Fusion on the Horizon?

When I arrived at MIT in 1976, fresh off the bus from Oklahoma, nuclear fusion looked like an exciting scientific career. The country was still reeling from "the" energy crisis (oil was over $50/barrel in today's prices!), and fusion was the energy source of the future.

It still is.

The promise has always been compelling, and is often described as "unlimited pollution-free energy from seawater." The fusing of two hydrogen nuclei to form a helium nucleus, releasing abundant energy without the radioactive products of nuclear fission, certainly seems cheap and clean. Indeed, this kind of process is the ultimate source of all solar energy as well, and the H-bomb showed that we can create it on earth.

So the challenges for fusion are not fundamental. They're "just engineering."

Foremost among these challenges is keeping the hydrogen nuclei together when they're heated to millions of degrees. This temperature is needed so they can overcome their natural electrical repulsion, but when they have a lot of energy they're just as likely to go in other directions. Sadly, techniques to confine these tiny nuclei seem to require tons and tons of expensive, high-tech equipment. Of course, advocates of cold fusion, now called "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions," think they don't have to solve this problem, but most scientists are unconvinced.

The traditional approach to fusion, then being pursued at MIT, involves confining a donut-shaped plasma of ultra-hot charged particles by using an enormous magnetic field. One problem is that the plasma finds all sorts of ways to wiggle out of the confinement. Over the decades, researchers have made steady progress in controlling these "instabilities." Recent research, still done at MIT and published online in Nature Physics this week, used a surprising technique of levitating a half-ton magnet in mid-air.

The other mainstream approach is to squeeze and heat hydrogen-containing materials by blasting a pellet with powerful lasers from all sides. Research at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility, published online in Science this week, showed promising results for this approach.

I've always found the idea of milking a steady stream of power out of occasional explosions inside of a horrendously expensive, delicate laser apparatus confusing. In fact, the long-defunct radical magazine Science for the Peoplepublished an article in 1981 claiming that "inertial confinement" fusion was just a plot by the military to test fusion explosions in the lab. That at least made sense.

The new results seem like steps forward for both approaches, but there's a long way to go. For one thing, neither group actually fused anything. They just set up conditions that seemed promising.

The reality is that no researchers want to actually use fusion-capable fuel in their machines, because it would make them radioactive (the machines, not the researchers). This may sound surprising, since fusion is supposed to be so clean. But although fusion doesn't produce radioactive nuclei, it does make a whole lot of high-speed neutrons. To generate power, researchers would need schemes to extract the energy from these neutrons. But the neutrons also irradiate everything in sight, turning much of the apparatus into hazardous waste, which would make experiments much harder.

But if the researchers keep making progress, they're going to have to use the real stuff soon. They'll look for any fusion at all, and eventually for "scientific breakeven," where they get more energy out than they use to power all the equipment. "Commercial breakeven," where the whole endeavor makes money, is much further down the road.

I wish the researchers good luck; they may yet save our planet. But I'm also glad I didn't decide to spend the last third of a century working on fusion.

Green Computing

Supercomputers run the vast simulations that help us to better predict climate change--but they also contribute to it through their energy consumption.

The lifetime cost of powering supercomputers and data centers is now surpassing the cost of buying the machines in the first place. Computers, small, medium, and large, have become a significant fraction of energy consumption in developed countries. And although the authors of Superfreakonomics may not understand it, the carbon dioxide used to supply this energy will absorb, during its time in the atmosphere, some 100,000 times more heat energy than that.

To draw attention to this issue, for the last two years researchers at Virginia Tech have been reordering the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers, ranking them according their energy efficiency in the Top Green500 list. I have a wee news story out today on the newest list, released last Thursday, on the web site of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. The top-ranked systems are from the QPACE project in Germany, and are designed for quantum chromodynamics calculations.

Calculating efficiency isn't as straightforward as it sounds. The most obvious metric is the number of operations you get for a certain amount of energy. This is essentially what Green500 measures in its MFLOPS/W, since MFLOPS is millions of floating-point operations per second and watts is joules per second.

As a rule, however, this metric favors smaller systems. It also favors slower operation, which is not what people want from their supercomputers. Some of the performance lost by running slowly can be recovered by doing many operations in parallel, but this requires more hardware. For these reasons, the most efficient systems aren't supercomputers at all. The Green500 list works because they only include the powerhouse machines from the Top500 list, which puts a floor on how slowly the competing machines can go.

Over the years, researchers have explored a family of other metrics, where the energy per operation is multiplied by some power of the delay per operation: EDⁿ. But although these measures may approximately capture the real tradeoffs that systems designers make, none has the compelling simplicity of the MFLOPS/W metric. This measure also leverages the fact that supercomputer makers already measure the computational power to get on the Top500 list, so all they need to do extra is measure the electrical power in a prescribed way.

These systems derive much of their energy efficiency from the processor chips they use. The top systems in the current list all use a special version of IBM's cell processor, for example. I worked on power reduction in integrated circuits more than a decade ago--an eternity in an industry governed by Moore's Law--and some of my work appeared in a talk at the 1995 International Electron Devices Meeting. I also served for several years on the organizing committee of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, but I'm sure the issues have advanced a lot since then.

In addition to the chips, the overall system design makes a big difference. The QPACE machine, for example, serves up as about half again as many MFLOPS/W as its closest competitor by using novel water-cooling techniques and fine-tuning the processor voltages, among other things. These improvements aren't driven just by ecological awareness, but by economics.

There's still lots of room for improvement in the energy efficiency of computers. I expect that the techniques developed for these Cadillac systems will end up helping much more common servers to do their job with less energy.

Zero Net Energy Buildings

Over the last year, I covered four separate symposia at the New York Academy of Sciences on "Zero Net Energy Buildings." The final installment was just posted. (If you're not an NYAS member, you can see my story and view the presentations by going through the NYAS link, under the "Clips" tab, at my website, http://www.DonMonroe.info.)

Something like 2/5 of the energy in the U.S. is used for buildings--more than for transportation. The zero net energy building vision is that by combining serious energy conservation measures with on-site generation (often photovoltaic, but also including wind and other sources) an individual building can put just as much energy back onto the grid as it takes off, over the course of a year.

One critical aspect of the definition is determining what's included in "the building." Does it include photovoltaics over the parking lot? Firewood grown in the back? I did not understand why the building should be the right level of granularity, rather than, say, the block or the city. (Obviously zero-net energy rooms would be too fine-grained.)

Part of the reasoning is that transmission is expensive, and that cost can be avoided with local generation. But most of the buildings under discussion meet the zero-net-energy goal only over time, achieving the goal only because of easy transfer of electricity to and from the grid. And some generation methods clearly have economies of scale (take nuclear, for the sake of argument) that make them most effective at a larger scale than a single building. Perhaps the most compelling reason to focus on the building level is that this is where a single team of architects, engineers, owners, and so forth can work together to make the needed decisions.

The challenges are great, not least because there are so many inefficient buildings out there already. Many retrofits that will pay for themselves over time, even discounting future savings. Unfortunately, decision makers are often short-sighted, and need to learn how to value sustainable investments, including the growing desirability of "green" properties for tenants.

Nonetheless, stabilizing global carbon levels could require reductions in the ballpark of 75%, and simulations by The World Business Council for Sustainable Development indicate that market forces alone won't get there, even with onerous carbon taxes. This coalition of sustainability-oriented corporations advocates serious government intervention, on top of carbon pricing, as critical to reducing carbon fast enough to lessen global warming.