France Will Be Home To Fusion Plant

ScentCone writes "After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility. The plant will use deuterium-from-seawater and a huge electromagnetic ring to produce the 100-million-C conditions in which researchers hope to produce viable fusion. The debate over whether this is even possible continues to rage. The ITER project started in 1985, and there has been a running fight over money and location since. France indicated that if Japan (one of the holdouts) didn't see it their way, they'd build a coalition of the willing and do it anyway. With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin." Coverage also available at MSNBC, the NYTimes, CNN, and the BBC.

Comments

When did Greenpeace become anti-energy

[HMA2000]

From TFA:

Greenpeace, for one, stated that "at a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project."

I swear, I think Greenpeace is more concerned about making sure nobody builds any new powerplants than they are about protecting the environment.

They are against new coal plants with modern scrubber technology, they are against fission plants, now they are against this expiremental fusion plant. Do they realize that humanity needs energy to live and thrive? Do they realize that by not building new more efficient powerplants they are forcing people to rely on older, more polluting powerplants more heavily?

It seems counterintuitive to me, it's like they would rather stick their thumb in the eye of corporations than actually help the environment.

A little bit disappointed, but there's an upside

[haggar]

I have nothing against France (only some French), but I was warmly hoping that Japan gets the project. In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.

Still, France is OK, because they are one of the countries with highest % of nuclear energy. So much so, in fact, that they make a lot of good money exporting it.

And get this: one of the largest importers (the largest?) offrench electric energy is Germany, who have outlawed and disbanded their nuclear plants due to Green misguided pressure, and are now
a) polluting themselves with coal plants, which actually produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants of same energy output (not to mention other pollutants).
b) paying for el. energy to France, which is produced by nuclear plants which are close enough to Germany, that if a meltdown happened, they would be just as affected!

There is something humorous in all this.

ITER is a fiasco!

[InterGuru]

I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)

Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.

Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.

Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.

Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion, but now is resurrected. I assume that they found some technical advances, or just "cooked the books" space-station style to justify it.

The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a 10 years ago in response to this.

Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.

Last decade the Trisops machine was moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.

Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).

The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.

This is a update of an earlier post Don't sell your Exxon Stock

Re:Let the E-Wars begin!

[h4rm0ny]

I'm what would usually be considered very environmentally minded. I've not only supported environmental work financially, but I attempt to live in an eco-friendly manner.

I've found Greenpeace to be predominantly made up of people who don't think for themselves and have an psychological need to "get even."

I'm not saying useful work is not done by them. They do good work against whaling for example. But as an organization they have a real inability to use logic.

Bring on the fusion, I say. I'm even happy with modern nuclear power if the alternative is fossil fuels.

In the meantime, I'll support people like IFAW, WWF and carry on cycling.

Re:Let the E-Wars begin!

[Bloater]

I've been watching for news from these people. Although I have no idea if they are legitimate or not. The documentation on their website (though incomplete from a geek's point of view) suggests a highly efficient direct fusion->electiricity reactor with no generator (so no inefficient steam turbine). The proposed pB11 reaction (one proton + Boron nucleus -> 3He2+) gets electricity in the process of slowing the resulting He nucleuses (alpha radiation). Apparantly the reaction chamber is safe to enter after a few minutes of the reaction shutting down.

It would be nice if anybody could provide some sound evidence that this is a legitimate organisation - and that their claim of achieving a 2 billion Kelvin burn is sensible.

Re:Let the E-Wars begin!

[Mad_Rain]

Gee, that's a great idea! By that line of thinking, our ancestors would never have bothered to develop the wheel, because carrying stuff on our back was "just good enough".

How about another metaphor more slashdotters can relate to - When to upgrade some computer hardware.

This situation is akin to "Well, my computer's not fast enough anymore to run FPS-of-the-moment with the resolution cranked all the way up. I've got $150 in my pocket this week, and over the next couple of months I can save up $1000." So you have 3 choices: 1) Lower the resolution and eye-candy. 2) Buy some RAM, or a newer video card, and make some progress towards getting that FPS going at full speed. Or 3) "I'll just wait a while, until the really new stuff drops in price."

So you can leave the problem where it's at (no good), can put together a solution that works better right now (an improved situation), or you can hope that you'll somehow survive and can find the uber-solution later.

I think what sensible people should be advocating for is that middle solution - make things better, sooner, rather than hold out until later, in both the computer upgrade problem and the power problem.

Re:Let the E-Wars begin!

[sploxx]

You're missing the point. Even if ITER works, we're still many decades away from commercial fusion power. More improvement would result from spending that money in optimizing what we already have.

I'm sure that this happens ALOT faster if the oil price rises steeply.

Give us humans a rational cause (global warming etc.) and we'll ignore it.
Give us a 'direct' feeling (evil enemy in (cold) war, money for gasoline), and we'll react promptly.

Re:A little bit disappointed, but there's an upsid

[hawkfish]

A coal-burning plant produces more nuclear waste than does a nuke plant only during normal operation. That's ignoring the problem of decommissioning the plant after it becomes too old and too radioactive to maintain.

I would interpret the OPs comment to mean "dumps more radioactive waste into the environment in a completely uncontained manner." A decomissioned nuclear plant may be radioactive, but it is all in one place and easily contained. By contrast, a coal plant's radioactivity has been dumped into the atmosphere and who knows where it is. Probably in your lungs.

Re:Let the E-Wars begin!

[RayBender]

The proton-Boron fusion idea sounded good a while back, but then a clever MIT grad student (link to his thesis) wrote a thesis proving that it (along with a bunch of other clever ideas) would never work. Bummer.