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French Fusion Experiment Delayed Until 2025 or Beyond
An anonymous reader writes "The old joke is that fusion is the power of the future and always will be. But it's not looking so funny for ITER, an EU10 billion fusion experiment in France. According to Nature News, ITER will not conduct energy-producing experiments until at least 2025 — five years later than what had been previously agreed to. The article adds that the reactor will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought:'...Construction costs are likely to double from the 5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER's operations phase, another 5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.'"
We need fusion energy desperately...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard
Even if he fails miserably its gonna cost a shedload less than all the projects like ITER around the world are
Is any part of Back to the Future II going to happen? Besides the Internet, the future's turning out to be a total ripoff.
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
If fusion could be made to work for 2-3 times the cost of coal electricity massively reducing C02 emissions without massively cutting energy usage would be possible. It's worth spending money to find this out. Bjorn Lomborg, who is loathed by most environmentalists recommends spending more on alternative energy research. Anthorny Watts would probably approve spending more on this kind of fusion research.
Surely if the US and the Europe, that would collectively spend about 700 Bn a YEAR on defence are serious about alternative energy this should be funded more.
Steven Chu where are you?
and I swear, it's like reading the Duke Nukem Forever "reviews" that appeared when the product is/was/ vaporware.
"The ITER tokamak, 24 metres high and 30 metres wide, will be smaller than a conventional power station. It will produce up to 500 MW of thermal power in a toroidal fusion plasma of 800m^3 volume confined by strong magnetic fields. It will demonstrate prolonged power production aiming ultimately a steady-state operation."
In the words of wikipedia, citation please?
Don't know about anyone else but polywell is far more interesting to me. IF it works, then it will be much better then tokamak. At this rate, IF it works, it could also beat tokamak to net energy production. I have a dream of cheap energy! Nearly all the worlds problems come down to energy! I'll keep dreaming. ;-)
Freedom Fusion in the U.S.A.
What's wrong with those Frenchies? My gf and I produce plenty of fusion energy all the time.
The title got it wrong: this is not a French experiment, but an international one which happens to take place in France. There's a difference...
Sounds suspicious to me. Read the whole FA and no mention of SAP..
Natural fusion energy is there everywhere, the sun provides plenty of energy for presently just a little more cost than usual
methods. If we would invest even a fraction from what is spend there and in fission programs we would have already reduced the cost of solar electricity to what it will be anyway within 10-20yr.
Big business and political powers dont like energy sources that are decentralized because they loose a way
to control their power source, the population.
Why is it that most government projects always end up late and over budget? So much for getting the specs right, decent planning and project management, and PRINCE2, etc. And the bit that made me really chuckle, "increase in staffing to manage procurement". For crying out loud. Why not throw out the staff they currently have and get in people who are more efficient. Just throwing more people at the problem is not the solution. Of course, in these economically challenged times, one has to ask whether such gigantic projects are value for money. Why don't they do smaller less ambitious projects, which might actually produce something useful... but I suppose those big white elephants are always a great way of keeping a bunch of people employed.
the French 30 hour work week.
It's EUR for the currency if that's what they're referring to with the 10 billion...
Seriously ,GM burnt through 5 billion in 3 months and we got bupkis for it. Costing only 5 billion extra over 20 years sounds pretty good to me if there's a chance we'll get fusion out of it. In fact, given unlimited funds, how much can we expedite this? We've spent hundreds of billions on banks that are worth less than nothing. Let's build some hardware!
Trying to turn theoretical ideas into concrete practical projects is expensive. Damn expensive. However, if anything concrete at all comes out of it then the payoffs are going to be almost infinite.
The idea of fusion and benefits of fusion are tremendous compared to fossil fuels but I've always wondered how long will it last before it starts eating a significant enough portion of the hydrogen to be a concern. (Or possibly when the helium concentration will become high enough to be a concern.) I imagine that we have enough reserves of hydrogen in the oceans it won't be a concern for many many many years to come but it is an interesting thought experiment.
Ultimately the only "safe" power sources are those that derive their energy from external sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and wave power; all of which are powered by the sun's energy and/or gravitational interaction with outside sources (aka moon). Granted eventually the sun will run out of hydrogen and we won't be able to use it as an outside source of energy. As long as we're burning things that have a finite source in the closed system of the planet we'll eventually run out or pay some unforseen consequences (Global Warming).
