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In case you don't know, the EU commission is discussing right now the building site of a future test fussion reactor called ITER. It'll cost over 10bn euros and it will be a proof of concept. The most likely location is somewhere in France and the construction will start in a few years. But don't hold your breath. We're at least 50 years away from the first commercial one.

Lots of info with drawings and hard-science here: http://www.iter.org/
EuroNews: http://www.euronews.net/create_html.php?page=detai l_europa&lng=1&option=9,europa

Hmm, nuclear reactions? Isn't the point to get hydrogen to be used with fusion(w/ helium3) without any byproducts? If you need to start using nuclear reactions, this still isn't a 'great' way to get hydrogen. I still believe using solarpanels and using electrolysis for getting hydrogen is still the best way. No CO2, no nuclear waste... Well that's just my opinion...

Fusion of helium-3 would be divine. Pity there isn't much here on Earth. (The moon is another matter.) It also usually costs hundred of dollars per litre. Bear in mind that there are several other reaction paths to fusion that don't require He-3. They aren't as ideal - just more practical.

Solar panels have their place, but they're never going to produce the amount of hydrogen needed for even a single nation's infrastructure. Even if solar panels were much more efficient, electrolysis itself isn't very energy efficient.

(As an aside, I was pleasantly suprised to run across an article about using good old Stirling engines & an array of mirrors to generate power from the sun - at higer efficiencies than panels and at costs comparable to fossil fuels. Have a read)

Now, on to the point of the story. Basically, some of the Generation IV nuclear reactor designs* can be used to produce lots of hydrogen, more or less as a byproduct of their operation. (Because of the extreme temperatures) So the fact that you've suddenly got the means for a hydrogen economy is a side-benefit.

Gen. IV reactor designs are cleaner, safer, more efficient, and generally smaller than their clunky old (current) counterparts. Yes, they are still fission. And while MOX reactors (which compose some of the designs) have questions about fuel reuse, a bona fide fusion reactor can be used to re-enrich spent fission fuel. (ie, blanket of uranium around reaction chamber, etc.) Fusion lets you make fission clean, or as close to it as possible.

Why is that important? Because no one is going to initially drop the trillion or so dollars to build the first commercially viable fusion reactor, when and if one is ever designed. ITER itself will be just a stepping stone, if it ever actually gets built. In the mean time, we'll still be fissioning away...

*Because of irrational fear and paranoia in the USA, most commercial reactors are Generation I or II. Not much has changed since the 70s. Nuclear can be dangerous, but it generally isn't and needn't be. It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.

Recently, BBC News reported that Europe might finally get on with the job of building ITER - the next stage of fusion power plant development. I believe ITER will use D/T fuel.

Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.

The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)

A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.

Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)

Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)

When I first read this I was thinking but isn't fusion currently incapable of producing more electricity than it consumes? Well, it turns out it is capable of producing more electricity than it consumes, but just barely. Not enough to sustain regular power generation. The record Power Amplification Factor (Q) is 1.25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_ fusion). This project is expected to push that factor up to 10, which is "proof of principle" but still below what is desirable for "good overall plant efficiency" (http://www.iter.org/ITERPublic/ITER/fr7.html). So that's why it's an "experimental" reactor. Based on the timeline of this project (and assuming it's successful) it looks like usable fusion reactors could be less than 50 years away.

...than they are at building their website. That home page is truly awful, with very little real text and everything done with images. If you want to visit with Lynx, or if you're a search engine, bad luck.

I'm a big fan of wind, but there are still lots of hurdles.

You'd need to cover the whole planet with windmills to cover the energy needs of humanity as the majority of it living in developing and third world countries build up their per-capita energy use to the orders of magnitude larger levels of developed countries (which is also growing as progress demands). Add to this increasing population, and you can see how all these pet projects the Greens have fail pathetically to meet a fraction of the upcoming demand. The fact is that you have here shown your sociopolitical bias -- you would restrict the progress of humanity by shoving a policy of decreased energy use down its throat. Shame on you! And this is all for nothing, as fusion can provide all the energy needed a million times over, and already the large multinational ITER project is preparing to begin construction of the first over-unity reactor several years from now.

Talking to oneself ain't good, but so is the lack of line breaks...

On ITER:

Question6, Bush: "a critically important experiment to test the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a source of electricity and hydrogen"

July 13th 2004, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham [energy.gov]: "a critically important experiment to test the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a source of electricity and hydrogen"

Firstly, ITER as a source of hydrogen? I know ITER might spur the hydrogen producers, but then could this equally say ITER would be a source of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and tritium (heavy-heavy hydrogen). Huh?

