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are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us?

Yes, if you read the reports they give some examples:

"However, several experimental facts do require the extension of the Standard Model and explanations are needed for observations such as the abundance of matter over antimatter, the striking evidence for dark matter and the non-zero neutrino masses. Theoretical issues such as the hierarchy problem, and, more in general, the dynamical origin of the Higgs mechanism, do likewise point to the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model."

Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration?

Huge amounts of money are already going towards bio-medical research, both by governments and commercial interests: "Globally, in excess of US$200bn is invested each year in biomedical research." link
There is already a multi-billion dollar international research project on fusion energy (see ITER). Fusion energy commercialization in an engineering challenge and not fundamental research and is already be addressed by commercial investment: Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, General Fusion, Helion Energy, LPPFusion, Proton Scientific and others.
Space exploration is being funded: "global government investment in space exploration totaled $14.6 billion in 2017" link and space exploration is also going commercial, witness SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and United Launch Alliance.

It will run at 400 - 600 seconds and will produce more energy than it consumes, that is all. There is no power plant attached nor will there ever be: https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals

And the power production is not clean as long as we use deuterium + tritium, the reactor vessel will have to be replaced around every 10 years and discarded as highly radioactive waste.

Regarding sustainability: ITER will attempt to breed tritium ... lets see how good that works. Otherwise we had to farm tritium from the sea, which is energy intensive and causes another spot in the chain to work with an radioactive element.

Link us to the research paper that supports your conclusion then. The "unreliable" Wikipedia provides links to research papers on this. The ITER team itself believes the record is 0.67 and is held by JET.

Wikipedia is unreliable. I use silly things like research papers.

Well that's wonderful! While you're fixing wikipedia you better also go sort out those idiots at ITER, who say the same thing:

"Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 16 MW of fusion power, for 24 MW of power used to heat the plasma (a Q ratio of 0.67)"

https://www.iter.org/sci/Beyon...

It's almost as if wikipedia actually is pretty reliable, and cites credible sources! But that must be an illusion, right? Clearly those assclown scienticians at ITER are just a bunch of ignorant bastards who have never read any papers. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to have your input! Imagine how much progress they'll be able to make once they know that they've been wasting their time trying to get to break-even when others have already done it!

I don't know why this /. article is full with "energy break even" myths.

There never was energy break even in a magnetic contained plasma anywhere on the world! And currently running reactors are not even designed with the attempt to reach break even: https://www.iter.org/sci/Beyon... " Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 16 MW of fusion power, for 24 MW of power used to heat the plasma (a Q ratio of 0.67). "
ITER might achieve break even, perhaps it does not: "Scientists have now designed the next-step deviceâ"ITER - as a Q > 10 device (producing 500 MW of fusion power for 50 MW consumed by the heating systems). ITER will begin writing the chapter on 21st century fusion."

Then they are doing it all wrong?

https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusio...

Wouldn't it be as simple as the containing vessel heating up

As simple as containing the plasma for very long (but never done), as simple as going to Mars and coming back (never done), etc. Assuming that something you don't fully (not even partially; you and anyone else, because this situation has never happened) understand is easy doesn't seem as a sensible approach. Additionally, when we are talking about crazily demanding conditions beyond anything which has ever been tried, that word sounds even more inadequate (to say it very softly).

Note that the reason for using magnetic fields (a virtually experimental methodology, very expensive and with unclear reliability) to confine the plasma (the vessel surrounds the magnetic field, but never touches the plasma) is that it is too hot for anything else (I mean any material ever). All what they are doing now is trying to keep the plasma for as long as possible, what means making sure that the temperature outside the magnetic field is low enough.

