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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.'"
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?
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.
Or we could have giant hemp farms to harvest fusion power from the nearest star, and then burn that in a hemp/steam power plant.
And best of all, there would be no "not in my backyard" syndrom. However, have we factored in the tax-funded muchies subsidy? That may be nontrivial.
the French 30 hour work week.
And what kind of breakthrough would you expect from throwing money at a dead man? Or was that the implied joke?
When (if) the experiment is a success, it will become a "US led experiment".
Bullshit - it'll come from clean coal. That's completely different, because it's been... polished.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, there's your solution.
Yeah but where would you stick the bodies? That controversy would generate more NIMBY's and form an infinite loop - maybe if we burned all the bodies, we could stick some sort of steam-powered turbine on the fire and with our infinite supply of NIMBY's (bouyed up to excess with those NIMBY's who don't like the stench from the fire)...