Not exactly the largest concern when it comes to alternative power but still and interesting topic to think about.
-Lifyre
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
The French get it pretty good. First, the money came from many nations and not just France. Second, the money spent on this will largely get redistributed to the local economy. This point would be much stronger if you focused on countries who paid in but did not get to run the experiment.
...the Superconducting Supercollider...
...billions of francs...
And that's just the obvious errors in your two line comment.
the governments and special interest groups don't want the problem solved. When it is "solved" then all the regulatory structure and special fees/taxes won't have application. The lose revenue and control over other people.
Look, we have known for a long time in the US that Nuclear power when done right is great for the environment. Yet at every corner it was shot down by one group or another. I have been watching Georgia Power trying to spin up two new nuclear reactors and it took years just to get it to the PSC and be allowed to price it out. Now they are past the point of being allowed to bill for them reactors they must fight to get them started. I seriously doubt they will get these two new reactors on line.
When control and tax (read cap and trade) comes along people are going to see their electrical bills skyrocket. Yet where will the base load power supply come from? Coal. There are no alternatives to it. My county spend almost a decade just to build a reservoir for drink water, I cannot imagine what it would take for to get one large enough for power generation.
So again, we have technologies to fix the problem, we even have the money, but the powers that be and the groups supporting them don't want it fixed. They need the problem to guilt and control.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
People used to say the same about Hubble... Personally, I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionise our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What for-profit company is likely to make a multi-billion dollar investment that, even discounting the possibility of failure, it is unlikely to see any chance of a return on for 40 years? The only industries I can think that make billion dollar investments are shipmakers and aircraft manufacturers, and their planned ROI period is much less than 40 years.
This is why America needs to re-build the IFR. It may be very important.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With rising costs of fossil fuels (and by extension, manufacture and transport, and by extension, materials), the costs are likely to rise even further before it's completed. Which is why it would be so essential to get ITER done on time -- we're lucky to get even one shot at developing fusion power, before industrial civilization beings to creak at the seams because of a shortage of cheap energy.
I think this super expensive design is the wrong approach to fusion and that this guy is on the right track. This is assuming, of course, that fusion can work as a power source.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Has anyone done the maths on the effect of taking power extracted from tides on the orbit of the moon? If we take too much tidal power might the moon be drawn into a downward spiral crashing into the Earth?
I'd be more worried about taking too much energy from the Gulf Stream, therefore depriving Northerm Europe of its warm water, plunging us into a man-made Ice Age. Solves the global warming issue though!
return 0; }
gaps in the original design
I read this as "nobody has any idea how the fusion power technology is supposed to work yet."
I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
It does not follow that because government funds something, that it would not happen if the government were not the source of the funding.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
:P
Let me introduce you to a new concept, it's called waves reaching the beach. Energy is reduced when the waves reach the beach.
If we extract that energy instead, there is no net change in energy distribution at a planetary scale.
Additionally, the moon is actually departing earth orbit, just very slowly. ( 1-3 inches / year) , so no global moon imact is imminent
a) "is the power of the future and always will be.
b) "five years later than what had been previously agreed to"
c) "will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought"
Have they never used Java...?
probably an optimistic start year anyway.
DEMO
Might give some time for development of the superior stellarator design to catch up to tokamaks, but perhaps time-scale of decades lend themselves to development hell.
The French revolt!
Also when I was in my teens, those of us doing physics and chemistry at our school were encouraged to do the radiation physics and radiation chemistry options because this would career proof us. It was just so obvious that nuclear power would completely replace coal. Unfortunately all those other kids planning to do arts degrees regressed into NIMBYs.
Personally I think we should stop pissing about, build a new generation of standardised U/Pu reactors and put the development effort into thorium reactors. That will buy us time, lots of time, since thorium is plentiful, in which we may be able to have an advanced society while we sort out fusion. Spending billions on a lot of "ifs" looks like engineer willy-waggling, especially when we have other technologies that actually work.