Their theory seems (corresponding section of the ITER webpage, the most ambitious fusion project) to agree with your suggestion: the small proportion of plasma heat getting outside the field is used to increase the temperature of the surrounding water (what, as per my knowledge, hasn't ever been tested). Even by assuming that all this works and by forgetting about all the problems which such a setup might provoke, how could you know/affect in any way the temperature variation? The generation of steam isn't precisely a random process happening under random conditions. The exact temperatures of the water and of the generated steam have to be perfectly controlled. A process like fission is highly stable, predictable and controllable; to not mention that the default temperatures are already quite close to the target (the reactor is precisely designed to make sure that this is the case). I don't know, perhaps something like a range of 90-110 Celsius degree at the water tank under extreme conditions. But what can you do when dealing with millions of degrees? How can you come up with a way to tune up these values to meet orders of magnitude smaller targets? Getting the 0.000000231% of the plasma's heat and, eventually, moving it to 0.000000232% to account for whatever issue? Could you put an example of a methodology allowing to convert 10^6 values into 100 with a precision below 1? Can such a methodology deal with a temperature-variation scenario?

500 degrees

Even my assuming that this would be possible, how do you expect to modify this temperature to reach the 100 target? Whatever you do would imply an additional expense of energy which would have to be brought into consideration while determining the total gain/loss.

ITER https://www.iter.org/ quite detailed.

It can already be done (Teller etc), it's just scaling it down to a manageable scale that's the problem.

You're referencing a thermonuclear device. Ok, but containing the reaction and getting adequate temperatures are the problems we have today. Scale at this point is moot. See ITER.

https://www.iter.org/

Start date: 2020.

The only -current- viable source of tritium is fission. However fusion can produce its own tritium in breeder blankets. This is one of the concepts that will be researched in ITER: https://www.iter.org/mach/trit...

So the last part of your post "but it's not a viable power source unless the need for tritum is eliminated" is just wrong.

Let's hope not. The ITER project (link for which this simulation is intended, is planning to have first plasma in 2020. Which means that the simulation, when run in 2018, will be just about in time for making last ajustments in the steering of the magnes and other anti EMP measures that are in place.

At least two or three schemes aim to do fusion with D-D or p-B11... they are more practical than the white elephant in France and make the helium 3 issue moot.

And how much of that is precisely because we keep cutting funding or simply not devoting the resources that could make it viable in, say, 20 years? No, fusion is seen as a long-term investment so there's every incentive to make long-term funding decisions that seen no reason to get a result in 20 years vs 60 years if it means spending three times as much (at least) in 20 years. That it creates some sort of morale problem seems to be missed or ignored

Exactly.

Break ground in 2008, 5 years before construction begins (2013), another 2 before assembly of the reactor (2015), 4 more years before commissioning (2019), and only starting full operations in 2027. That's 19 years. It should not take 7 years simply to build the building that will house the reactor, unless money is so tight that they have to pull money out of multi-year budgets. If you throw enough funding at it they should easily be able to go from breaking ground to first plasma in a fifth of the time their roadmap shows. The building that takes 7 years to build should be able to go up in 3 months easily.

ITAR is a (...) project led by the French

Not exactly French. From the ITER site:

Three departments report directly to the Director-General Osamu Motojima: Administration; ITER Project; and Safety, Quality & Security. Click on the Organizational Chart below to find out more about the management structure of the ITER Organization.

and (picture)

Management greets staff on the first ITER Day in September 2011: Rem Haange, Department for ITER Project; Carlos Alejaldre, Safety, Quality and Security; Director-General Osamu Motojima; and former head of the Department of Administration, Rich Hawryluk

So, top management is made of
Director General: Osamu Motojima (Japan)
Deputy Director-General and Head of the ITER Project Department: Remmelt Haange (Netherlands)
Safety, Quality and Security: Carlos Alejaldre (Spain)

Or, look at the Organization Structure. No French in the top management

ITAR is a (...) project led by the French

Not exactly French. From the ITER site:

Three departments report directly to the Director-General Osamu Motojima: Administration; ITER Project; and Safety, Quality & Security. Click on the Organizational Chart below to find out more about the management structure of the ITER Organization.

and (picture)

