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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...
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.
The Telegraph and several other news outlets are reporting on the international deal to build the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor that was signed in today. Representatives of the EU, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) agreement in Paris, finalising the project which aims to develop nuclear fusion as a viable energy source to fossil fuels. According to the ITER consortium, fusion power offers the potential of "environmentally benign, widely applicable and essentially inexhaustible" electricity, properties that they believe will be needed as world energy demands increase while simultaneously greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced,justifying the expensive research project.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
Who needs big science? Hell, I bet some teenager could do fusion in his parents basement.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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."
2 did and when it is done with 1 you wont need 3 - you'll be living it.
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?
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.
I worked at D3D 'way back in the 1980s, when people thought breakeven would be achieved before the turn of the millennium. If as much effort were put into electrostatic confinement (the Farnsworth fusor we keep hearing so much about) that might have actually happened. The advantage of the Farnsworth fusor is that it uses a confinement field with a divergence term!
The magnetic field has no divergence (there are no magnetic monopoles) so it is extremely difficult to confine anything -- you can only slow down the leakage. That comes with some problems -- for example, it's very hard to get anything into or out of a magnetic bottle (as in a Tokamak) unless it is electrically neutral. Accelerating and heating the plasma are hard because the energy sources you can use (manipulation of the magnetic field itself, either at radiofrequency (RF heating) or near DC (betatron heating), themselves destabilize the confinement.
D3D used the innovation of firing neutral atoms in through the magnetic bottle, which provides material and heat into the plasma (the atoms generally ionize once they get in -- and then they're trapped like the rest of the plasma). The problem there is that we have no technology to accelerate neutral particles -- so they had these little tiny particle accelerators that fired their beams through GIANT TANKS of reactant that was intended to neutralize the input beams on-the-fly. Some small percentage of the particles got neutralized, and the rest bounced off the outside of the magnetic bottle into a beam dump. Seeing the size of the equipment made me realize that tokamak fusion is probably a dead end for power generation -- if it can be made to work at all (in the sense of achieving, say, 10x heat gain), the ancillary equipment is HUGE and it's not at all clear that economies of scale are enough to make it worthwhile.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch type fusors have the advantage that you can fire in charged particles -- they rattle around and lose some of their kinetic energy, and after that they're trapped in a normal potential well. Like muon-catalyzed fusion machines, the Farnsworth fusor is in a race to get the energy out of a fusible nucleus before it leaks away -- but fresh hydrogen or deuterium ions are much, much cheaper than muons, and it seems to have a better chance of working.
(Remember muon-catalyzed fusion? Muons act like electrons, only more massive -- so atoms that have an electron replaced with a muon get smaller [it's a quantum thing], bringing the nuclei closer together and boosting the fusion rate. You can get a pretty high fusion rate (a few fusions per muon per microsecond) at close to room temperature in pretty tame materials. The problem is that muons only last about two microseconds before decaying into energy, neutrinos, and electrons -- so you have to make several hundred fusions per microsecond, to make the energy worth the effort of making a muon in the first place. Nobody was able to make it pay off.)
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.
Yawn. That's so 1960's.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
They will, but not yet ... currently China expends about 15% of the world's energy, the U.S. about 25%. In the next couple decades though, China should take the lead.
Also, our per capita energy expenditure is massively higher than China's:
U.S. - 11,571 KWh per person
China - 637 KWh per person
It's scary to think of China's demands if their per capita wealth (and consumption) reaches levels anywhere close to that of the U.S.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
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)
That works out to 110% of the cost -- let's hope their science is better than the [reporter's] math!
Certainly not true of OPEC countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who've amassed massive overseas investments by using their oil wealth intelligently, and therefore do quite well (perhaps even better; certainly Kuwait did prior to the Iraqi invasion in 1990—one of the reasons for that invasion, in fact—though some of its wealth went into postwar rebuilding) when oil prices are lower than when they are higher.
Most likely, no OPEC nations are involved because they weren't invited; still, as it gets closer to practical commercialization, I'm sure that some OPEC states will find ways to invest in commercial fusion and its supporting industries: not doing so, of course, would be suicide.
Through the miracle of arithmetic we see can extrapolate this trend to see that commercial fusion power was available in 1920 when it was undoubtedly captured by a Henry Ford and with assistance from proto-Nazis, kept it secret from the rest of the world in a Peruvian cave where they run their UFO base to this day.
With Y being the years from now the geniuses predict commercial fusion energy and X being the year of the prediction:
deltaY=((2040-2008)-20)=12
deltaX=(2008-1975)=33
slope=12/33=0.363636
Y=20+slope*(X-1975)
X-1975=(Y-20)/slope
X=(Y-20)/slope+1975
Setting Y=0
X=(0-20)/0.363636+1975
X=1920
So we see that commercial fusion power was available about the time spherical electrostatic confinement was first conceived of by Irving Langmuir, Katherine B. Blodgett: Physics Review, 23, pp49-59, 1924; "Currents limited by space charge between concentric spheres", which was the last time there was any leak about the existence of commercial fusion power once Henry Ford and the proto-Nazis impounded the technology.
Seastead this.
they could actually, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
the difficult bit is getting more usable energy out than is put in. One important milestone on the way to achiving that is to get a plasma that will keep fusing without external heating, hopefully iter will achive this milestone.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register