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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.'"
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!
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
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?