Slashdot Mirror
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...
Estimates of when fusion would be a viable energy source didn't take into account years of under-funding. ITER could have been done years ago.
Considering that the U.S. uses over a quarter of the world's energy, I think the only thing cool about the project is that we're only contributing 10% of the total cost. The problem is that the reactor will take designs that have not been terribly successful at a smaller scale and try to prove that all of a sudden they would become commercially viable at a large scale.
... then once the research creates results we can devote the resources to building a test reactor. Apparently the U.S. has been thinking along similar lines since they've wavered back and forth on the project for so long, and in the end committed only a token amount towards the project.
Instead of devoting Billions to developing a large reactor on relatively low-yield/high-cost technology, I'd rather see the U.S. spend these Billions on researching how to create a more productive and economical fusion reaction
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
ITER gets a lot of press, but there's an equally large obstacle to commercial fusion that it doesn't even address: the materials issues.
A commercial fusion plant is going to produce a tremendous neutron flux, orders of magnitude greater than that seen in modern fission plants. So many neutrons will be produced that every single atom in the reactor vessel is can be expected to be struck and displaced several hundred times over a 30-year life cycle, and you're actually going to get a small number of nuclear reactions that will produce minute hydrogen and helium bubbles at lattice boundaries. There are no known suitable materials that can handle that kind of neutron exposure without swelling, cracking, degrading, becoming extremely brittle, and so forth. This would be Bad.
ITER isn't going to generate the kinds of neutron flux you'd need to even explore those issues. ITER's going to generate about 3 displacements per atom, not 300. There is another facility, IFMIF, intended to research this by generating similar neutron fluxes to what you'd see in a real fusion reactor, but it's only at the design stages right now, and won't come on line for long after ITER does.
Getting the fusion right is only part of the problem, and it's possibly the easier part. It's an engineering problem. But the materials issue might not be solvable, because the right materials might just not exist.
Folks, there are huge amounts of uranium and thorium around, and we do not have time to wait until we figure out fusion to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. By the time we even come close to exhausting our sources of fissile fuel, we should have learned how to construct large-scale orbital structures, and once we can do that we won't even *need* fusion. It's entirely possible that commercial fusion will never happen.
That works out to 110% of the cost -- let's hope their science is better than the [reporter's] math!