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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.'"
No, we don't. We need fusion energy eventually. Fission energy is able to sustain our energy needs for the next couple of thousand years. We're just using it wrong due to concerns for nuclear weapons proliferation.
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?
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.
Bonus oil for biodiesel.
Currently easily feasible, no need to invent stuff that might not work.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
...the Superconducting Supercollider...
...billions of francs...
And that's just the obvious errors in your two line comment.
"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."
If your fusion powerplants are eating a significant portion of Earth's hydrogen, then it's time to relocate somewhere where the temperature is not high enough to boil oceans.
That statement about profitability is most likely wrong. Not because the whole operation is profitable but because the subsidy is indirect. At least in Europe it seems to be - the costs of nuclear waste disposal and especially transport of said waste include costs of massive security operations. The problem is also with left overs after the power plant stops active operation. One must not forget also all the costs associated with preparations for the worst case scenario (this of course is partially offset by the fact that you have to prepare yourself for attack by nuclear armed nutcases of any sort). Just to avoid misunderstanding - I am not against fission or fusion reactors and research done to make them work but I do not think that current policies to subsidize the operations in a rather hidden way are no good.
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.
Boil oceans? If fusion powerplants are eating a significant portion of Earths hydrogen, then it's time to apply SPF 10^50 ASAP and get off this fscking ball of plasma as fast as you can.
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."
PWRs weren't designed to produce Pu (they do, but so does any reactor containing U-238).
The thorium-cycle thermal breeder is an interesting idea (and the molten salt reactor isn't the only way of doing it), but has traditionally lost out to the U-Pu cycle fast breeder. However, neither is exactly widespread because uranium is just so cheap and abundant right now that using it inefficiently in a PWR doesn't really matter.
That was a good prog... shockingly mentioning that we spend more per year on mobile ringtones than we do on fusion research.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
This means it was built with the Hungarian people's taxes. It's easy to turn a profit when someone else is footing your capital-cost bills, which are especially high for nuclear power plants.
Don't forget that Hungary would be much worse off if we had to provide that 44% of electricity we use, from other sources. There's a reason we built it in the first place.
And don't tell me it's impossible to come up with a more cost-effective solution than 70's era soviet technology.
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.
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.
Why not simply have more than one avenue of research? We have many designs of fission reactor (PWR, pebble bed, MAGNOX, fast-breeders, etc), many designs of internal combustion engine (4-stroke, 2-stroke, rotary, gas turbine, diesel, etc), why not have several designs of fusion reactor as well? Tokemaks, Spheromaks, Polywells, PPDs, laser inertial and so on, all of them may have different applications, different niches where they work better than others.
And don't tell me it's impossible to come up with a more cost-effective solution than 70's era soviet technology.
Given that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from the extreme safety measures built into the designs, and that 70's era Soviet projects heavily cut corners on those same safety measures, it very well just might be impossible.
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."
See, thats exactly the problem. If you invest everything you have into a single solution, you are kind of stuck with it, as you end up being to busy fixing the problems of your current solution to look for alternative solutions. Polywell presents an alternative and tries to tackle the problem from a completly different angle. Nobody knows if it would work out, but if you believe Bussards google talk it would cost a tiny fraction of ITERs cost to build a full scale Polywell reactor to find it out and it wouldn't take 15 years either. ITER has the problem of being way to expensive and way to unsuccessful so far, if you would pump similar amounts of money into alternative solution, you might already have found one.
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.
If there's one thing I learned from taking classes about nuclear fusion, it's this: generating net fusion power is difficult. This goes for magnetic as well as inertial confinement schemes. So I caution you against being too enthusiastic about any particular initiative. The history of fusion research is a pattern of "oh this is a great idea, we'll have it in 10 years", followed by "uhh there are all sorts of unexpected issues". Progress is slow and painstaking, and TANSTAAFL is the rule. Don't be surprised when previously inexpensive concepts turn out to require significant investment to achieve net power production.
But I agree that we should fund research across the board.