Ars takes on the Advancement of Science

Last week's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was unlike just about any other scientific meeting or trade show. Most other gatherings target a specialized audience; a few keynotes cover the big picture, then smaller sessions (and sometimes booths on the show floor) provide a focused view for those who care about the details. None of that was true about the AAAS meeting. Nearly every session focused big-picture issues and the audience, as indicated by the meeting's title, "Science and Technology from a Global Perspective," was nothing less than the entire planet.

This was made clear in countless ways, including an opening talk by Rwanda's President Paul Kagame. The AAAS also made sure that the message got out to the world; over 20 percent of the attendees were press, and scientists were given many opportunities to interact with them. Most talks were targeted so that even nonspecialists—both the press and researchers in other fields—could follow them. Even the show floor was designed to appeal to an audience with a broad range of science sophistication.

Specific sessions focused on a variety of global concerns. First and foremost of these was climate change, where the current thinking on the relative role of human and natural influences was discussed in detail. Even if you doubt the scientists that tell you the sun isn't responsible for the recent rise in temperatures, a second session reminded everyone that dumping lots of carbon into the atmosphere could have drastic consequences for life in the oceans. Stay tuned, as we have notes from sessions covering one potential solution for energy sustainability, biofuels.

Other panels discussed the global integration of the scientific community, as projects such as large telescopes, big physics, and genome sequencing have all gone international. Since physics went this direction first, the lessons from their large-scale collaborations were presented as a way of informing current and future efforts. Unfortunately, these collaborations may increasingly leave the US out. Examples such as elimination of funding for the ITER fusion reactor and the International Linear Collider are suggesting that the US is simply an unreliable partner for long-term collaborations.

Not all the news was grim, though. International efforts still rule space exploration, allowing NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to provide a triumphal recap of the golden age of robotic exploration. One of the successes highlighted was the joint US-EU Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. A separate panel looked back on all 50 years of the space age, and considered what they meant for humanity's future in space.

The future for space exploration and all science will continue to require them to engage the public's imagination and thirst for progress. Here, there were silver linings amidst the gray clouds; Fermi Lab's work on the International Linear Collider, despite its cancellation, demonstrated that the public can care deeply about the esoteric world of high energy physics when they're suitably engaged. But scientists need to know how to engage the public, as discussed in a session on how the public assesses the credibility of scientific information. Other discussions of public engagement took place during the meeting, and should appear shortly.

Overall, the meeting covered a tremendous amount of ground, from the basic science to how the public perceives it, on topics of truly global significance. It was like a Davos meeting filled with the people who tell the actual Davos attendees what's important.

To check out all existing coverage and watch for more from the meeting, use Ars' tag system to find the content.

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MIT Fights for Clean Power With Holy Grail of Fusion in Reach

In the first part of a week-long series at the breakthrough university, our resident geek looks down the belly of extreme machines with forces some 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's—and forecasts the future of efficient energy.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — This is what a fusion lab is supposed to be like. As I walk in, a woman’s voice is on the speakers, counting down from ten. Banks of chairs face banks of computer monitors, where data is literally streaming across application windows that are pulsing, multi-colored and reassuringly complex. And at the head of the control room is a massive projection showing a diagram of the fusion chamber nearby—a top-down view of the donut-shaped, concrete-lined structure that’s about to fill with superheated ionized gas, or plasma. On the same wall is looped footage of the last “shot,” a brief attempt to harness that plasma, and make fusion a little more feasible. The countdown is over, and there’s a sound straight out of sci-fi—a high tone coupled with a deep, resonating hum. On a tiny, black-and-white monitor mounted on the ceiling, a one-second flash ripples across the screen. A sign lights up over the door leading to the chamber, indicating that the oxygen is too low for anyone to approach without breathing gear, and the clock starts again. Next shot in 15 minutes.

MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) is about as Hollywood-worthy as science gets. The stakes, after all, could hardly be higher. If fusion can be perfected, it could mean a golden age for power production, with systems providing all of the benefits of nuclear reactors—but none of the drawbacks. Fusion is, to some extent, the exact opposite of fission: Instead of splitting atoms, fusion combines them, creating larger atoms and releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. Despite the high temperatures often associated with plasma, fusion is a relatively stable reaction, generating little to no radioactive waste. Even in a worst-case scenario, there’s no chance of a fusion reactor turning into a catastrophe on the scale of Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl. “Fission can run away,” says Miklos Porkolab, director of the PSFC. “Fusion can only fizzle.” Since there’s no chain reaction at work, the biggest danger associated with fusion is a temperature collapse. And even if the materials lining the chamber were to suddenly give way due to sabotage or terrorism, the introduction of debris into the plasma cloud would actually smother the process at an even faster rate. Fusion is fragile, difficult to maintain, and ultimately its own worst enemy. But it is not dangerous.

That quality makes it utterly useless as a weapon, Porkolab explains, which is why the federal government decided to declassify its fusion research 50 years ago and make the results public. That was effectively the birth of open, academic fusion in the United States. So a half-century into this quest for one of science’s holy grails, are we any closer to grace?

The answer, not surprisingly, is mixed. Here at MIT, the fusion center’s primary research tool is the Alcator C-MOD, the largest university-run fusion reactor in the world, and one of only three “tokamaks” in the country. Tokamaks are reactors that use magnetic fields to control the flow of plasma. Extreme machines like the C-MOD, which has the most powerful magnetic fields of any tokamak (and some 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s) have enhanced our understanding of fusion. But a truly efficient reaction, with more energy released than poured in, is still decades away.

The problem, Porkolab says, is turbulence. To increase the chances of a fusion reaction, a cloud of plasma must be incredibly hot and dense. As the atoms become more closely packed and excited, the natural tendency for nuclei to repel each other can be overcome. C-MOD uses microwaves to heat the ionized gas, and magnets to shape it, building up pressure within the plasma. But as any meteorologist can tell you, juggling temperature and pressure is a recipe for bad weather. “We have our own storms, inside the plasma, just like in the atmosphere,” Porkolab says. Temperature gradients within the plasma can lead to eddies, and the more unstable the cloud becomes, the more heat it loses. When the temperature gets low enough, the reaction dies. Plasma turbulence, in other words, is the biggest obstacle to fusion, limiting current reactors to brief pulses and preventing the kind of long-term reaction necessary for true power production.

That's why, when the next countdown begins in the control room, and I try to catch the real-time flash of the plasma shot on that tiny ceiling-mounted monitor, it’s gone before my camera can even focus. The replay starts to loop on the main screen—a slightly misleading bit of pyrotechnics, since the visible light released by the shot is generated at the edges of the plasma donut, where temperatures are at their lowest, and where fusion is not likely to occur. And while it’s possible that C-MOD’s pulses could one day last longer than seconds, this particular tokamak won’t reach the promised land. In many ways, C-MOD’s most important job is to pave the way for a reactor 10 times its size, called ITER.
The product of an international collaboration, ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak, and according to MIT’s Porkolab, it will be capable of pulses as long as 8 minutes, generating up to 500 MW of power (the most powerful tokamak, Britain’s JET, tops out between 10 and 20 MW). The jointly developed reactor will have roughly the same shape as C-MOD, but with 1000 times more volume in its chamber, and radio-frequency arrays operating at much higher frequencies. The goal for ITER is a self-sustaining reaction, where the plasma cloud remains stable and intact for long periods. For that to happen, scientists like Porkolab are using supercomputers to more precisely model plasma turbulence, and to develop novel methods of avoiding it. One technique is to go beyond simply surrounding the cloud with magnetic fields and slice it into cross-sections, creating layers that flow alongside each other, similar to the titanic superheated clouds on Jupiter. This process can break up the eddies that lead to instabilities, and create a more sustainable environment for fusion.

But even ITER, which is scheduled to be built within 8 to 10 years, is intended as a research facility—not as an answer to our current energy dilemma. It might produce an overall surplus of energy, but it won’t be cost-effective production. For that, Porkolab estimates we’ll have to wait for ITER to show results, possibly in the 2020s, and then wait another decade or so while demo reactors are built. That means we’d see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century.

