Nuclear fusion, there are twenty years left for energy salvation?
Of the irons that are called to contain the hottest spot in the known universe hangs a pedestrian red sweater. A few meters away, two workers weld a rod and drop some icy sparks, compared to what has to happen in Caradache (France) in twenty years for the Iter to make history: ten times the temperature of the center of the sun.
"There's nothing on that machine that's simple" says Mark Henderson
The American physicist is convinced that it will be withdrawn before the nuclear fusion reactor demonstrating the viability of this technique as a source of energy is fully operational. The Iter is his particular cathedral.
"We want to grab a piece of the sun, bring it down to earth and imitate that reaction "
For a couple of years now, everything on the Iter has been heard above the sound of cranes, trucks, drills and hammer hammers, and with infinite accents. The seven partners of what Iter's communications director, Laban Koblentz, describes as "the most ambitious scientific collaboration project ever undertaken by humanity" - China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States - account for half the world's population. In 2009 they made all the trees disappear, five years later they began to manufacture their big machine. They hope to make it operational in 2035.
In the diagrams, the hottest future space in the universe is shaped like peeled mandarin. Around this gap, 23,000 tons of technology will be available and in some cases it has not even been invented. The' small' pieces - along with the Iter shrink until time goes by - arrive from overseas and are distributed, in wooden boxes, in the warehouses of the complexes in charge of their assembly. What can't cross seas and roads is built right there.
Hence the cranes, blocks, planks, iron, screws, scaffolding, debris, workers - always with helmets - from one side to the other. You cross a catwalk and load a carafe of fuel in front of the pit that will house the machine:"Bonjour". In the hall where the biggest magnets are being made, another spins between the boxes with a diagram in his hand, like looking for the pieces of furniture from Ikea. Under the pieces of the Cryostat you can see the feet of a group of welders and the sparkle glow.
When everything is manufactured, the challenge will be to assemble ship-size parts with millimeter error margins. Once the assembly was finished, the time would come for the first test,"the first plasma", scheduled for 2025. The complete experiment that will confine deuterium and tritium to obtain 500 mw with an input of 50 mw will occur at least 18 years from now.
The future invention of the last century
Three decades have passed since Ronald Reagan sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and acknowledged the need to develop fusion as "an inexhaustible source of energy for the benefit of humanity. It's 2017 and the emperor is still naked. His 10-million-piece suit is spread all over the world. And half sewn.
The things of coordinating seven palaces at once are part of the problem, but they are also the only solution. The cost of this adventure, which is now estimated at 22 billion euros (2 billion more than at the outset), would be too great for a single country. "It's a way of sharing technology and risks, and balancing investment. As a taxpayer, I love it. As a scientist, I hate it,"Henderson admits. 45% of the contribution to the project comes from Europe, which is managed by Fusion For Energy. The rest of the members are divided into 9% pieces.
The march is slow and depends on the economic and political fluctuations of all those involved, who now look with suspicion at the ball that rests on Donald Trump's roof, or rather on the recently cut budgets of the science and technology office, which is responsible for financing the North American side of the project. "If they don't deliver on their commitment, the project and the momentum we have achieved will be wounded,"warns Bernard Bigot, who took over the leadership of the Iter in 2015, after a risky drift that culminated in inflated budgets, delayed deadlines and a lapidary audit.
What will happen in the coming decades? God knows how. "I am convinced of the intelligence of humanity, but we are also stupid. We are capable of making something as complex as an iPhone but at the same time we are causing our own deaths,"Henderson reasoned. Its commitment to fusion is based, among other things, on its low impact in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, the inherent safety of the plants using this technology -any instability in the process would simply halt the reaction- and the absence of long-lasting radioactive waste associated with it.
What if it doesn't work? "There are always people who doubt, but the world cannot afford to continue without an energy alternative,"says Bigot. So it's gonna work? "I don't know. But I want to know.