Meanwhile the Russians are talking about 70MW floating conventional reactors based on their icebreaker technology to open up the Arctic. At this rate, they'll be selling power on demand to the world while the West is still trying to get a net energy gain from fusion. Being sexy does not make a technology valid or useful.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Name one other funding source that is willing to commit to billions of dollars over a very long period - charities and trusts certainlyt won't, and as I noted before corporations are highly unlikely to. So what are we left with?
On that note, where is the funding from Greenpeace et al for this sort of research?
The problem behind this notice is indeed the fact that mr Sarcozy has signed a contract with Mr Berlusconi where France will build 5 nuclear station in Italy ! how can they approve a test with fusion with that econo/politcs/dictorial contract !?
. . . it should be called Freedom Fusion???
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Once this technology is properly developed, it means virtually unlimited energy for humankind and a very big step towards solving our environmental issues. I don't get it why there isn't already massive investment into this and why governments are bitching about a cost measured in single-digit billions - peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
Well, we're talking tens if not ultimately hundreds of billions here, which makes a big difference.
That said, if we're only talking billions, how about the $6 billion Microsoft spent developing Vista. Heck, Microsoft spend about $1.5 billion a year just in advertizing!
Guess which industry has given a nice big check to someone on that team to keep things from happening....yes you have 3 guesses but the first 2 don't count, take your time.....need a clue...it's the same industry that as soon as they heard any type of new engine coming out that could run on compressed water and get more miles to the gallon, bought up the copyright and placed that engine in storage until the day we would never use ..... for our cars again......yes you guessed it!
They probably just ran out of baguettes & wine.
Ok, Microsoft spent $6billion developing Vista - what was their planned 'Return On Investment' period for that money? A decade? Less? Quite probably no more than 5 years.
Compare that to the timescale for the ITER - ~ $12billion over 30 years (2006 program initiation, 10 year build cycle, 20 year operation). And thats not counting cost and timescale overruns. And thats assuming there is likely to be an ROI on that investment...
Would Microsoft have spent $6billion investing in a product if they were unlikely to start to see even a start on ROI for 15 years? I doubt that - even aircraft manufacturers expect to have their costs recouped within a decade of program initiation, and they spend upwards of $10billion on a single product.
You see my point? Its exactly the same as the one I made in my parent post...
If Governments were not allowed to invest in these programs, they wouldn't get done. Hubble would still be a pipe dream, the Mars rovers would still be in the back of someones mind as they drove an RC car around a circuit. Sometimes investment has to be made in pure science, and unfortunately the risk is too great for corporations to take interest.
...then they would have already begun construction. You can thank the lazy French for their relaxing way of life in the delay and increased cost for ITER.
I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
It does not follow that because government funds something, that it would not happen if the government were not the source of the funding.
-jcr
Right. But, just because the government funds a research project that does not exclude private funding of a similar project.
Greenpeace? Why would you expect a terrorist organization to contribute money to something productive?
I think it is an absolute disgrace that the USA is a junior ITER partner and is not building its own ITER reactor. Yes, its billions of dollars, but the prize is priceless. Americans have the money to do this. If we could cut a sliver of medicare and defense, and maybe have a tax structure in place so that we don't have to borrow a trillion dollars every time corporate and capital gains taxes plunge in a recession, then, we could easily fund the kind of research into fusion that can get the job done.
I think the only way to get there is to build a new fusion plant every few years, expecting each to actually fail, but gaining lessons from it to apply to the next one that we will build. If we don't have the answers to all the physics problems, guess, and learn from it. Trying to figure out everything before hand is just impossible in a task this complex. We need to build, fail, learn, and keep building. This is how we learned to do everything else, from flying, to cars, to spacecraft, and even to operating systems and computer software.
This is my sig.
If we put as much effort (money, time, mindshare, public discussion and activism, governmental efforts, tax credits and other incentivesm etc) into energy conservation as we do trying to come up with new energy sources we could probably get by with much less on the energy producing side. But you see, that makes the huge energy companies a lot less money. A LOT less. Not attractive at all to the predatory side of the "investor class" folks.
