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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
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?
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?
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
Don't know about anyone else but polywell is far more interesting to me. IF it works, then it will be much better then tokamak. At this rate, IF it works, it could also beat tokamak to net energy production. I have a dream of cheap energy! Nearly all the worlds problems come down to energy! I'll keep dreaming. ;-)
Freedom Fusion in the U.S.A.
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 title got it wrong: this is not a French experiment, but an international one which happens to take place in France. There's a difference...
the French 30 hour work week.
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!
Trying to turn theoretical ideas into concrete practical projects is expensive. Damn expensive. However, if anything concrete at all comes out of it then the payoffs are going to be almost infinite.
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"
The French get it pretty good. First, the money came from many nations and not just France. Second, the money spent on this will largely get redistributed to the local economy. This point would be much stronger if you focused on countries who paid in but did not get to run the experiment.
...the Superconducting Supercollider...
...billions of francs...
And that's just the obvious errors in your two line comment.
the governments and special interest groups don't want the problem solved. When it is "solved" then all the regulatory structure and special fees/taxes won't have application. The lose revenue and control over other people.
Look, we have known for a long time in the US that Nuclear power when done right is great for the environment. Yet at every corner it was shot down by one group or another. I have been watching Georgia Power trying to spin up two new nuclear reactors and it took years just to get it to the PSC and be allowed to price it out. Now they are past the point of being allowed to bill for them reactors they must fight to get them started. I seriously doubt they will get these two new reactors on line.
When control and tax (read cap and trade) comes along people are going to see their electrical bills skyrocket. Yet where will the base load power supply come from? Coal. There are no alternatives to it. My county spend almost a decade just to build a reservoir for drink water, I cannot imagine what it would take for to get one large enough for power generation.
So again, we have technologies to fix the problem, we even have the money, but the powers that be and the groups supporting them don't want it fixed. They need the problem to guilt and control.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
This is why America needs to re-build the IFR. It may be very important.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With rising costs of fossil fuels (and by extension, manufacture and transport, and by extension, materials), the costs are likely to rise even further before it's completed. Which is why it would be so essential to get ITER done on time -- we're lucky to get even one shot at developing fusion power, before industrial civilization beings to creak at the seams because of a shortage of cheap energy.
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
I think this super expensive design is the wrong approach to fusion and that this guy is on the right track. This is assuming, of course, that fusion can work as a power source.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
I'd be more worried about taking too much energy from the Gulf Stream, therefore depriving Northerm Europe of its warm water, plunging us into a man-made Ice Age. Solves the global warming issue though!
return 0; }
gaps in the original design
I read this as "nobody has any idea how the fusion power technology is supposed to work yet."
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.
I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
It does not follow that because government funds something, that it would not happen if the government were not the source of the funding.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And bear in mind, that no nuclear fission power station turns a profit. Not one.
How about this one?
Let me introduce you to a new concept, it's called waves reaching the beach. Energy is reduced when the waves reach the beach.
If we extract that energy instead, there is no net change in energy distribution at a planetary scale.
Additionally, the moon is actually departing earth orbit, just very slowly. ( 1-3 inches / year) , so no global moon imact is imminent
a) "is the power of the future and always will be.
b) "five years later than what had been previously agreed to"
c) "will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought"
Have they never used Java...?
probably an optimistic start year anyway.
DEMO
Might give some time for development of the superior stellarator design to catch up to tokamaks, but perhaps time-scale of decades lend themselves to development hell.
The French revolt!
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."
Name one other funding source that is willing to commit to billions of dollars over a very long period - charities and trusts certainlyt won't, and as I noted before corporations are highly unlikely to. So what are we left with?
On that note, where is the funding from Greenpeace et al for this sort of research?
A good website about thorium fluoride reactors: Energy from Thorium
Another good (informative and technical) general nuclear website: Nuclear Energy Institute (a.k.a. lobby) Nuclear Notes
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.
solar panels in the Sahara desert. when we learn to make them without all that rare stuff.
. . . it should be called Freedom Fusion???
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Once this technology is properly developed, it means virtually unlimited energy for humankind and a very big step towards solving our environmental issues. I don't get it why there isn't already massive investment into this and why governments are bitching about a cost measured in single-digit billions - peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
Well, we're talking tens if not ultimately hundreds of billions here, which makes a big difference.