Management greets staff on the first ITER Day in September 2011: Rem Haange, Department for ITER Project; Carlos Alejaldre, Safety, Quality and Security; Director-General Osamu Motojima; and former head of the Department of Administration, Rich Hawryluk

So, top management is made of
Director General: Osamu Motojima (Japan)
Deputy Director-General and Head of the ITER Project Department: Remmelt Haange (Netherlands)
Safety, Quality and Security: Carlos Alejaldre (Spain)

Or, look at the Organization Structure. No French in the top management

maybe thats the tokamak's containment failing.. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Actually, the problem with the ITER approach is that it cannot ever produce net power because of Bremsstrahlung losses inherent to its design. Simply put, you cannot heat the plasma with radiowaves AND extract useful heat from it because it's more efficient at cooling down itself radiatively in radiowaves you cannot make good use of.

That's why it's going to use Neutral Beam Heating

It is also highly vulnerable to disruptions, as are all magnetically-confined fusing plasma (all variants of tokamaks) - disruptions that are similar in nature to solar eruptions and will cause catastrophic damage.

Not all magnetic confinement devices have disruptions. Stellarator

But ITER will still eat billions, mostly in tax money, to get some science done at least... though it seems from TFA that this last part will be abandoned for the sake of trying futilely to produce energy instead.

Achieving ignition is still doing science. It's just going to be different science.

Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.

No, you misunderstand. ITER is not predicting fusion power in 15 years. They are predicting a gigantic laboratory experiment that will: Not. Produce. Any. Electricity. Whatsoever.

ITER declares itself to be a model for a far more expensive fusion prototype power plant called DEMO for which even the conceptual design will not be seen for years, and could not produce grid electricity before the 2040s, which is, wait for it, still more than 25 years away!

Once DEMO has been built and has been put into operation is will be proven that since the capital cost for the breeding blanket alone dwarfs the cost of even fission reactors it will be the most expensive source of electricity in the world, costing more than solar power does today.

What do you mean by ITER having a good head start? ITER is still a giant construction site! Here's what ITER currently looks like. Yes, it's that hole in the ground.

The Google Maps imagery dates from 28th May 2009. For current construction information, go have a look at http://www.iter.org/construction

They're not yet complete, but they are way, way further along than the Google images show. There are building complexes under heavy construction now.

Reminds me of a story from ITER (giant tokamak being built in the south of France), where they used low-tech coconut shells to solve a really high-tech problem. Sometimes Nature provides us with solutions that work better than anything man-made.

They need to build cryocoolers to remove helium and contaminants from the reactor, and the best material they've tested so far, came from burnt shells of coconuts imported from Indonesia. So the EU has been busy stockpiling enough coconuts to last the lifetime of ITER...

http://www.iter.org/newsline/116/1681

You misunderstand, my bad.

By not doing too well I mean:

1) We're still burning fossil fuels. Period. Not cracking atoms and persuing renewables.
2) Decades of stagnation in development and deployment
3) Plagued by NIMBYs and doom mongers.

Not to mention the climate sceptics saying coal's fine and the enviromentalits demanding we all run off of a few wind mills and... coal until we build more wind mills?? Eh?

Bunch of idiots.
Bulldoze the lot, build nuke plants until fusion is ready.
It's the only way to be sure.

My money for long term sustainability is on:

ITER: http://www.iter.org/
Desertec: http://www.desertec.org/
Pelamis: http://www.pelamiswave.com/#5 (Oh look an inventor!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Yemm)

Richard Yemm is the British inventor of the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter and director of Pelamis Wave Power, a company he founded in Edinburgh in 1998.

He spend years in a small (very big) shed (wave tank) developing a practical spin on the work of another incredible inventor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Salter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salter's_duck

And Salter's duck was invented in 1974 as a result of the 1973 oil crisis.
So why aren't island nations now powered by the waves? It is after all 40 years later.
Because funding was cut off in the 80s after the oil prices came back down.
And becasue the british government employ ACTUAL PSYCHIC WITCHES they knew in the early 80s that there would never again be a shortage of cheap plentiful energy in the UK!!

