NUCLEAR FUSION SCIENTISTS SEEK FUNDS AFTER LANDMARK TEST

By Paul Holmes

LONDON, Nov 11, Reuter - European scientists involved in a landmark experiment in nuclear fusion appealed on Monday for funds and political support to help make limitless supplies of safe, clean energy a reality in the 21st century.

Scientists from the European JET project which on Saturday reproduced the power of the sun at an experimental fusion reactor in Culham, Oxfordshire, said the 50 years needed for commercial viability could be shortened with the right backing. ``The real problem is the long timescale. Too many people will be dead when we see fusion so they are not really interested,'' JET (Joint European Torus) director Dr Paul-Henri Rebut told a news conference.

He was speaking two days before negotiators gather in Moscow for final talks on whether Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States should go ahead with the next stage of research, a 1,000-megawatt experimental fusion reactor. The global project, ITER, envisages building a reactor some two-and-a-half times the size of JET's, itself as high as three double-decker buses.

The Moscow talks will decide whether the partners spend one billion dollars to design the reactor. No site has been chosen for the reactor itself, which would cost five billion dollars and take eight years to build.

Rebut said the target of 2040 for a first commercial reactor could move forward if funds were available to allow the next two research stages -- the experimental reactor and a demonstration reactor -- to overlap rather than be conducted consecutively. ``We're in the business of establishing energy options for the next century. If we don't do the work now we shan't have the options available,'' JET associate director Alan Gibson said.

He said the funds needed for ITER were equivalent to just 0.5 to 0.75 per cent of the European electricity industry's annual turnover. Rebut called the funding ``negligible.'' Saturday's experiments were the first to produce a substantial amount of fusion power in a controlled experiment, as opposed to a hydrogen bomb, and in another first used tritium as well as deuterium as fuel to boost energy generation.

Unlike a conventional fission reactor in which atoms are split apart, fusion super-heats atoms at temperatures to reproduce a process that occurs continuously in the sun and stars. The reaction requires temperatures more than 10 times hotter than at the centre of the sun so the atoms strike each other with such force that they fuse together and release energy. Scientists say commercial fusion reactors would be safer than conventional fission varieties, cleaner than fossil fuels and would provide virtually inexhaustible energy because the basic fuel, deuterium, is easily extracted from water.

Tritium must be made in the reactor from the light metal lithium. JET officials said there was sufficient lithium to supply the world's electricity needs for 1,000 years but more advanced fusion reactors would use only deuterium. Rebut, who will attend the Moscow talks, said his team's success would boost the chances of ITER. ``To put tritium in JET...is almost a condition for the next step,'' he said. The European Community, whose 12 member-states back JET together with Sweden and Switzerland, was also upbeat after the experiments gave Europe a lead in international research. EC Research Commissioner Filippo Maria Pandolfi said the results opened the door to construction of an experimental reactor. But he warned in Brussels that governments and researchers would have to make a long-term commitment to research as commercialisation of nuclear fusion was decades away.

Similar projects are under way at Japan's JT-60 fusion reactor laboratory and the U.S. Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton, New Jersey. Both groups have hailed the European breakthrough but Princeton spokesman Anthony DeMeo said U.S. research had been slowed by cuts in federal funding.

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Commercialisation of nuclear fusion was decades away.

The EC and national governments have spent about one billion European currency units (1.24 billion dollars) since the JET project was launched in the 1970s. The JET project is awaiting final approval for funds to see it through until the end of 1996. A senior British official on Monday confirmed Britain would contribute to extra funds. Similar projects are under way at Japan's JT-60 fusion reactor laboratory and the U.S. Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton, New Jersey. Both groups have hailed the European breakthrough but Princeton spokesman Anthony DeMeo said U.S. research had been slowed by cuts in federal funding.

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There are new technologies on the horizon that baffle the mind.

Bell Labs announced its optical computer (CPU) which uses light instead

of silicon r wire connection to transmit its data between its registers and memory. They say this is as big a breakthrough as the transistor was during the vaccum tube era. This CPU will speed computers up to almost the speed of light. This i because light beams pass through each other alowing more connections and each beam is carring more data lines than ever before. Right now the prototype takes up a table top but that will reduce in size according to its inventor as they develope the smaller technology to miniturize it.

Hitachi announced that it too had created a new chip. Their CPU uses sub-atomic particles instead of the eletron part of of the atom. Hitachi says, because sub-atomic particals go faster than the speed of light this will speed up computers 10,000 times. This application was theorized years ago by a man whose name escapes me at this moment.

IBM claims to have made a memory break through. They say they have been able to store 1 gigbit of data in a 1 square inch of space. The details of the technic are not yet revealed so stay tuned.

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