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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.'"
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
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?
Probably because its not going to work. Fusion can only be made to work on a large scale, if at all. Every step along the way will cost the 15 billion you speak of and we are probably 100 years away from commercial production of energy. Wind, tide, photovoltaic and solar thermal power work right now. They can be tested on a small scale for a couple of thousand bucks then scaled up as far as you want in many cases.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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!
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"
for 10 billion, you can also construct 10 Gigawatts of wind power... which will eventually (within a few years) pay itself back.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
You should search for "Thorium fluoride" in the googletechtalks channel on youtube. There are at least two talks covering the subject, it really made me reconsider the nuclear option. In short, nuclear fission plants were *designed* to produce plutonium. It's actually an advantage when you're in a cold war race. But does it need to? Using molten salts, it is possible to let the nuclear reactions happen in a fluid, making really interesting cycles a possibility. And you wouldn't need to mine uranium any more.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
According to a BBC Horizon show, you are very wrong. We desperately need fusion.
Say equality is a force in world peace. Say you want Americans to cut their consumption in half through conservation and allow everyone in the world to have that lower standard by something like 2020 (global warming and all). The fission plant per WEEK built and the acreage of solar, wind and bio per DAY built would be astronomical.
In my opinion, that is why Obama is allowing Big Coal to continue topping mountains. Nobody wants to be honest about how demand outstrips probable clean supply.
That would be correct. ITER was slashed entirely from the '08 (I think?) budget, the first one passed after the Democrats got control back of Congress.
Story goes, Democrats wanted to use their new-found power to add items from their party wishlist onto the budget. Bush gave a specific limit over which he threatened to veto. Instead of cutting back on new stuff, the Democrats had an overnight session and ransacked much of the pre-existing budget. That's also how Fermilab got into so much trouble, along with most of the DOE Office of Science (physical sciences) budget.
I guarantee you there were maybe 5 overworked staffers going over the budget line by line trying to reach a number their bosses liked. "ITER?" "Never heard of it." "It says, fusion research" "Cut it.".
Wouldn't you like to be the lobbyist who offers them a pizza?
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.