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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
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.
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."
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
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.