Congratulations lads (and lass).

And that ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't drive a fission powered hover duck.

Er..

True.

But I saw a programme on the BBC called geniuses of invention.
It was about the geniuses that gave us the power station, and mighty minds they were, making incredible metal leaps off of the knowledge of the day.
So even Watt and Faraday built on the work of others.

Then it cuts to today, the Drax Power Station. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_power_station

Where, in 2013, we BURN COAL TO DRIVE A STEAM ENGINE.

I know I'm being facetious but it seems a shame that nearly 200 years later we haven't really moved on at all.
It's probably down to the fact that we've needed a 100 years of work first in chemistry, physics and materials science before we can even consider moving beyond burning stuff.

Our large power generation is still based off of Newton's world, not, erm, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Pauli, Fermi, Schrodinger, Dirac, de Broglie and Bose's.

We tried fission, that's not working out too well.
The French have dug a big hole: http://stream.iter.org/cs-webcam1.swf
Soon they will shovel some fusion into it.

The Europeans are taking fusion very seriously and making nice progress.

ITER Construction will be managed within an agreed capped ceiling of 4,700 kIUA (ITER Unit of Account in thousands). This construction cap is based on the ITER Baseline adopted in July 2010 by the ITER Council and cannot be exceeded.

From here.

As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.

This is silly. There's been enormous progress on fusion over the decades. ITER may be the first time we actually achieve long term self-sustaining reactions.

But there's practically no cross-over between fusion neutron sources, and fusion energy sources. If you want a neutron source, build a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor and save yourself a lot of time and trouble - but those things will never be self-sustaining (unless Polywell's work out, but it seems more like those were a badly monitored experiment then real progress).

But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?

Negative. Conventional fusion exists, but is not practical at the moment for other reasons, requiring more research to lower those costs. Those other reasons are things like,

  1. dealing with high energy neutron flux and trying to come up with materials that will not be destroyed (during the lifetime of the plant, so at least 20-30 years) by such energy density - this is a materials research question and requires. You can't be replacing the liner every year because it disintegrates.

  2. someone needs to build a prototype plant and invest enough to work out all the uneconomic kinks

http://www.iter.org/sci
http://www.iter.org/sci/beyonditer

Fusion research has increased key fusion plasma performance parameters by a factor of 10,000 over 50 years; research is now less than a factor of 10 away from producing the core of a fusion power plant.

Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70% of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step deviceâ"ITERâ"which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.

So what is the difference between this and "cold fusion"? The former exists and is close to working. The later is in the realm of perpetual motion machines. It has never been demonstrated to occur in a reliable experiment, never mind producing any real energy.

But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?

Negative. Conventional fusion exists, but is not practical at the moment for other reasons, requiring more research to lower those costs. Those other reasons are things like,

  1. dealing with high energy neutron flux and trying to come up with materials that will not be destroyed (during the lifetime of the plant, so at least 20-30 years) by such energy density - this is a materials research question and requires. You can't be replacing the liner every year because it disintegrates.

  2. someone needs to build a prototype plant and invest enough to work out all the uneconomic kinks

http://www.iter.org/sci
http://www.iter.org/sci/beyonditer

Fusion research has increased key fusion plasma performance parameters by a factor of 10,000 over 50 years; research is now less than a factor of 10 away from producing the core of a fusion power plant.

Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70% of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step deviceâ"ITERâ"which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.