That said, if we're only talking billions, how about the $6 billion Microsoft spent developing Vista. Heck, Microsoft spend about $1.5 billion a year just in advertizing!
And best of all, there would be no "not in my backyard" syndrome.
Sure. Except our star actually *is* in our backyard. And if you think that its nuclear reactions have no incidence on our health, well... think again.
Bottom line : don't stand in front of a nuclear reaction without protection unless you actually understand what you're doing. And even then, lots of people *thought* they knew what they were doing (that's "thought" because they're no longer around). And Being in the sun all day certainly counts as standing in front of a nuclear reactor.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Guess which industry has given a nice big check to someone on that team to keep things from happening....yes you have 3 guesses but the first 2 don't count, take your time.....need a clue...it's the same industry that as soon as they heard any type of new engine coming out that could run on compressed water and get more miles to the gallon, bought up the copyright and placed that engine in storage until the day we would never use ..... for our cars again......yes you guessed it!
We don't need to do it in the Sahara. We've got solar power plants already online that put out as much electricity as small to medium nuke plants. And the fuel costs nothing. And the fuel doesn't have to be buried under rock where there's no people around. And the fuel doesn't have to be trucked through 14 states on the way there.
You could say that the fuel lasts a really long time, but at least it's 91.40 million miles away (at perihelion).
You are welcome on my lawn.
It always has.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sure. Except our star actually *is* in our backyard.
yes, but I think the parent was talking about the hemp, which would literally be in people's back yards. he was implying people would prefer hemp (or its relatives) growing in their back yard to nuclear power plants in their back yards.
They probably just ran out of baguettes & wine.
equality? other than equality under the law, I don't care much about it. other types of equality make me afraid actually; i was born in a country where everyone was equal...but some were more equal than others.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Why is this post modded "troll"?
The poster should maybe back some of his claims, but afaik this should be possible.
Easy. All you need are mirrors
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Ok, Microsoft spent $6billion developing Vista - what was their planned 'Return On Investment' period for that money? A decade? Less? Quite probably no more than 5 years.
Compare that to the timescale for the ITER - ~ $12billion over 30 years (2006 program initiation, 10 year build cycle, 20 year operation). And thats not counting cost and timescale overruns. And thats assuming there is likely to be an ROI on that investment...
Would Microsoft have spent $6billion investing in a product if they were unlikely to start to see even a start on ROI for 15 years? I doubt that - even aircraft manufacturers expect to have their costs recouped within a decade of program initiation, and they spend upwards of $10billion on a single product.
You see my point? Its exactly the same as the one I made in my parent post...
If Governments were not allowed to invest in these programs, they wouldn't get done. Hubble would still be a pipe dream, the Mars rovers would still be in the back of someones mind as they drove an RC car around a circuit. Sometimes investment has to be made in pure science, and unfortunately the risk is too great for corporations to take interest.
Because of course most of the arable land on the planet isn't currently needed to feed people. And even the current minuscule production of biofuels hasn't caused price hikes in food products that have left people starving to death.
If you hadn't been paying attention in the last couple of years there have been tremendous food shortages throughout the world (leading to numerous food riots) mostly caused by loss of food production due to the spread of the fungus UG99 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726474.400-killer-wheat-fungus-threatens-starvation-for-millions.html do we really want to produce even less food just so you can pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere???
As for Fission vs Fusion fusion is the very clean option fission is more geared to producing weapons grade plutonium and produces an awful lot of nuclear waste. Fusion on the other hand is extremely clean in comparison the only waste will be the reaction chamber when it is decommissioned.
For those who are interested you can build a fusion reactor in your garage http://www.brian-mcdermott.com/fusion_is_easy.htm
Cheers
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
...then they would have already begun construction. You can thank the lazy French for their relaxing way of life in the delay and increased cost for ITER.