Secondly, are these the words of our much loved Mr. Bush or did he just copy and paste some of Spencer Abraham's memos? This looks more like a 'whole party' thing.

It produces even more radioctive waste than fission, because you have to transform the all the neutreons and other radiation coming out from the reaction, to heat.

I strongly suggest that you read more about nuclear fusion.

The number one problem of humanity is that we are consuming too much natural resources. The availability of a power-source like fusion would increase our consumption even more instead of reducing it.

Why would it not reduce our consumption of resources? When fusion is realised, less coal, oil and natural gas would be required to produce power.

Please everybody stop dreaming of fusion and use your resources (intellectual and monetary) on techonlogies like solar power, ....

I put my intellectual and monetary backing behind nuclear fusion, solar power does not spark my interest as I find that too much energy is reflected. This is a personal opinion of my own.

More info from ITER's site.

If a $100 billion investment was all it took, I think it would already be here. Fusion isn't easy.

Fusion is very easy. It's fusion that produces more energy than it uses up that is not easy.

However, the ITER people seem to think commercially viable fusion is not only possible, but realisable within a few decades.

The total cost for the ITER project is valued at 5 billion dollars, only a part of which is paid for by the US.

I think 100 billion dollars would make a big difference. ITER needs to be railroaded, since it's just moving too annoyingly slow.

Yet. ITER is touted as being the final research fusion reactor before production fusion reactors can be built.

--

In fact, Canada left negotiation on December 23rd.
More info about Iter on Iter Web Site with pretty cool drawings.

In fact, Canada left negotiation on December 23rd.
More info about Iter on Iter Web Site with pretty cool drawings.

In fact, Canada left negotiation on December 23rd.
More info about Iter on Iter Web Site with pretty cool drawings.

JET is the joint european taurus. But there used to be a project called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER was supposed to be the next big fusion reactor, and was supposed to achieve sustained burn. It's costs started to look like that of the SSC, so it was scaled down.

The ITER website has lots of useful info on fusion...

My personal beef with solar power is that, where I live, we statisticly receive around 150 days of sun a year, disproportionally in the warmer months. We've gone 30 days with grey, overcast skies in the winter. And no, I'm not from Alaska.

Wind and tides are out. Solar isn't a particularly good choice here except as a secondary source. (But it could possibly be used to separate and store hydrogen and oxygen. Don't know what the efficiencies are.) So we're back to "traditional" sources like natural gas and nuclear.

And that's how it should be really, one size doesn't fit all. Let the places like Arizona (with >300 days of solar a year) do solar power. Kudos. I say we up here build some small Gen IV nuclear plants (which can also generate hydrogen) and suppliment with renewables where we can. Flywheels make sense for industry (even homes sometimes) to store excess energy. Systems with magnetic bearing have crossed the 90% efficiency threshold. No hazardous materials and high maintenance costs as with batteries. Let's also put more money into fuel reprocessing and go for a closed nuclear fuel cycle to reduce waste.

The big problem in the US regarding nuclear innovation is, IMHO, that the power companies are all privately owned. They won't risk the capital to do anything innovative. That and so many environmental groups spread disinformation about the technologies that Joe Average gets freaked out by the word nuclear. Nuclear is the only way I see us ever making the bridge to a hydrogen economy...every other means of hydrogen production is far too inefficient, dirty, or wasteful.

Fusion...hmmmmm. Experiments have reached break-even and have even produced excess power. It is basically now a scaling problem, with some materials and containment problems tossed into the mess. If they ever stop vacillating on ITER and actually start construction on the damn thing, it will be easily be 10 years before it goes online, with about 20 years of experiments and tweaking planned. Then if it all worked they can begin with commercial plants. If anyone will pay for them.

Here's an explanation (read - Public Relations Piece) of IETR for the less-technical.

My personal beef with solar power is that, where I live, we statisticly receive around 150 days of sun a year, disproportionally in the warmer months. We've gone 30 days with grey, overcast skies in the winter. And no, I'm not from Alaska.

Wind and tides are out. Solar isn't a particularly good choice here except as a secondary source. (But it could possibly be used to separate and store hydrogen and oxygen. Don't know what the efficiencies are.) So we're back to "traditional" sources like natural gas and nuclear.

And that's how it should be really, one size doesn't fit all. Let the places like Arizona (with >300 days of solar a year) do solar power. Kudos. I say we up here build some small Gen IV nuclear plants (which can also generate hydrogen) and suppliment with renewables where we can. Flywheels make sense for industry (even homes sometimes) to store excess energy. Systems with magnetic bearing have crossed the 90% efficiency threshold. No hazardous materials and high maintenance costs as with batteries. Let's also put more money into fuel reprocessing and go for a closed nuclear fuel cycle to reduce waste.

