The future of our planet is in the balance. This is becoming more apparent as, in the United States, Our Children's Trust -- a non-governmental organisation representing the voice of youth for healthy environment -- is taking legal action against the federal government and the fossil fuel industry on the grounds that global greenhouse emissions, mainly from coal, are a violation of public trust. And, so far, the children are winning.
In Thailand, global warming is taking a severe toll. Twenty-seven provinces have been declared drought areas. Thailand, as leader of the G77 and prospective UN Security Council member, has a role to play -- in leading investigations into low-end nuclear fusion, a zero greenhouse gas emissions technology.
Nuclear fusion is nuclear fission's big brother and uses the physics that powers our sun instead of potentially dangerous uranium or plutonium. The fuel used is typically isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, the latter being only slightly radioactive, and in any case being consumed in the reaction. Humanity has been able to create a fusion reaction for decades, but the difficulty has always been producing net energy -- more energy than is consumed by the process.
Major world powers are currently pursuing fusion through the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) located in the south of France. ITER uses a tokamak, a giant doughnut with magnetic shielding. However, ITER has been criticised for running three times over its budget, now at US$20 billion. It also requires at least two more updates over the next 25 years, costing approximately the same as ITER for each update, before a commercial net energy reactor is envisioned.
ITER suffers all the problems of a megaproject built by a consortium, but leaner competitors exist in first-world commercial fusion companies. They are attracting significant funding, including from one of Thailand's competitors in leading Asean, Malaysia. Last year, the government of Malaysia, which spends 1.1% of its GDP on research and development, compared to Thailand's 0.4%, invested $27 million in General Fusion (GF).
GF is a Canadian company established in 2002 which has attracted over $100 million for a fusion technology. It is working on a prototype fusion reactor together with McGill University and Hatch, a global engineering company. GF's technology, magnetised target fusion, is relatively simple and dates from a design in the 1950s. Coordinated pneumatic rams pound anvils surrounding a cylinder, into which is injected a deuterium-tritium super-heated gas, or plasma. The impact on the anvils creates shockwaves, which could super-heat the plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius. Within the device is a lead-lithium liquid metal, which serves as shielding. The device then feeds into a normal heat exchanger. General Fusion is aiming for a net energy reaction within a decade.
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