A world leader in nuclear research now calls Perth home, and is still active in the energy debate.
UNLIKELY as it may seem, Perth’s long-gone iconic Boans department store may one day be looked back on as ground zero of a cleaner and more sustainable nuclear age.
For it was at Boan’s in 1958 that a young Perth science student caught the spark that would ultimately make him one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear fusion.
Today, after decades at the forefront of fusion research in Europe and Japan, physicist Barry Green has returned to where it all began.
Officially retired, Dr Green now lectures on energy sustainability and plasma physics as a visiting fellow at the University of Western Australia, in between lobbying for Australian involvement in the international fusion research program known as ITER.
But he smiles as he looks back to the day it all started on the shop floor at Boan’s.
“It was the Best of British week, and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority had a display there, detailing all the fantastic things they were doing,” Dr Green says.
“There was a lot about (nuclear) fission, but down in the bottom right hand corner there was something on fusion. I thought this all looks very space age and modern ... and that was the basis of my interest in fusion.”
For the uninitiated, nuclear fusion is something of a holy grail for physicists.
Nuclear fission creates energy and myriad radioactive by-products through the highly volatile process of splitting atoms in two.
Nuclear fusion occurs where the nuclei of two atoms are combined, in turn releasing even more energy than fission with a fraction of the harmful radioactive by-products.
But the technical challenges of harnessing fusion remain immense, not the least being the need to attain and hold temperatures hotter than the sun for the reaction to occur.
It is in that quest that Dr Green has become one of the world’s leading pioneers.
Born in Queensland, Dr Green spent his formative years in Perth before studying the new field of plasma physics at Sydney University in the early 1960s. From there he moved to Princeton in the US, where a German colleague convinced him to join the renowned Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany.
It was while on staff at the institute that Dr Green became involved with Europe’s leading fusion research facility, the Joint European Torus or JET, in Oxfordshire.
At JET, in 1991, Dr Green made world headlines as the engineer in charge of the first ever controlled fusion reaction, producing a breakthrough 2 megawatts of power.
“That was my small claim to fame. I was on page 3 of The Guardian and all that sort of stuff , but it was a real thrill because it was something tangible,” he laughs.
Dr Green then became part of the European and Japanese teams working on the multinational ITER program (Latin for “the way”), the world’s leading nuclear fusion research body backed by the European Union, US, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and India.
He spent 10 years with the ITER program in Japan before joining the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research in 2003 to co-ordinate the fusion research programs of member countries. On reaching the commission’s mandatory retirement age of 65 in 2006, he returned to Perth, his wife’s hometown.
An avid supporter of nuclear power, Dr Green believes Australians must ultimately embrace a diverse mix of energy sources if they want sustainable long-term supplies.
“We really need an ideal mix of energy,” he says. “It’s not a question of one silver bullet. You have to use whatever you can because the problem is so huge.
“We are blessed with solar, wind, and wave, but at the present moment these things can’t support us 24-7. So where’s the big base load power going to come from? It clearly has to be nuclear in one form or another.”
Given Australia’s reliance on its vast gas and coal reserves, both for power generation and export dollars, Dr Green also believes the federal government’s funding for clean coal and carbon sequestration research is vital.
“Fossil fuels are so important in Australia that we can’t just discard them without trying to make them clean, so the work being done on sequestration is absolutely essential.”
He also sees Australia’s failure to adequately promote science education as an attractive and worthwhile career option as a major problem. He sees one price of Australia’s poor scientific literacy as being the poor quality of debate on key issues such as climate change.
“So much of the debate on climate change is scientifically uninformed,” he says. “There are lots of bits of evidence that point in one direction, but there also lots of things ... that can’t be substantiated. It’s being misunderstood, and a lot of the claims being made are being overtraded, and that is the problem.”
Dr Green has no doubt that climate change is real and that mankind is playing a role in it. But he also remains uncertain whether man is the driving force in that change.
“We certainly play a role but the problem is how big a role and I don’t think that’s clear.”
What do you do get up to outside the world of nuclear fusion?
I like to swim - we swim with the Stadium Snappers at Challenge Stadium, and my wife Helen and I swam in the world (masters) championships here two years ago ... we have a lot of fun, and that keeps us going.
You have lived and worked all over the world - where is your favourite place to be?
Perth - definitely. This is absolute paradise, just don't tell anyone ... and leave Perth the way it is.
After 50 years as a research scientist, what personal goal do you still hope to achieve?
My personal goal is really to put something back, in other words, enthuse kids for science, in particular for the sort of science I've been doing. One of the problems we have is getting bright young things to go into science. It's at secondary school we need to grab them and say that science and maths are great careers and you will have a lot of fun.
Do you believe climate change is real?
It's not a question of whether climate change is occurring - it always has and always will. The only issue is whether mankind is the dominant influence, and the answer to that is not clear.
So what should government do?
I don't believe a trading scheme is the way to go. I believe you have to have direct action, and you have to start generating power in a different way.