The big problem in the US regarding nuclear innovation is, IMHO, that the power companies are all privately owned. They won't risk the capital to do anything innovative. That and so many environmental groups spread disinformation about the technologies that Joe Average gets freaked out by the word nuclear. Nuclear is the only way I see us ever making the bridge to a hydrogen economy...every other means of hydrogen production is far too inefficient, dirty, or wasteful.

Fusion...hmmmmm. Experiments have reached break-even and have even produced excess power. It is basically now a scaling problem, with some materials and containment problems tossed into the mess. If they ever stop vacillating on ITER and actually start construction on the damn thing, it will be easily be 10 years before it goes online, with about 20 years of experiments and tweaking planned. Then if it all worked they can begin with commercial plants. If anyone will pay for them.

Here's an explanation (read - Public Relations Piece) of IETR for the less-technical.

I recently saw the 'fusion roadshow' by our national plasma research institute. Although it was actually targetted at highschools it was great fun to watch with a whole audience of physicists. Their predictions were however a little bit negative: almost all of the fossil fuels will be used up in the next century when we achieve a maximum population of around 10 billion. Renewable energy sources such as wind power and hydraulics will be used more, but they will never be able to supply more than 25% of total demand. Their obvious answer was to invest in nuclear fusion now, all the other types cannot be scaled up enough.

Apparently the current best fusion reactor, JET, is close to break even point (energy in versus energy out). The future project ITER, to be built in France/Japan/Spain (depending on politics), will be the first to actually be a net energy producer. This will still only be a research plant. Production type plants are expected around 100 years from now, mightbe just in time to save us when the oil dries up.

We hear, every so often, that "nuclear fusion has occurred", and nothing ever comes of it. It either can't be replicated or is impractical for power generation.

Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?

The trouble with fusion reactor experiments (of the tokamak kind) is that they are tremendously expensive and lengthy to build. After the previous generation of European experiments (JET) there supposed to be something like a seven-year gap before ITER would become available. IIRC the US pulled funding on their independent fusion programme, but eventually decided to join ITER too; its pretty much the only tokamak game in town.

However, due to its cost, ITER has always been mired in politics (even the site hasn't been chosen yet - 5 years after the project was supposed to have started) and this leads to more delays and increased costs.

Plasma theorists also have to find something else to do (and alternate funding) between each round of testing; seven years is a long time and people leave the subject, retire, etc, never too return. You'd be a very brave man to pin your career hopes on ITER being built on time. This then causes manpower difficulties for the project when it finally gets into gear, which then suffers more delays and overruns, etc, as postdoc researchers are trained up.

In short; expect progress when ITER is build, but don't hold your breath.

The next one in the pipe is ITER.
Don't forget Canada and Spain as potential homes.

Break even can be defined in a number of ways. I think the next big goal of fusion research is to achieve "ignition" (which has not yet been achieved by any reactor.) Ignition implies a sustained reaction in which the energy produced by fusion is in turn used to sustain the fusion process. If I understand this, ignition in the case of NIF involved completely burning one fuel pellet with the energy produced mosty by fusion and ignited by the laser pulse (with a reactor built from NIF-type laser operating by burning multiple pellets.) In magnetically confined fusion, this would involve a sustained reaction within a confined plasma with fuel being continually injected into the plasma and burned by the "ignited" reaction sustained in the reaction vessel. I believe ignition of this type is the goal of the ITER project www.iter.org

Go there and you'll learn (1) it isn't CERN, it's a different european consortium, and (2) it isn't 'this': it's magnetically confined fusion, an entirely different kettle of worms. The people working on inertially confined fusion (lasers) are trying to solve some of the problems that magnetic confinement produces. But it's true that they are a long way behind. ITER will be along before all that long...

It kind of makes me wonder what is happening with ITER, which was an international project that started just before the end of the Cold War.

It looks like they are behind schedule too, but we were "supposed" to have fusion for a few decades now anyway.

"The incoming also creates a small amount of 'heavy water' in the oceans. The creation process I've been told is forever as long as the sun shines, and has long ago, as in billions of years, reached an equalibrium point."