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
the big problem however with nuclear is not that there are safety concerns with normal operations. There is little doubt reactors are fairly safe now. But the big concern is an accident in the handling of the waste. Murphys law, indicates that if something can happen, it will. In nuclear power there are too many things that can go wrong, too many mistakes and places accidents can be made. Nuclear power really approaches anything near a level of safety in the presence of a very strong independant regulatory regime, not present in all countries and constantly in tenous in the USA due to conservativism. even then an accident cant be devastating. Its just like accidently dropping some coal in a coal plant. If you see the birth defects and diseases caused by just a minuscule amount of radioactivity, you think twice. There are a million things that could go wrong that this could end up in surface water and ground water, etc. Plus there is storage which there is NO vaible solution for safely storing waste for a few billion years. Any storage container can be eroded down just like entire mountain ranges dissappear in that time frame.
I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
It does not follow that because government funds something, that it would not happen if the government were not the source of the funding.
-jcr
Right. But, just because the government funds a research project that does not exclude private funding of a similar project.
The Paks power plant was built over 20 years by the People's Republic of Hungary. 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.
The GP's point was that no nuclear power plant has ever paid for itself, proof of which is that no private entity has ever built, run and made money out of a nuclear plant without substantial subsidies, be it in the form of participation to capital costs, tax breaks, or socialisation of accident risks (as in the US).
Feel free to produce a counterexample. In the meantime, check out "Will Nuclear Power Pay for itself?", by Jeffrey Paine, The Social Science Journal 33(4), 459-473, 1996; that's a peer-reviewed scientific journal. From the abstract: "[...] even under the most optimistic conditions [...] the current generation of the nuclear option over its lifetime may be best be economically marginal."
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
I think it is an absolute disgrace that the USA is a junior ITER partner and is not building its own ITER reactor. Yes, its billions of dollars, but the prize is priceless. Americans have the money to do this. If we could cut a sliver of medicare and defense, and maybe have a tax structure in place so that we don't have to borrow a trillion dollars every time corporate and capital gains taxes plunge in a recession, then, we could easily fund the kind of research into fusion that can get the job done.
I think the only way to get there is to build a new fusion plant every few years, expecting each to actually fail, but gaining lessons from it to apply to the next one that we will build. If we don't have the answers to all the physics problems, guess, and learn from it. Trying to figure out everything before hand is just impossible in a task this complex. We need to build, fail, learn, and keep building. This is how we learned to do everything else, from flying, to cars, to spacecraft, and even to operating systems and computer software.
This is my sig.
this is imo not a valid argument.
most of the amortised nuclear power plants have a profit of around 200 to 300 million EUR per year.
but - I found no good sources for the hidden costs: development of the technology, waste treatment, maybe more cancer cases around the plant (okay, this is not a valid point either as the correlation nuclear plant and more cancer in the region was never proven), deconstruction after closing, etc
take my words with a grain of salt, my comment is only a first shot without any substantial data to support my opinion...
"The GP's point was that no nuclear power plant has ever paid for itself, proof of which is that no private entity has ever built, run and made money out of a nuclear plant without substantial subsidies, be it in the form of participation to capital costs, tax breaks, or socialisation of accident risks [wikipedia.org] (as in the US)."
Sorry, that's not proof of anything. Even large companies have a hard time justifying large, new, projects if the up-front cost is extremely high. Also, profitability has nothing to do with whether or not a company lobbies the government for subsidies. The journal article you posted, however, does seem like a decent source though one study isn't, necessarily, incontrovertible proof.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
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.
No we don't. We need space based solar power eventually. Fusion power would be nice, but space based solar power is the real long term solution. Ultimately almost all power we use comes from the Sun (well, or long dead distant stars in the case of fission), and it just makes sense to get at it directly. Unlike Fusion there are no show stopping technical problems with solar power, it looks quite likely to be to be cost effective, and the amount of power available is, for all current practical purposes, unlimited.
In particular if we were able to set up off-world manufacturing plants for the satellites, ideally on the moon, it should be possible to get essentially unlimited cheap power this way, and this technology may not be so far away.
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.
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionize our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What these researchers haven't realized is that first we need to learn about superconductors (Conquer 4) and Pre-sentient Algorithms (Discover 5) to learn Fusion Power. But yeah, it'll be a pretty big deal once we get it.
To quote:
"It will happen, and it will happen in our lifetimes. Fusion Power isn't just the future. Fusion Power is now.
-- T. M. Morgan-Reilly, Morgan Metagenics"
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
That's the same with whatever's powering the turbine though. Using solar heated water rather than coal or oil etc makes for much cleaner energy.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
he was implying people would prefer hemp (or its relatives) growing in their back yard to nuclear power plants in their back yards.