So what is the difference between this and "cold fusion"? The former exists and is close to working. The later is in the realm of perpetual motion machines. It has never been demonstrated to occur in a reliable experiment, never mind producing any real energy.

http://www.iter.org/

Just keep in mind that disposing of the radioactive waste, as well as the entire structure of a plant (which inherently is classified as radiation waste as well) will cost billions in the long run, and just with this in mind. It will make nuclear energy to be the most expensive form of energy harvesting ever. Not to mention the dangerous byproducts. Of course (I think) most power plant carriers aren't liable for the disposal/safekeeping of nuclear waste, so in their books, it is of course the cheapest form of energy currently available. I expected more from the /. crowd, than just mindless rants and praise about this form of energy. The American nation has brought quite a lot of havoc upon this world by "applying" nuclear energy. And yet people seem to still believe that that 20th century brainwash propaganda .. I'm from Germany and I'm glad that the Germans finally have come to realize (at least I do hope so), and that germany might come up with a new course for energy harvesting which will lead the world into a new future that could eventually solve our energy crisis, even to an extent when energy could one day be freely available and distributed for every human being. But I might just be a dreamer about that, who really knows what the future will bring.. But really, AMERICANS, FRENCH, wake up, think about the nuclear waste and the disposal of it. That stuff costs more than you could possibly imagine, just make up your mind and stop that mindless propaganda. tnx, and about Siemens, well .. I was never particularly fond of Siemens, since I think to recall that they were involved in exporting building obsolete/insecure nuclear tech equipment/plants which did not meet EU security standards into third world countries just to provide a basis for the greedy nuclear power energy politics of old and sad men. With that in mind, and how ruthless and irresponsible the people in this industry act, I think it's fair enough that we finally turn this ship around and find real solutions. Anyway.. We'll see what the future brings :> Post Scriptum, I have my fingers crossed for ITER, which is about the real tech stuff called fusion ;> Since the planet has enormous amounts of hydrogen and quite a few tons of, err what was it again, Lithium? http://www.iter.org/
And yes, it is on its way! \o/

How is the LHC going to pay off in under 100 years? Sure, in an "advancement of knowledge" way it will pay off (and don't get me wrong, I think those are perhaps the best investments to make), but in terms of monetization? Developing new technologies? It won't happen.

What about ITER? Billions of dollars and decades of work for a fusion reactor that still won't break even on generating energy. Yet it's almost certainly going to be necessary down the road.

People's, and governments', lack of foresight is indeed distressing, but to say that there is absolutely no long term planning or investment is stretching it, to say the least.

Move to peer-to-peer microgrids which by the redundancy of many diverse small energy sources would fill gaps in baseload, reduce the need for redundant large powerplants and losses to electric resistance

I lived in an area with a "micro-power grid". The power to the local grid was supplied from a local business that was connected to the grid. Basically, they were a "micro-utility" of sorts, with a limited supply. This was in communist Poland about 50 years ago.

You know what happened? It worked very well, until someone down the street turned on their arc welder and there was a nice brown out throughout the neighborhood. Or someone started running a large motor. Hell, most of the time you couldn't run an electric motor because the phase was so "out of phase"!! (pun intended) Yeap, insufficient buffer on the "micro-grid" to counter lack of proper grid connection.

After the real grid was connected in the early 1980s, well, brownouts went away. People could actually use things like arc welders or electric motors without fucking up your neighbors power supply.

This is actually the reason to have a large power grid. It is called redundancy. Modern, well maintained grids don't tend to suffer from single point of failure anymore. And guess what? Renewables will require an even larger grid to counter their unpredictable intermediate tendency.

Finally, the article you linked are not "micro grids". They are regular grid with local utilization of locally generated power. Imagine that!!

They're also making great strides towards net-positive fusion using lasers

Err, no. As a physicist, I can tell you that laser confined fusion has about the same potential of making power as a fusor. The research is not aimed at production of actual power. You may want to read up the actual linked article. Let me quote to you the important part,

The Petawatt laser will also enable researchers to study the fundamental properties of matter, thereby aiding the Department of Energy's stockpile stewardship efforts and opening entirely new physical regimes to study.

If you want actual power project, you have to look at ITER.

http://www.iter.org/

What about nuclear fusion? Where are we in that development?