Wrong. In the Big Bang about 90% of all matter formed hydrogen-1, about 10% formed helium-4, and about 0.15% formed hydrogen-2 (deuterium). This value has been confirmed in theory and observations of very old stars. In any given star, it will preferably use deuterium vice hydrogen-2 as a fuel due to the lower energy requirement. This leads to a deficient deuterium spectra when older stars are observed. Once the first stars supernova'd (known as population I stars), the remnants of the star (which only had elements up to roughly iron since that is all that fusion can produce exothermically, higher is endothermic) was ejected at incredible speeds (up to 0.3 c in some cases). This ejecta sometimes collided with interstellar gasses with such force that it transmuted the elements up to uranium rarely. Later this gas formed a population II star, and then a population III star, in our case the solar system. There is no deuterium production in the earth, and it is at the ~0.15% level naturally since large stars that supernova rarely eject burnt fuel, just their outer layers. But the deuterium in the universe is constantly decreasing. Neutron absorption reactions in nuclear reactors can occasionally produce it, but that is the only way that I know if its production.

"The one item I can't drag up from memory is the byproducts of its fusion"

D + D -> He-3 + neutron + lotsa energy (~50% chance)
D + D -> T (H-3) + proton + lotsa energy (~50% chance)
D + D -> He-4 + energy (rarely, less than 1%)

"Maybe its time some of the people playing with this gave us a progress report?"

ITER is expected to break even in a couple of years.

Fusion power is the way to go. It's potentially much safer and can generate a ton of electricity without air pollution.

Fusion power is the way to go. It's potentially much safer and can generate a ton of electricity without air pollution.

A note of the Canadian withdrawl from the ITER project.

The forefront of fusion research will be ITER. Unfortunately, this project is in peril because the participants have so far been unable to agree upon a location.

Canada withdrew from the project after its location was rejected by the other participants. Now France is threatening to split from the project.

Well, we're still working on getting a net-gain fusion reaction going with deuterium and tritium, which is a considerably easier fusion reaction to start than deuterium and Helium-3. The advantage with the D-He3 reaction is that it is theoretically aneutronic, but in any D-He3 fusion-capable environment you're going to have enough D-D fusion to have to worry about neutrons anyway...

Actually, Bush has made ITER a high priority.

Last time I checked, Canada, Russia and China preferred the Japanese site.

• EU (28%)
• Japan (28%)
• Russia (14%)
• USA (10%)
• China (10%)
• South-Korea (10%)

Yes, the "fusion power will be workable in N years" mantra that's been heard from many sources for the past 40 years is frustrating, and considering that here it is 2003 and we still havent even reached ignition in any laboratory reactor is dissapointing to say the least. However, it is important to note that during this time fusion research hase come a VERY long way. I don't see how this progress can continue forever with no results.

As I understand, getting the power out is one of the more tricky aspects of building a usable fusion reactor. The problem is that if the fusion plasma comes to close to anything it tends to cool down, get polluted, and stops burning.

The current designs use a 'diverter' which modifies the magnetic confinement field near the edge of the plasma, sucking out both impurities and energy.

There's more info on the ITER site here

The fusion plant they are talking about will be the ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, so it's designed to make fusion power a reliable reality. Check out ITER's web page for more info on the project.

Fines are mouting following Sol's blatant disregard of the C&D order. And the newly implemented blocking filters just aren't 100% effective, yet.

Rest easy, this should all be resolved as soon as designs for the fusion reactor, Iter (pronounced, unless my Latin is rusty, as "eater"), are accepted as prior art and all sunlight users pay appropriate licensening fees.

Iter

I believe that nanotech, just like AI and superconductivity, is a pipe dream.

Superconductivity will be used in ITER. The next big thing for plasma physics.

http://www.iter.org/ is the ITER Project web site. The ITER U.S. is not really in production.

The only practical candidate actually is fission since fusion doesn't yet work. The only way fusion can work right now is to produce fuel for fission reactors in a hybred cyle. This puts say a thorium cadding around the fusion reaction. The neutrons from the fusion reaction transmute the thorium into U233.

You can check ITER if you wish from some information on fusion. This reactor is suppose to have Q=5 when it is built - about 15 to 20 years from now.

It is hard to say if this will be a practical reactor mind you. One thing to note is that it is not planned as a hybred and hense the neutron flux from the fusion reaction will end up irradiating the sheilding materials and magnets and hense it will produce a lot of radioactive waste just as fission reactors do.

A better method that we can use right now is to build a spallation recactor. In a spallation reactor we have a high energy proton source (basically an accellerator) that is directed at a fuel target. The protons crash into the nucleus of the target atoms and release a very large flux of neutrons which in turn fission more atoms. Such a reactor is inherantly safe because the moment you turn off the beam, the reaction shuts down.

Another advantage of spallaton technology is that it can burn the wastes as well. What you need to check is actinide transmutation. Not only can we get power from the wastes.. we also transmute long lived isotopes to not radioactive and very short lived isotopes.