Even that protracted timeline now appears optimistic. Since 2006, when seven member countries committed to the ITER’s $14.6 billion budget, federal funding for scientific research in the United States appears to have bottomed out. The U.S. agreed to pay 9.1 percent of the project’s total cost—but of the $160 million contribution planned for this year, Congress has approved just $10.7 million. “I’m laying off twelve ITER engineers,” Porkolab says, “and I can’t even get them severance pay.”

The C-MOD reactor is also limited by shrinking science funds. With more financial support, it could operate for 24 weeks out of the year. “Progress is very slow. We’re only running about half the time,” Porkolab admits. The work is likely to slow even further because of nationwide cuts to high-energy physics programs; such cuts have already led to 200 layoffs at Fermilab, a Dept. of Energy-funded particle accelerator in Illinois. If belts are in need of tightening, it might seem reasonable to limit research that appears to be wandering on the fringes. But when the primary goal of fusion is a revolution in clean energy, and the rest of the world is preparing to take a historic step in that direction, scientists fear it’s a particularly dangerous time to limit C-MOD and effectively pull out of ITER.

But even if C-MOD never reaches its full research potential, there’s more than one way to cook a plasma donut and scientists are also working feverishly on those. I leave C-MOD’s eerily perfect control room, with its starship-computer voice and distant, periodic generator rumble, for an entirely different set of pop-culture associations. Deeper, more subterranean, is a three-story-tall jumble of stainless steel—a mad scientist’s vision called the Levitating Dipole eXperiment, or LDX. Through grates in the floor, I can see researchers in hardhats weaving among the cables on the level below. In this reactor, the process of fusion confinement is complicated even further—a superconducting ring is lowered into the center of the chamber, where it levitates within the plasma. The resulting magnetic field is closer to the kind of field produced by planets like Jupiter. This project, which is a collaboration between MIT and Columbia University, is currently the only fusion experiment in the United States that uses the same kind of superconducting magnets that ITER will use. The project achieved a successful levitation this past November; unfortunately, there will be no levitation today, no plasma ignitions or ominous countdowns. For the LDX, glimpses of plasma—and the holy grail within—are few and far between

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Coal states push 'next-generation' clean fuel

But others want evidence carbon can be captured

Governors pushing alternative energy development are not shying from coal, a major culprit in global warming but also a homegrown energy source and an economic lifeline for many states.

Leaders of coal-rich states say clean-coal technology is a must. Governors from states without coal want more evidence the technology works.

"There's no doubt there's a tension and there's no doubt there is very rapidly growing public opposition to coal," said Gov. Jim Doyle, D-Wis. His state relies heavily on coal for power although Wisconsin does not produce coal.

Energy tops the agenda at the governors' annual winter meeting. The group's new clean energy initiative seeks to promote renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Next-generation coal is going to need to continue to be part of our energy future for this country," said GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, chairman of the National Governors' Association, on Saturday.

"It is abundant, it is available, it is Americanized in the sense that we control the supply. We would be incomplete and doing a disservice to the debate and the ultimate policy direction that we're going to take if we don't envision coal being part of that."

Next-generation coal typically refers to capturing and somehow sequestering or storing the carbon that coal produces. It also envisions reducing or eliminating emissions as coal is burned.

Pawlenty has embraced renewable fuels such as corn-based ethanol and conservation, but he also promotes clean-coal technology.

Such technology is a rallying cry for many coal-producing states. They say it is possible to continue relying on the fossil fuel while minimizing its impact on the environment.

Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., envisions an economic turnaround if clean-coal technology takes off.

"Coal states would be back in business big time, and the economies would flourish," said Rendell, the association's vice chairman.

Gov. John Baldacci, D-Maine, needs to hear more before he would include clean-coal technology among the promising energy ideas for the country. His state promotes renewable energy produced through wind, solar and even tides.

"You have to deal with the coal states, but I don't think you want them doing more of what they're doing until they change what they're doing and make it truly the next generation," he said. "Not just say clean-coal technology, but really do clean-coal technology."

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