Things like superinsulation of buildings and using telecommuting more than human being commuting would reduce energy demands considerably. Superinsulate once, drop energy demands for the life of the building. Eliminate one physically commuting job to a telecommuting job, then no fuel for either a private vehicle nor to run some public transportation thing is needed. Reducing the number of office workers needing to physically commute would reduce the need for those huge corporate SUV styled energy hog "headquarters" buildings, which drops energy demands. And so on.
Here's a real simple one, only take a single law to pass and help with energy demand. Ban night time huge lit up advertising signs of any kind, product specific or corporate specific. Look it's the Acme Anvils business! And look again, ten different kinds of Acme anvils, all in their scroling neon glory! We at Acme need a 50 foot electronic sign that uses as much electricity per night as could run the next ten small villages in the developing world.
That sort of stuff is just a ridiculous waste. You can still see various advertising signs in the daylight, there is absolutely no need to be able to see them late at night, especially from the space aliens overhead perspective. I don't know how many gigawatt hours that might save, but judging by every big city I have ever been in, it would be quite a lot.
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionize our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What these researchers haven't realized is that first we need to learn about superconductors (Conquer 4) and Pre-sentient Algorithms (Discover 5) to learn Fusion Power. But yeah, it'll be a pretty big deal once we get it.
To quote:
"It will happen, and it will happen in our lifetimes. Fusion Power isn't just the future. Fusion Power is now.
-- T. M. Morgan-Reilly, Morgan Metagenics"
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
There's really no point in continuing with this experiment now.
I have strong confidence in the technical side of this project, meaning that I believe that ITER will work, and generate net energy. Unfortunately it's not clear to me how much we'll actually learn in that process; this is an engineering project more than a scientific one.
I have zero confidence that the ITER path (and related approaches) is one that will ever result in commercial power generation. The energy density of ITER is far too low to be useful, and the only way to improve that is to make more expensive machines. There's no evidence that the technology scales down in cost, and that any approach along this "big dumb" line is useful. Very smart people at the power companies have already given it a big thumbs-down.
This money needs to be turned to other projects. For the price of ITER we can fund a whole bunch of smaller science projects, projects that at least have some hope of being actually useful. HiPER is one that cries out for funding, but so does magnetized target fusion and the polywell. Unlike ITER, the physics of these experiments is not yet understood, but IF they do work then they are FAR less expensive to build. That is a much better way to spend research money IMHO.
I can't help but think that money wasted on the stimulus package couldn't have been better spent on research like this. Even if the end result was that this sort of power generation isn't practical I can't help but think that we'd learn a lot from it and come away with some sort of technological innovation. But of course, that's not how things work. Instead the money goes to whoever lobbies hardest and contributes to the right politicians.
But don't worry, China or India will do it first while the West is struggling to pay for its bloated, unproductive welfare programs. I don't deny there's some need for such programs, but the way I see things going our government is creating a class of people entirely dependent on the government instead of investing in programs which will ensure the long-term innovation prosperity.
Well, there's your solution.
Well, except the USA's war in Irak proved that it cost much more than 10bn to go and kill a few civilians in a small region.
Nah, funding fusion is still cheaper. Could buy around 20 ITERs for the same budget.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I fail to understand why everyone thinks a project should be able to have a fixed timeline. It's dead easy to get fusion in a D-T plasma; it makes a good college level physics experiment, using a current induced pinch.
So the basic physics is understood. The engineering is not so. It takes a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge, to turn a laboratory demo into an industrial process. Consider that it has taken a hundred years to learn to build refineries the way they are now, and improvement is still ongoing.
Worthwhile projects can take a long time, on a human scale. Plasma fusion is one of these projects, and may easily extend into the next century. That doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to give up. The USA is spending a trillion dollars on keeping bankers happy, surely they can spend a few lousy billion over the next twenty years on a possibly limitless energy source.
I understand why politicians think that a "project" should cough up results before the end of their elected term. The rest of us don't need to be that short sighted.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Wouldn't it accelerate the moon?
The good:
- Longer days -> incompatible with biological clock -> you don't need an alarm clock any more because you wake up early every day
The bad:
- No full solar eclipses any more
- Moon can only be seen from one half of the earth (can this be called hemisphere?). Just how it is on pluto.
If they are so competitive, there should be no need, should there.