Oh.
My bad. Well, I'm sure I'd rather have something I could weave carpets from growing in my back yard. OTOH of course, if 40m high chimneys/evaporators suddenly sprouted in my backyard, I'd probably spot it, unless I was already growing something silly and making use of it...
Now don't take this wrong, all of my vegetables are organic (although we call them "bio" this side of the channel, which is at least as silly as "organic, so don't start). So it's not like I'm making fun of the organic people. Or at least not of the *normal* organic people. And I'm quite a tree hugger as well. It's just that... well, read on if you made it this far.
Nuclear power has quite a number of good things going for it as well as some bad things (ooh, spent fuel takes a while to cool, I wonder how long it takes for natural concentrated fuel, and yes, there's quite a bit of it... how unnatural). A lot of "green" militants see the world in black and white. But ask one of them how a solar panel is manufactured, how much water is dirtied, how much energy is used, how much carbon (including the shipping of the raw materials) and he won't have a clue. But it's still "renewable" energy. Which it is. Sure. Or will be, when we'll optimize it. Which we will.
But the real world still is shades of grey.
I could bring you to a place in the Pyrenees (the mountains between France and Spain) that has enough natural radio activity that you wouldn't last the night. Hey, it's natural, it can't be bad, right ?
Lots of "green people probably use "natural" plant remedies (which is pretty much what you'll find in any pill, minus the assorted other chemicals the plant has). How many molecules are in a plant beyond the couple they need ? 100 ? 1000 ? 100 000 ? Probably the latter. A plant is the descendant of one of the very first life forms to set foot (root ?) on Earth. A plant has had 3 billion years to evolve its chemistry. You and your kin have had maybe 800 million years... And you still believe you can beat a plant at its game by eating it ? That you're better than it with your silly body chemistry with no lab to back you up ?
What are you ? Some kind of suicidal back to earther ? Why do you think we extracted the useful bit out of plants *while leaving the rest out* ? Which by the way is what chemistry is all about ? What do you think a chemical compound is ? What is the difference between the carbon atom in that "chemical" molecule and the one in that "organic" compound ? What if they're the same molecule ?
If you get a sample of two similar molecules, one extracted from an "organic" source, the other synthesized, will there be a difference ? What if there's a guarantee that all the *atoms* are from organic sources ?
And so does a whole industry spawn, targeted at people who don't understand the first thing about chemistry (which is kind of puzzling given the way school is organized, at least in Europe, but they prosper here nevertheless).
So when you go to school and say, "bah, chemistry, I'll never use this IRL". Think again.
This is also true for physics ("stick on device protects you against radiation from your cell phone") or pretty much any topic. Sounds weird, I know, but crooks are counting on you to fail.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
> PWRs weren't designed to produce Pu
No, but they were designed FROM reactors that did so (the RBMK being the cannonical example). If we did not have an arms race that required the large-scale production of Pu, then we would have had any number of different paths to take. As others have pointed out, the thorium path has numerous advantages.
Basically if we set out from the start to make civilian nuclear energy, we wouldn't have started with U.
Maury
> a turbine requires a lot of manteinance.
They absolutely do NOT. Turbines are probably the most reliable devices ever invented, in terms of energy handling to maintenance required.
There are jet engines that run for 10,000 hours before needing *routine* maintenance, but generate the power equivalent to hundreds of car engines. 10,000 hours is the equivalent of 600,000 miles at cruising. The total maintenance load of hundreds of engines over 600,000 miles is enormous.
Maury
I can't help but think that money wasted on the stimulus package couldn't have been better spent on research like this. Even if the end result was that this sort of power generation isn't practical I can't help but think that we'd learn a lot from it and come away with some sort of technological innovation. But of course, that's not how things work. Instead the money goes to whoever lobbies hardest and contributes to the right politicians.
But don't worry, China or India will do it first while the West is struggling to pay for its bloated, unproductive welfare programs. I don't deny there's some need for such programs, but the way I see things going our government is creating a class of people entirely dependent on the government instead of investing in programs which will ensure the long-term innovation prosperity.