It's still as 20 years from today as it was 20 years ago :)
Funnily enough, from the ITER site:
If all goes well, DEMO [Demonstration Power Plant] will lead fusion into its industrial era, beginning operations in the early 2030s, and putting fusion power into the grid as early as 2040.

So, realistically: not any decade now.

But we don't have fusion power plants yet, nor are we particularly close to getting them.

The good people at ITER would beg to differ.

http://www.iter.org/

the ITER fusion reactor cant get done soon enough.

more funds towards science could help the world a LOT.

Why not? It's likely that by the time uranium runs out, fusion will be available. The current rough schedule is for a prototype power station in about 2040. And that's not just pie-in-the-sky, one indicator of progress is that now there's a lot of focus on engineering issues, not just plasma physics.

No guarantee that it'll be as cheap as fission, but if the alternative's no energy at all, that doesn't matter so much.

Does anyone ever read TFA at slashdot, or do any research before posting a comment. Oh... sorry, this is slashdot, of course they don't! The iter website actually lists the consortium as "China, EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA". Indeed if you want to get a job there, you need to be citizen of one of those areas. I'm British, which is (just about!) part of the EU, so I'm eligible. As it happens, they also include Switzerland with "EU", even though it isn't. The ITER project builds on the developments at JET and other fusion projects..... which have been looking for a way to get fusion working for along time already. Considering the potential benefit, the time and effort is worth it. Actually, I think it will take us that long to get to grips with the potential outcome. Imagine the disasterous consequences to the global economy if oil and gas were suddenly made worthless! Has anyone thought of doing the financial modelling of the possibility that ITER is successful?!

The ITER project www.iter.org is not and EU project, but an International project. The USA, Japan, China, India, Russia and Korea (South presumably!) are all involved! The last time I checked, the USA was not in the EU. Could be wrong there.... However, the ITER "machine" does happen to be in France. France is in the EU.

There are test reactors that produce the same amount of energy that it eats for controlling the plasma. See the ITER project for example (i hope it gets built, some usual childish problems around the place and etc hinders the project somewhat) http://www.iter.org/a/index_nav_1.htm

One of the ways they have improved things is to use supercooled magnets as part (I think!) of the plasma containment system as (as we all know!) supercooling the magnets makes them superconductors and therefore MUCH cheaper to run (even factoring in the cost of supercooling the suckers). The LHC uses a similar method.

The excellent BBC Horizon program on "How to build a star on Earth" with Prof. Brian Cox talked about all this stuff in a quite approachable way, although I'm sure accusations of bias could be levelled at their enthusiasm for the subject, it was encouraging when he asked all the scientist how likely and how long and they all had a high percentage for "How likely" (80%+) and how long (15 to 25 years).

He ended with the thought that this tech could come MUCH sooner if we decided it was a good bet and invested in it, which could be the words of a snake-oil salesman or it could be the answer to the Earth's energy needs. Certainly just wheeling out the cliched "It's always been 20 years away" mantra doesn't really help. I'd say we should throw the money at it now - it certainly won't be as big a waste of funds as some of the other things we seem so happy to spend money on, and could be the first genuinely big step humanity's made for a long while!

What we need is some CERN-scale collaboration on this so that we can possibly help to alleviate the energy strains on the global populace.

You means something like JET http://www.jet.efda.org/ or ITER http://www.iter.org/ ?

For all the hoopla about inertial confinement, my money is on magnetic confinement as in ITER (see http://www.iter.org/).

This is something that people say quite often that buggs me. We ALREADY have the ability to make nuclear fusion reactors. The trick is makeing them produce more energy than they consume. But ya 2020/2030 may be good time frame for the possibility of a commercial plant. For those of you who want to do a little introduction reading http://www.iter.org/a/n1/downloads/construction_schedule.pdf the ITER project aims to be produce more energy than it consumes and it should be finished in a few years. It will never make more money than it consumes but theoretically it could be connected to the grid and i belive they plan on doing that. So ya France will have fusion power before the U.S dose thanks to Dubya et all not funding things properly.

