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Green Light For ITER Fusion Project
brian0918 writes, "A seven-member international consortium has signed a formal agreement to build the $12.8 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). From the article: 'Representatives from China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States signed the pact, sealing a decade of negotiations. The project aims to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves, although nuclear fusion remains an unproven technology.' ITER will be built 'in Cadarache, southern France, over the course of a decade, starting in 2008.'" If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040. Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
no opec nations getting in on this action?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Shut up you fucking hippies, get a haircut.
Seriously, this -is- an effort to fight global warming, and if you weren't so dogmatically opposed to anything involving OMG ATOMS!! you'd see that.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
It's always interesting how we're trying to predict when scientific breakthroughs will occur. Isn't it the nature of science such that breakthroughs happen when you don't expect them?
The U.S. would resist ratification...because we didn't sign Kyoto...? But we didn't sign Kyoto because we didn't like the economic downsides, not because we as a country somehow like the concept of global warming and are hoping for beachfront property in West Virginia.
The second statement is also fun. So a bunch of nations finally get together and decide to do something that could, someday, potentially give us an alternative to carbon-emitting energy sources, and they pan it as distracting? What gives. Talk about not being happy with anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah. Right.
Please google "shale oil reserves".
668: Neighbour of the Beast
The sad part is that the "Negotiations" on where to put the damn thing and fund it have taken 10 years. Imagine how much work could have been done on this already..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Grandparent is indeed right, and his harshness isn't too out of place, either.
I can accept that Greenpeace/similar don't agree with me on more fission being good for the environment. However, speaking out against fusion research just makes me angry. If (and probably when) they get it to work, it'll make fission look inefficient EVEN IF one ignores the nuclear waste issues.
Environmentalists often do good work. They need to marginalize their extremists, like most constructive organizations though.
Not to mention that progress HAS been made in the fusion field. The Joint European Torus reactor has achieved output of about 64% of input. A result like this has NOT been around for very long. JET is an improvement over earlier designs, and ITER will be that too. I'll actually be surprised if ITER doesn't reach break-even.
. stm
Article/feature by the nominee boss of the ITER project, Kaname Ikeda, FWIW:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6158040
I think I can speak to that.
The problem is that we currently are putting a massive amount of investment dollars in an unproven technology - fusion power - which has no proven results, when the money could be spent today on actual projects such as tidal energy, solar energy, wind energy, etc that would deliver real change by reducing C02 emissions.
However, I think both arguments ignore the real problem, which is that the use of oil and natural gas are both subsidized very heavily (taxes, investment and exploration credits) when if they were not subsidized, the market would shift more money to such alternatives and let us do research and development on fusion power reactors.
If you look at the research and subsidy pie, more than 95 percent goes to oil and gas. Get rid of most of that and put that towards fusion, and the market itself will expand use of solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc due to market pressures.
Sometimes, you have to walk up to the elephant in the room (oil) and push it over with a large mallet.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To quote Niven/Pournelle, "the air's already full of crap from fossil fuel plants and we're running out of fossil fuels, and damned fools keep delaying the nuclear plants that might get us out of that particular box."
Nuclear waste may be nasty stuff, but at least it stays in one place where you can keep an eye on it, rather than being thrown up into the atmosphere at large. And the byproducts of fusion are generally a lot less problematic than those of fission - from what I understand, mostly radioactivated metals from the reactor itself, not spent fuel.
Isn't that just...sad. We could have fusion by now. Or alteast several dozen gigantic fusion experiments.
It's always interesting how we're trying to predict when scientific breakthroughs will occur. Isn't it the nature of science such that breakthroughs happen when you don't expect them?
This isn't really science, it's more like engineering. Engineering at the edge of what is currently possibly, admittedly, but still engineering. It's unlikely that significant new scientific breakthroughs will come of this.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Why is fusion receiving such a tiny (relatively speaking) amount of funding? Why is the Western world not rushing the project. At a risk of sounding cliched, it seems to me that if the 300-500 billion thus far spent on the Iraq war had gone into fusion research, we could have 10-20 different experimental approaches (essentially, trying all the major possible reactor designs) and commercial reactors in a few years.
Not to mention the obvious superiority of spending billions educating the horde of scientists and engineers and computer programmers and managers and other technical workers that would need to be trained for a big project like this. Instead, we spend that money training young men and women how to fight and perform military tasks. The thousands of technical workers that would be produced from an all-out effort for fusion would be extremely useful in achieving the next level of technological breakthroughs.
War damaged soldiers come home, often with permanent injuries, and may never reach their potential. I am in the Army National guard, and I've seen it happen time and time again. Surprisingly few people take advantage of their GI Bill to actually finish a degree.
