Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Green Light For ITER Fusion Project

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-where's-my-rocket-plane dept.

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...

2 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. I don't normally say things like this, but by bunions · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Environmental activists, who generally oppose nuclear power, have argued that the project is too costly and would divert attention from current efforts to fight global warming.


    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.
  2. Why not rush it? by ShooterNeo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.