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U.S. and China Join Fusion Project
Garp writes "According to the BBC News website, the U.S. has finally decided to join the international Fusion project, Iter, along with China, with the aim of building the worlds first commercially viable Fusion reactor. Fusion is one of the cleanest forms of energy conversion, excluding renewable natural sources, like wind farms, tidal generators, and solar cells."
ICF was never principally for power generation; it was a weapons-lab project with energy thrown in as an afterthought to make it look like it had peaceful purposes. The big ICF facility in the states, NIF, is just coming online now... and the future of ICF will have nothing to do with what happens with ITER.
So we'd have fusion technology today if Joe Scmuchatelli had a weak inkling of what happens in a nuclear reactor? I'm afraid you're vastly uninformed about fusion. The problem isn't that Joe Sixpack doesn't know a little, the problem is that Joe Scientist doesn't know the intricacies of how to maintain a fusion reaction. That's why this facility is being built.
Fusion research has reached a stage where the only way to get closer to commercial production is to scale the whole experiment up. You state that there haven't been any experiments to show fusion can be used commercially... Well Duh! Researchers have only recently gotten past the break even point. That's why we call it "experiment", and not "commercial implementation". The problem is not one of not enough qualified workers and thus it's too expensive, the problem is we just don't know how to make a sustainable fusion reactor yet.
AccountKiller
They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors.
Fusion reactors do not generate high level radioactive waste that must be isolated for geological lengths of time in the way fission reactors do. The radioactive by products from a fusion reactor are low level and with short half-lives (less than 100 years). The short half-life makes in place storage of the irradiated structural components quite feasible - they don't need to be transported etc.
In addition a fusion reactor is fail safe - there is no danger of a meltdown or similar event.
The real attraction of fusion is that it is potentially extremely scalable. Alternative energy sources like solar, wind, etc. are attractive within the near term framework of reducing greenhouse gases over the next decade or two. Ultimately however it is hard to imagine how these dilute, funtamentally limited sources of energy will supply what is needed for strong economic growth into the next century, or a world population that exceeds 10 billions.