Oh, and the middle east would be irrelevant. Without money from oil, they would be unable to buy advanced weapons or commit international terrorism, and would basically be another degenerate culture like most of Africa. Sure, they'd kill each other : but we would be able to safely stand back and occasionally drop in food to the refuge camps.
Personally, I am hopeful that the other small project will work. It would be funny to see a 200M project succeed when govs. will not fund it, but fund large monster projects.
I just hope any of the approaches work, so we can be done with this War on Terrorism.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
True to some extent, but not in the practical sense. None of the old fusion power timeline estimates (most were more or less guesses, actually) really reflected the difficulty and complexity of sustaining a burning plasma. There seems to have been a natural tendency to think it was only one step up in difficulty from sustaining a fission chain reaction. In reality, that is far from a trivial challenge. In the last 25 years, researchers have invested a lot of effort learning how to heat the plasma, deliver fuel, deal with heat and neutron bombardment, and confine the plasma so it doesn't fizzle out.
ITER will finally take all these lessons and apply them to create the first truly sustained (or "burning"...ie (Q - losses) > 1) fusion reaction. From there the crew will still have to learn how to operate it on a continuous basis, applying all of the above challenges to long term experiments, and if all goes according to plan, provide a testbed for integrating a Tokamak core into a functioning powerplant.
In light of all this, I'm skeptical that fusion power prospects could have reallistically gotten more than 10 years ahead of where they are today even with more abundant funding (and according to the current ITER project timeline, the reactor will achieve first plasma late in 2016, so that's where we might be today). Of course, it doesn't help that a disappointing portion of the ITER news over the last 10 years has been the debate over whether to build it in Japan or France.
The lack of motivation still frustrates me though. The $12 billion cost of ITER is roughly the value that the US produces in raw coal every 4 months, yet we backed out of our 10% committment in 1999 until jumping back on the wagon in 2003. Throwing money at the challenges won't make them go away, but it could sure expedite solving some of them. I can only hope that once ITER starts operating (assuming no insurmountable challenges are then found), people will really see the potential of the Tokamak design and waste no time converting what we know into the design of the first generation of fusion power plants.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
I think the fundamental problem is that even if you add new, clean sources to the grid (or off the grid, whatever), you're probably not going to take away from the current levels of existing emissions. All that will be done is a change in the increase, because despite what treaties say, it is very unlikely that current emission levels will drop; the only way that's possible is if the rate of increase of total production of alternative sources outpaces the growth of consumption, allowing the old emissions-generating methods to be taken off-line. If the rate of consumption is the same as or exceeds the growth of "alternative" sources, you cannot reduce the existing emissions base.
I think that's the economic hardship that is spoken of - you cannot maintain existing output unless you are able to grow new technologies fast enough to allow old technologies to be taken offline - and there is real economic loss in taking machinery offline before it's lifespan has expired. It's unlikely that we'll actually have any technologies which actually reduce consumption in a meaningful quantity over a short (say, 25 year) timeframe. Sure, new construction may be more efficient than old construction, but that's still adding load to the system - unless you replace or retrofit the old no new technology will help the existing situation.
Remember, per-capita energy consumption may decrease, but what matters is total consumption (if increase in population is greater than decrease in per-capita, there is no gain). I'd even like to see world per-capita energy use, not just broken down by "major offending nations" and see what that looks like.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That was why I said remove the subsidies for oil research and exploration.
Stop incentiving that form.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That's EASY:
- IF the price of power comes down people will use more power.
- IF it's cheaper than burning carbon compounds, it will displace burning them and less carbon compounds will be burned.
The displacement is a LITTLE complicated: The price of carbon compunds will come down and some will continue to be burned - as long as it's cheaper to run the older fossil-fuel plants than shut them down and tear them out, or they serve special purposes (such as fast start-up peaking generators if the fusion plants don't respond to load variations quickly). But the burning will decline as they're retired and their replacements are the cheaper fusion plants.
Other side of the IF: Just as with nuclear FISSION plants, if the cost ends up higher than fossil fuels (whether due to inherent costs or regulatory/legal costs) they'll never catch on and the carbon will still be burned.
So if the environmentalists are serious about mitigating greenhouse effect, it's time for them to shut up and sit down (or keep the engineers honest by looking for problems).
If they don't, it's clear they're really after shutting down tech so we can "return to nature" (and suffer a die-off that makes the Black Plague look like a bad cold until we're down to the no-tech farming carrying capacity of the planet.) Then, if they get their way, the survivors can freeze in the dark through the next ice age while waiting for an extinction event to finish us off - or our displacement by some species that's a bit more reasonable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way