Desperately need fusion?
If we can't build enough fission reactors now to supply demand, I doubt we can build enough fusion reactors especially of the ITER style.
The expensive ITER approach is the wrong horse to bet on if you're desperate.
Heck it's probably a better investment to throw a hundred million or so into cold fusion. Even if it turns out to not be fusion, it's extremely likely that there's some interesting scientific phenomenon there, and maybe we just might get another type of battery (energy storage device).
Chucking billions into ITER and committees that take years to decide on where stuff is going to be built, is an incredible waste.
It's like betting all your money on a horse that has not won a single race in decades.
If we are really desperate, I think we better spread smaller bets on many other horses.
If we run out of energy, we aren't going to be able to build these prototypes because they are just so huge. We will be too busy trying to grow food.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The design criteria for ITER have been known since the mid-1980's. If you build a machine big enough you can sustain fusion for a while. The reason ITER has been so long getting approval is that it is a waste of time--the design will not support many ports for taking data to actually try to figure out what was going on in the plasma at fusion temperatures. In other words, very little new physics can be anticipated from ITER but somebody may get a Nobel prize out of it for positive energy yield in a sustained reaction. The ITER reactor will work for about 3 weeks at positive power yield before the neutron flux degrades the steel to the point it will no longer hold vacuum, hence they are delaying that 15 years or so, since that is the end of ITER related jobs. While running, it could basically power the entire North American continent. Then, you shut down and send in the robots to disassemble the radioactive mess and ship it off to some appropriate storage facility, while you start building the next one. This is not practical power production, and if it were the utilities would have built it 20 years ago.
Ex plasma physicist.
In a somewhat related article, The Economist this week wrote an article about the startup of the National Ignitiion Facility.
It's an international project, not a french project. Half of the funding comes from the European Union, the other half is from non-european countries (e.g. Japan). Also, you might not know it, but Europe has a currency known as the "Euro", "francs" don't exist any more.
I can tell you with a good degree of certainty that ITER will fail. Here is why;
The solar nuclear Hydrogen-gas-plasma model is wrong.
Based on various satellite observations there is clear evidence that suggests a liquid iron-nickel rich sun with insulating layers of calcium, neon, sulfur, and silicon. Unrelated cold fusion experiments have provided some insight into interactions and byproducts which are likely to occur such as ** Iron-nickel's ability to absorb D2 and produce He3. **
This a new area of science with huge opportunity. Any enterprising individuals reading this?
opening a portal to another dimension and letting in some non-carbon based life forms or something of that ilk, we can at least count on a quick surrender. They will quickly bow to their [fill in the blank] overlords.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
Were they bought out by big oil?
Or are they really incompetent?
Don't they understand that it is better to pump a few more billions into ITER than to pump those same billions into banks?
Don't they understand that energy is a world-class problem and that it needs to be solved ASAP? I.e.: 5 years extra is unacceptable?
I'm surprised that Japan doesn't have a more aggressive fusion program. Japan has almost no oil, little coal, and small natural gas reserves. Japan imports over 97% of its energy. If anybody needs fusion, it's Japan. Japan is a participant in ITER, but that's not enough.
i wouldn't worry about fusion power, within next decade it will become clear that continuously growing fossil fuel use is over. once that realization is here and not even recession is capable of bringing oil prices back down we will see serious money poured into fusion power. i bet with few hundred billions we could have fusion within 1-2 years.
>>>ITER will not conduct energy-producing experiments until at least 2025 -- five years later than what had been previously agreed to. The article adds that the reactor will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought:'...Construction costs are likely to double from the 5-billion (US$7-billion)
I guess the in-home personal version of this is also delayed then?
For one thing, this is an international experiment, that just happens to be in France -- it had to be built someplace after all. A lot of countries contribute dollars and people to it.
Second, it is only one of many possible approaches, the one that happens to suit tenure seeking cubicle type big scientists and bureaucrats the best, not perhaps the scientifically best approach, and obviously not for the money. I've lost count of how many times fusioneers have said "we just need one twice as big and it will work this time". Personally, as a businessman -- I'd have fired the lot of them on rev 2. But since each try takes like 10 years, and everyone has moved on to some cushy position by then, it's always a different crowd using the same old trick for employment security.
