer has been contracted to make sample strands of superconductor cable for evaluation.
“It’s an opportunity for us to prove we can manufacture it,” said Art Greene, engineering director at New England Wire.
The product design group at the company is being led by Craig Simpson, an engineer responsible for prototype cable manufacturing. If successful, the full contract would be for nine cables 765 meters long, or a little less than half a mile, and 18,000 pounds each, to be manufactured in mid-2008. The cables are less than two inches in diameter, but contain more than 1,000 strands of wire. The cable contract would be worth several million dollars, which Greene called a significant contribution to the local economy. New England Wire is the largest employer in Lisbon, with more than 350 employees in a town of about 1,640 people.
James Van Dam is the chief scientist for the U.S. ITER Project Office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which is responsible for procuring hardware and other duties. He is also the director of the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the U.S. Burning Plasma Organization, a national group that coordinates and promotes research and development on “burning plasma” science, a method for producing fusion energy.
Fusion generates the sun and stars’ energy. Laboratory fusion on Earth aims to show that it can be used to generate electricity in a safe and environmentally friendly way to meet the energy demands of the growing population, Van Dam wrote in an e-mail to Foster’s. Fusion energy produced by the project could generate 10 times what it takes to create it, he said.
The facility is expected to be operating by 2016. The construction site in France has been cleared, and work will start next year leveling the land and building concrete platforms. Procurement packages for materials and equipment will be released for contract bid in the coming months, according to Bonnie Hebert, spokeswoman for U.S. ITER. The ITER device is based on the “tokamak” concept, in which hot gas is confined in a doughnut-shaped vessel using a magnetic field. The gas is heated to more than 100 million degrees and should produce 500 megawatts of fusion power.
The challenge ITER faces is putting out more energy than is put into it, said Amitava Bhattacharjee, professor of space science at the University of New Hampshire Institute for the study of Earth, Oceans, and Space. He said researchers have been trying since the late 1950s to duplicate the kind of nuclear fusion reactions that occur in the core of the sun. Some have been able to produce a nuclear reaction but weren’t able to maintain it long enough to harness the energy.
“This is the first time people will try to break the break-even condition,” he said.
It may also be the first step toward commercialization of the energy produced, but he said that could take a few decades of work. Plasma is distinct from other states of matter — solid, liquid, and gas — in that it is heated to a point beyond gas.
Bhattacharjee said the energy in plasma is difficult to contain because it’s unstable.
“I really think that ITER will meet its goals, but it still has challenges ahead,” said Bhattacharjee.
Commercializing the energy should become more feasible as the technology becomes more powerful and less pricey, he added. The project potentially could create “virtually inexhaustible energy” using heated sea water as fuel, he said.
Superconductor cables run “almost for free” once charged because they carry an electric current without resistance, said Greene, of New England Wire. But they must be kept at cryogenic temperatures, or minus-238 degrees. There is a cooling channel in the middle of the cable and chrome plating for insulation on the outside. The wires are made of metals that include copper and niobium-tin. The company was asked to bid on the cable near the beginning of the year, and beat out a few competitors in the spring for the initial work. Greene said this is one of the largest science projects the company has contributed to, though it is known for such work.
“If we could create an environmentally friendly method for producing energy, it would be a great triumph,” Greene said.
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