Canadians move ahead with fusion work

SASKATOON — The plan: build a small sun and solve the world’s thirst for guilt-free energy.

The problem: designing a container strong enough to withstand the kinds of temperatures and pressures found inside the sun.

Enter the University of Saskatchewan physics department, which houses Canada’s only magnetic fusion reactor.

The physics whizzes who operate this metallic doughnut have paired up with a British Columbia company that’s determined to build the world’s first net-gain nuclear fusion reactor. That means developing a method of smashing atoms together that creates more energy than it consumes.

“This is the big Holy Grail. This is making energy with no pollution, and less amount of supply. No fight around everybody to get the fuel because it’s available from the sea,” said Michel Laberge, founder and chief scientific officer at Burnaby-based General Fusion.

The company aims to develop the technology for a reactor that would fuse hydrogen into helium in a rapid flash lasting ten-millionths of a second. Doing that requires extreme conditions, like million-degree temperatures and crushing pressure. The resulting plasma can interact with the reactor wall, and that’s not good, Laberge said.

In a project funded by the National Research Council, General Fusion will pay U of S physics Prof. Akira Hirose’s team $60,000 to use the Saskatoon-based reactor to test materials for the company.

General Fusion and Hirose’s lab will co-develop a chamber they’ll use in conjunction with existing equipment in Saskatoon that injects plasma into the reactor. The company will send Hirose’s lab samples of different metals to see how well they withstand the intense reaction conditions.

Laberge said the company needs to find a dense, heat-resistant material that doesn’t draw heat away from the reaction. Good candidates are tungsten and copper, he said.

Hirose’s lab will also analyze metal samples to determine how well they withstood the conditions.

Nuclear fusion is different than nuclear fission reactors across the globe. Fusion generates energy by combining atoms to make new elements. Fission breaks them apart.

A fusion reactor would create no waste to store and wait for its radioactive decay. And hydrogen is widely available in the form of water.

Both Hirose and Laberge agree it will be at least a decade before anyone is ready to use nuclear fusion to generate power for public consumption.