I have done government work, and there is no way we'd have penicillin if the governement had funded that. In that case it would have gone like "There's some contamination in this ditch bitch -- toss it out and do it all over and get it right this time". If, while doing government work (I have actual experience here) you find that the original thing can't work, but discover something that could -- no joy. They will tell you to spend the original money and time on something known not to ever work, then write a new grant, and 3 years later, long after any inspiration is gone, try the new thing.
I am privately funding my own fusion work, and am already doing better than that crowd, and while not on a slashdot shoestring, real cheap compared to anyone else. And getting results! The thing is, here we can follow our noses, taking anything we learn into account for the next experiment. Those guys can't.
We're not doing Bussard's thing, as we don't like the idea much and there's not enough data we can find to prove even their limited claims. And BTW, yet another error -- the government cut him/them off quite awhile back, that's why there's that video of him trying to get money from Google...
We are right now doing electrostatic/dynamic containment/focus in a pulsed mode (nnot like Lerners DPF) using transit times and pure ions (not plasmas) and getting like 100 times the interaction rates compared to anyone else in the literature -- more than enough for the neutron flux to be very dangerous with 40 watts input total. Cost? Maybe a couple hundred K$ over two years, and we think we'll see gain before another two.
Don't all visit at once, and no, I don't want your money or cynicism, I have plenty of my own.
This ain't a slashvertisement. Sorry, this site is nearly two years old since last update. I've been having more fun doing than documenting --
www.coultersmithing.com
There are other fusion projects available.
Several excellent GoogleTalks available.
The first which is Dr. Busserds Poleywell project:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606&ei=wxkgSqWnPIyEqQP9sZScAQ&q=googletalk+nuclear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
The second and more exciting is the Focus Fusion project which is a Dense Plasma Focus machine:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760&ei=UhogStX8GYuEqQO_tMGiAQ&q=googletalk+focus+fusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus
The second GoogleTalk is more interesting because it covers the other small fusion development areas.
Dense Plasma focus fusion allows you to build a table top machine from which the electricity is drawn off directly, rather than the fusion energy being used to heat water to run turbines as all the other fusion methods would require.
I do not hear about Fusion research in Obama's energy plan, despite his appointment of Dr. Steven Chu to the department of energy.
Small fusion projects have a handicap as expressed in by both proponents in their respective GoogleTalk videos.
These small projects can be run in parallel, and I feel that our time is running out for our civilization as a whole:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Ahimsa.
Sarkozy is going to make it a 30 hour work... Day.
Cheers,
An anonymous frenchman.
What for-profit company is likely to make a multi-billion dollar investment that, even discounting the possibility of failure, it is unlikely to see any chance of a return on for 40 years? The only industries I can think that make billion dollar investments are shipmakers and aircraft manufacturers, and their planned ROI period is much less than 40 years.
Carmakers... it takes about 6 billion euros now to design a new car and put it on the road. Chipmakers - the cost of new factories are astronomical. Foundry-makers. Pharmaceutical companies. Biotech companies...
There are a lot of companies investing money like water. But yes, the ROI is usually something like 4 years, not 40. And thus we need government, to do those things collectively that individually would mean suicide for companies.
Again: ITER is not French.
Otherwise it would be fission and or it would be FTER...
I went to a talk at Fermilab a while ago about this project. I nerded-out over the different technologies that'll be brought to bear on it (it is a superconducting tokamak, for starters). If I were the president of the world, this is what I'd spend my money on. I would fund the crap out of fusion research until fusion happened.
Rick Nebel = Nick Rebel? You decide!
First they boiled the oceans, but I'd given up drinking water, so I didn't speak up...
"[...] and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement"
Now there is a good example of the self-serving nature of bureaucracy: Overspending on managers to manage spending.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Instead of spending billions on a theoretical power generation source, why doesn't the government invest in geothermal plants? These have already been proven to work (you can even get a plant setup big enough to run 2 family homes for around $40,000USD), and will provide energy for about the next 10,000 years. I'm sure with the final price tag of the 14 billion or whatever, a geothermal company could have created some pretty cheap and efficient commercial versions of these plants.