I found no good sources for the hidden costs
For Paks, there is a big one: it was built to benefit the people and the state-owned industry, not investors, and their prices were controlled accordingly. Had it been a private enterprise, it would have paid off big time by now.
In a broader sense, it has paid off, with cheaper products from the also state-owned factories, and a higher standard of living for an entire country (it was built in a big push to get electricity everywhere). I think that's worth more than some numbers reported yearly.
Well, there's your solution.
Well, except the USA's war in Irak proved that it cost much more than 10bn to go and kill a few civilians in a small region.
Nah, funding fusion is still cheaper. Could buy around 20 ITERs for the same budget.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
> The fission plant per WEEK built and the acreage of solar, wind and bio per DAY built would be astronomical
To produce ALL the power used in the US now, including all electricity, heating and transportation energy use, requires a patch of solar panels in the southwest desert about 170,000 km^2 assuming 8% efficiency (which is low). That's about the same as the paved area of the USA (160,000 km^2), and about 1/3rd of the desert area.
Assuming the average road lasts 20 years before it needs re-paving (which seems very low to this Torontonian), 5% of the existing road surface has to be replaced every year. Solar panels also have a 20 year life span, or at least they'll be producing 85% power at that point. So the total effort needed to build and maintain ALL of the power in the USA using existing solar technology is the same amount of effort it that we are already using to maintain the road system.
It's big, but not "astronomical".
Maury
Desperately need fusion?
If we can't build enough fission reactors now to supply demand, I doubt we can build enough fusion reactors especially of the ITER style.
The expensive ITER approach is the wrong horse to bet on if you're desperate.
Heck it's probably a better investment to throw a hundred million or so into cold fusion. Even if it turns out to not be fusion, it's extremely likely that there's some interesting scientific phenomenon there, and maybe we just might get another type of battery (energy storage device).
Chucking billions into ITER and committees that take years to decide on where stuff is going to be built, is an incredible waste.
It's like betting all your money on a horse that has not won a single race in decades.
If we are really desperate, I think we better spread smaller bets on many other horses.
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."
Coal produces about as much radioactive waste (due to thorium present in the coal itself), and it just gets spewed into the atmosphere so we can all breathe it.
False. You have zero credibility.
You're probably rehashing something you heard about coal plants releasing more radiation than is typically released by nuclear plants into the environment during *normal* operations. People aren't worried about normal operations: they're worried about abnormal events.
--We're just using it wrong due to concerns for nuclear weapons proliferation.--
Very true and at this point it shouldn't be a concern. That line of thinking hasn't slowed down nuclear proliferation one bit. You could reprocess the stuff until it is only radio active for maybe 100 years. That can make waste disposal easier to deal with as well.
Fusion is even better though but no one wants to spend the money to scale it up to where it might work. It might take 100 billion or more really to get that. If we went at that problem like we were in a war, it would get solved just like the atomic bomb. Really we are in a race against time. We have to get enough power that is clean and fast. The only reason that there is not a net output yet is just a matter of scale, but fusion has to be scaled up even beyond ITER. Maybe they should just go ahead and build a bigger one no matter what the cost.
Actually, there is a risk of an accidental leak or spill of radioactive materials which is always present. The amount of radioactivity by coal is minor compared to this, and in fact USA coal technologies are using filters to reduce emissions. But I will not say coal is safe. Your argument is fallacious because you are trying to distract the argument away from the risks of nuclear, by saying coal is dirty. Coal is in fact very dirty of a fuel. This does NOT mean that nuclear is not dirty and does not present grave threats. With a nuke plant we are dealing with high concentrations of radioactive waste, that even in a small quantities is lethal. If you have a leaking container a significant amount of radioactivity could leak, enough to cause major health problems, birth defects, cancer, etc. This idea that Nuclear is safe is propoganda fed to you by the nuclear industry. In fact, it is a dangerous technology and there is just too many places something could go wrong. Even a small accident can kill thousands of people and make a place unliveable for millions of years. You dont need a meltdown for this, just an accidental spill of radioactive waste.
opening a portal to another dimension and letting in some non-carbon based life forms or something of that ilk, we can at least count on a quick surrender. They will quickly bow to their [fill in the blank] overlords.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
Then why, with most of my energy coming from a nuclear power plant, do I pay the lowest per KW/H rates in the country. 3.5c in winter and 5.5c in summer.