I'm to young to really have a full comprehension of the politics at the time...but the cancellation was due to both some financial mismanagement, and competition with the International Space Station, which ran to 100 billion. I hear stories about how biologists were going to their congress-critter's office complaining about how the "proton racetrack" was going to cause them to loose all their funding. It's disgusting that different disciplines have to compete in this way. But if congress decides one day that project A is interesting, it should complete project A. When project A takes 12 years, and project B comes along after 2, and congress decides to switch funding from project A to project B...no project will ever be completed.

As I said, fire some bureaucrats, hire some auditors, help keep it on budget and avoid over-spending. But make sure the science gets done.

All that said, cooperating on international projects is a fantastic idea, and the US contributions to CERN should not be discounted. But a little competition greases the wheels of discovery.

Note that this year, the ITER funding was zeroed, and Fermilab was cut by $94 million, a change which required "voluntary" rolling furloughs. This was partially fixed by a supplemental funding bill in June, but due to the current budget crisis, the 2009 budget is passed under a "continuing resolution", which means that Fermilab is short and ITER is zero again, and we have to again grovel before our congress-critters for funding, which is highly unlikely since Wall Street is obviously more important than science.

The US is at a serious disadvantage.

Because for the last fifty years, fusion power has been constantly just twenty years in the future, that's why.

No.

The ITER guys state that it will take until the 2050s until the first production fusion powerplant comes online.

For its first 12 years, The ISS has been/will be an engineering project first, a science facility second (with the unending stream of budget cuts and cost overruns invariably being held against the science part). Only when the crew size is increased to 6, after the delivery and outfitting of Node Three, will sufficient crew time be available for science to take the forefront of ISS operations.

Even disregarding the ISS, ITER could give the LHC a good run for its money in the cost department, though it's not expected to begin operations for another 10 years.

Just for the record, that is a diagram of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), not the Large Hadron Collider.

However, the ITER is being perhaps as impressively documented, and a lot of that is also online. Keep in mind that the ITER design is not complete, but the overall architecture shouldn't change much. In addition to a huge amount of data on the operating theory and conditions, if you dig around through the site, you can even find animations of the mechanical parts (which are primarily for maintenance) in action.

Hardcore Nerd Stuff:
ITER Design

This has already been done and the research is going on now at ITER. This should be one of the last research reactors ever built. It is built to generate 500 MW for 400 seconds. After this reactor its on to large scale deployment. http://www.iter.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_confinement_fusion

It's amazing how many tabletop cold fusion experiments have attracted public attention, and all turned out to be fraudulent when they claimed to have started nuclear reactions. The worldwide large-scale not-so-cold fusion project ITER has just started, with an estimated cost of 5bn EUR, and there are still guys out there trying to outsmart them on a tabletop and some cookbook chemistry.

There are a variety of techniques (depending on the application) that manufacturers use to overcome the inherent brittle nature of most superconductors.

For magnet windings, the preferred technique is to fabricate the wire from ductile precursors, draw to final size, wind the coil, and then perform a heat treatment to react the precursors and form the brittle, superconducting phase. This, for example, will be the technique used when brittle Nb3Sn is used in the magnets for the ITER project.

A related solution is to grind the brittle superconductor into powder, insert it into a tube, and use the natural rolling and sliding action of the particles to draw the material into a fine wire that can be subsequently wound into a magnet, with a heat treatment employed to sinter the powder particles back together to form a continuous superconducting path. This is a common technique for MgB2 superconductors.

For non-magnet applications (like power transmission), the preferred technique is to make a tape (e.g. YBCO) that has only a very thin layer of brittle superconductor. Just like a glass fiber, this very thin layer has a very small bending moment in one direction, and so can be spooled (and unspooled) in this direction, allowing you to manage long lengths.