International Fusion Reactor Project Moves Forward

mjgp2 writes to mention a BBC article about an agreement which will begin construction on the second most expensive scientific collaboration, after the ISS : the world's first large-scale fusion reactor. From the article: "The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence ... He said that the participants would aim to ratify their agreement before the end of the year so construction on the facility could start in 2007. Officials said the experimental reactor would take about eight years to build. The EU is to foot about 50% of the cost to build the experimental reactor. If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040. "

Comments

transporting electricity

[Douglas Simmons]

Just like there is room for improvement in battery technology, is there any chance we can come up with a way to transport electricity over long distances without it diminishing in power as fast as it does now? Or do physics tell us otherwise? That's the one thing holding us back from making super-duper large nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere...

It will be before 2040

[styryx]

The Japanese are the contractors, they are pretty well renowned for their efficiency. So I think building time may be reduced.
More work needs to be done on the spherical Tokamaks such as START and MAST. Which are showing increasingly promising results. I know from an inside source that more attention is being given to the spherical Tokamak. Especially now that in nearly all the participating countries there is at least a single toroidal tokamak.

From TFA:
"However, environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."
This baffles me, just whose side are the environmentalists on again? It doesn't matter that there is no gaurantee. The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high.

Also, bear in mind that everybody knows that fusion will be "along in 20 years" and has been this way for the past 60. However, most countries in the world are producing larger plasma departments at universities and there is a much greater influx of fusion scientists. Many hands make light work. And it has already been mentioned that there are many tokamaks in the world, Russia, China, Japan and America have multiple. The UK has the current largest, Jet, and it also has the spherical tokamaks as stated.

Peace out, baby.

Re:It will be before 2040

[Phanatic1a]

The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high.

No, I don't think it is, and I don't think anyone can say that with any certainty.

I tend to class problems in three general ways:

1. Theoretical problems: We're not sure if this is even *possible*. e.g. FTL travel
2. Materials problems: We think this is possible, but we don't know what to build it out of. e.g. a space elevator.
3. Engineering problems: We know this can work, we know how to make it, we just have to work out the nuts and bolts. e.g. The Manhattan project.

Depending on the particular scheme in mind, commercial fusion is all three.

1. There are a wide variety of fusion schemes (the various aneutronic cycles, all cycles in thermal non-equilibrium), that are simply theoretically impossible to generate net energy from. Even plain old D-T fusion is *theoretically* hard; sure, we know it's possible, but getting it to proceed at a rate sufficient for useful net energy extraction might just be intractable.
2. What do you build the reactor vessel out of? You need something that can survive the 300-500 displacements *per atom* that it will experience from neutron collisions over the lifetime of the reactor. No such material is known; ITER will generate only one hundredth of that sort of neutron flux, so it can't even adequately explore the issue. There's another test facility intended to do that, but it's doesn't even exist on blueprints yet. Again, proper materials just might not exist, so you might have to replace the reactor vessel inner surface every few years, which dramatically increases the costs of the scheme and makes it much less viable commercially.
3. Everything else, and there's a lot of it, sits here. And there are some pretty big engineering problems as well, but yeah, those aren't show-stoppers. How do you get the energy out? How do you turn a flood of 14 MeV neutrons into electricity?

Re:It will be before 2040

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>What do you build the reactor vessel out of?
>How do you get the energy out? How do you turn a flood of 14 MeV neutrons into electricity?

What happened to the idea of coating the walls with a "waterfall" of liquid lithium? It heats up (energy extraction), absorbs neutrons (sparing the vanadium walls and deferring or eliminating the need to anneal in place), and when it absorbs the neutrons it breeds tritium that can be used for reactor fuel. Is it too high a vapor pressure or something?

US should sponser an He Prize

[kerskine]

Instead of putting our eggs into one EU driven basket, I propose that our (US) government sponser the following contest:

Prize: US$10.0 Billion

Contest: Within the next ten years, produce a sustained fusion reaction that can generate 1.0 MW of power over a 30 day period.

I bet there are a couple hundred smart engineers/physicists out there that would make this happen.