Essentially the PWR was developed from scratch as a submarine power reactor. Has anyone ever used a PWR to make plutonium for weapons? I don't think so, but if someone knows better, feel free to correct me.
RBMK was a development of a plutonium production reactor, yes, as were the Magnox and AGR reactors.
We'd have had to have started from U in any case. It's the only naturally occuring fissile element. Pu-239 and U-233 have to be bred (from U-238 and Th-232 respectively). The thorium cycle would still need some initial fissile load to start it off.
This is correct. Nuclear is safe under normal operations. Its accidents we are worried about. We know accidents happen. People can be corrupt, negligent and so on, etc. Corporations try to cut costs to improve the profit margin. Another thing i forgot tp mention is terrorism and an intentional spill of radioactivity as well. Container technology is supposedly safe, the nuclear waste supposedly kept in tight facilities, yet, we've learned from the past not to take the reliability of technologies for granted. Long term storage cannot be done safely so it would be nice to have reprocessing. The waste is dangerous, in very small amounts, and it would not take much getting into the environment, either on a worker, or whatever, maybe a corrupt corporations who ignores contamination, etc. With the human element, nuclear becomes more dangerous.
Perhaps with a massive regulatory framework and a very competent government and plant operator, and reprocessing, extensive checks, safeguards, and procedures, you can have safe nuclear and the chance of leaks or mishandling is nil. But the cost of an accident can be very high.
Were they bought out by big oil?
Or are they really incompetent?
Don't they understand that it is better to pump a few more billions into ITER than to pump those same billions into banks?
Don't they understand that energy is a world-class problem and that it needs to be solved ASAP? I.e.: 5 years extra is unacceptable?
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.
I forget where I read it, but I seem to recall somewhere that 90-95% of "nuclear waste" is still usable fuel, it just needs to be cleaned up. Hopefully someone else reading this knows where I might have seen that, and can clue us in on the fact/fiction of it.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
>>>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)
I guess the in-home personal version of this is also delayed then?
Well there -are- a lot of unemployed people out there nowadays... :)
Giant TVs everywhere happened.
Hands in my pocket
The numbers involved in realistic energy production are so large, it's almost always worth doing some simple scale calculations. Consider a small nuke with 500 MW faceplate capacity. 500 MW times 365 days/year times 24 hours/day times availability of 0.8 (allow for repair and maintenance) is 3.504e9 kWh/year.
On the hemp side, a variety of sources give 9.0 dry tons/acre/year in temperate latitudes, 1.46e7 BTUs/ton, 2.928e-4 kWh/BTU at 100% efficiency, assume 0.4 thermal efficiency (traditional coal-fired plants are about 0.33), and availability of 1.0. These numbers are all on the generous side of their ranges. Multiply that and get 1.539e4 kWh/acre/year. Call it 227,680 acres to match the output of the small nuke. A square about 19 miles on a side.
OTOH, assume cheap low-efficiency solar panels. Assume daily solar flux of 5.0 kWh per square meter per day (parts of the US are better than that), efficiency of 0.05, and availability of 1.0. Multiply that all out and get 3.693e5 kWh/acre/year. About 9,488 acres to match the output of the small nuke. Overall, an efficiency gain of 24 in favor of the panels.
Sanity check: non-crop plants are about 1% efficient in converting solar flux to biomass, so a factor of 5.0 for solar panels; assumed thermal efficiency for biomass to electricity is a factor of 2.5 for panels; growing season of five months is a factor of roughly 2.0 for panels (five month growing season in temperate latitude, but it's the five months with greatest flux); that gives a factor of about 25 in favor of panels, which matches.
Dye-sensitized solar cells can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, have demonstrated efficiencies greater than 5% when produced in that fashion, and depending on advances in the materials that can be used, may drastically change the cost per watt for solar PV. And solar PV can use land that's much more "marginal" than what's needed to support hemp: deserts, semi-arid high plains, and rooftops.
Again: ITER is not French.
Otherwise it would be fission and or it would be FTER...
Because of course most of the arable land on the planet isn't currently needed to feed people. And even the current minuscule production of biofuels hasn't caused price hikes in food products that have left people starving to death.