Of course.. the whole area of nuclear energy is the subject of a great deal of disinformation and underfunding.

Within a few years I personally expect this to change because we are running into a fossil fuel shortage that will grip the world. Check the Hubbert peak website for more information. Pay close attention to North American Natural Gas Supplies as well because they peaked Q1 2001. It is possible this will turn out to be the historical peak as well because supplies are still dropping in spite of intense drilling.

The idea that MacKensie Valley gas will relieve the problem is a pipe dream. With the expected output increases of Syncrude operations in the Tar Sands of Alberta, the expected gas demand is going to exceed what a Mckensie Valley pipe line can carry.

In fact... another way of looking at this is as follows. THere are about 1.7 tillion barrels of oil in the tar sands with about 300 billion barrels recoverable through conventional technology (mining and insitu). The problem is that the molecules need to have the hydrogen to carbon ratios increase. Gasoline for instance has a ration of about 2:1 (two parts hydrogen to 1 of carbon and the exact formula for the largest consituant component of gasoline is H(2n+2)C(n)... )

So you see, really what tar sands is all about is that it is a mining operation to get the carbon so that hydrogen can be added to it. In this sense we have already entered the hydrogen technology era.

Now... if 1/2 the carbon is disposed of (possibly via CO2 emissions) then that 300 billion barrel resource drops to 150 billion barrels.

Note that the USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. This means tht 150,000 million barrels will keep the US supplied for only 7500 days or about 20 years. Then it is all gone basically.

However, the total Canadian supply of natural gas is enough to only lighten about 10% of this resource and this means that natural gas could not be used for anything other than chemically lightening bitumen.

So any way we look at it we're going to be in deep shit in short order unless we start building alternative plants now.

Well... I wouldn't be quite so quick to write off fusion power. See, there's a point at which a fusion reaction generates power and becomes self-sustaining. Since the first tokamaks were built in the 1970s, there has been pretty much logarithmic progress toward that point.

See?

(I saw a more detailed picture with points drawn for major reactor projects like JET in my quantum book, but have been unable to find another since. Foo. Anyone out there seen it?)

--grendel drago

1) Old reactors suffer from old and bad design constraints.

2) These same old reactors also suffer from improper management which leads to the numerous problems such as sludge and accident potential.

3) All of this could have been avoided by adopting new nuclear technology and proper maintenance and cleanup.

4) New reactor designs such as the pebble bed and the Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor eliminate many of these problems while producing 50% more efficiency and less waste.

and 5) (a biggie) if the whole world used Nuclear power, Uranium reserves would be depleted in an estimated 50-100 years depending on the recycling technology.

The future of power generation is really either in de-centralizing power by using things like fuel cells in every home. Or, creating even bigger power grids hooked up to a Fusion Reactor. However, the fact of the matter is that if civilization is to continue for another 100 or even 200 years (not that long from a historical method), then great strides in technology need to be taken now. And it looks like they are. Fusion is ready for the first power generating beta reactor, fuel cells are ready now, its now up to business and society to see the work completed....

Ha thanks! I don't think that they've picked a site yet, though. :) Sean

"And you believe a guy whose family is heavily invested in the oil industry?"

Well, considering how back in late January the Bush Administration rejoined the Internationa Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project (details of the move here), the one that the Clinton Administration pulled out of in 1998, I'd say "yes."

The US government is in negotiations to get back involved with ITER. ITER is the big international magnetic confinement fusion experiment. The US government pulled out in the mid-nineties after Newt Gingrich's congress greatly reduced DOE's research budget.

The US government is in negotiations to get back involved with ITER. ITER is the big international magnetic confinement fusion experiment. The US government pulled out in the mid-nineties after Newt Gingrich's congress greatly reduced DOE's research budget.

It's always 10 years away.

There still is some radioactive waste. (he3?)

It won't be as cheap as fossil.

However:

The science works, it's mainly a technical issue (containment, superconducting magnets)

The waste elements are much lighter, so the halflife is measured in years, not aeons

There is much more deuterium and tritium around than U235. The oceans first, then the gas giant atmospheres...

Get some real information on fusion:

European Community, Fusion Programme

U.S. Fusion Energy Sciences Program

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or (ITER) site

a special Canadian ITER site

This page has a lot of links to different fusion sites around the world. These websites probably contain a lot more useful information than the slashdotted article.

By the way, my university happends to have a research center on plasma physics. It's not as easy as "some basic engineering skills, this site and the inspiration necessary to make your very own 'fusor' produce more energy than it consumes" =)