If you hadn't been paying attention in the last couple of years there have been tremendous food shortages throughout the world (leading to numerous food riots) mostly caused by loss of food production due to the spread of the fungus UG99 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726474.400-killer-wheat-fungus-threatens-starvation-for-millions.html do we really want to produce even less food just so you can pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere???
When hasn't there been a food shortage somewhere in the world?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Has anyone ever used a PWR to make plutonium for weapons?
If not, then what is all the hassle with Iran's nuclear reactor? I always assumed it was for the inherent plutonium production.. I too stand open for corrections..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Last time I checked, installing solar panels wasn't a matter of mixing some ingredients together in a paver and laying them down. It takes real manpower, far more than paving, and even with some extra labor, you still can't lay solar anywhere near as fast as paving a road. Your statement about the total effort required is pretty simplistic and doesn't take into account the extreme differences in effort required. A single crew can pave miles per day. In comparison, a single crew can install solar panels on one house rooftop in a day.
You're assuming that it's going on houses and there's not a set process. Consider this, in the desert, like the GP was talking about, you have flat ground with easy access. Send two guys to put in some sort of framework to mount the panels to and that'll be their job. Then a truck and two more guys to come around and mount the panels and hook them into the grid.
These guys can probably throw up many dozens or even hundreds per day as long as the mount and hookup is easy. Then the process is repeating it and replacing failed panels in a continuous way. There's no climbing onto unstable and angled rooftops, no real skill needed in positioning it, and a very orderly installation that doesn't really need a lot of skill.
This can be done in a much easier and efficient way than road paving.
Bullish Machine Tzar
I'm building a fusion reactor in my backyard right now. The trick is, you tell the neighbours it's just a fancy composter. Green is good! *thumbs up*
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I went to a talk at Fermilab a while ago about this project. I nerded-out over the different technologies that'll be brought to bear on it (it is a superconducting tokamak, for starters). If I were the president of the world, this is what I'd spend my money on. I would fund the crap out of fusion research until fusion happened.
Rick Nebel = Nick Rebel? You decide!
First they boiled the oceans, but I'd given up drinking water, so I didn't speak up...
Chernobyl, by no means a small nuclear accident, has killed 56 people so far... 47 workers directly involved in the immediate cleanup from radiation poisoning and 9 children in the surrounding area from thyroid cancer due to increased iodine-131 exposure, mostly through local milk. There have indeed been many cases of thyroid cancer which have been linked to Chernobyl, but it is actually a highly treatable cancer with a very good prognosis with early detection. The rise in the most malignant cancers such as leukemia should have been seen within ten years, but there has been no statistical increase found yet. Of the pregnant women who evacuated the area around Chernobyl who elected to carry full term, there was no significant increase in birth defects or mortality found in their children.
As for making the place unlivable for millions of years? Study after study shows that after the initial death toll the wildlife took, populations have not been significantly impacted. Specimens have been taken from the area which are so radioactive that they have to be handled specially... however studies on even these animals show little to no statistical increase in DNA damage over control specimens. Often times, samples taken from areas of lower radiation exposure surprisingly showed LOWER rates of DNA damage and associated cancers than control specimens not affected by the accident... the current best supported theory of radiation hormesis is that low levels of radiation exposure trigger DNA repair mechanisms which account for this anomaly, and studies have found that proteins responsible for DNA repair are indeed transcribed at a much higher rate in mildly irradiated organisms. Basically, it has been shown that the linear non-threshold model used to predict casualties due to radiation has been shown to be invalid at exposures lower than about 100 milliSeverts.
This video from the BBC has a pretty good summary. Am I going to attempt to get irradiated? No. But the current widely held fear of low dose radiation simply is not supported by evidence, but a mathematical model which is proving to be faulty the more we look at it.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
To produce ALL the power used in the US now, including all electricity, heating and transportation energy use, requires a patch of solar panels in the southwest desert about 170,000 km^2 assuming 8% efficiency (which is low). That's about the same as the paved area of the USA (160,000 km^2), and about 1/3rd of the desert area.
Does this number account for the fact that Solar, like a government worker, is only useful for about four hours a day ?
Yes, it's true. All modern nuclear fissions devices basically can use the old "waste" as fuel, leave no long-lasting highly radioactive waste (which is an oxymoron in itself btw) and are so safe it's impossible (even if you go the Chernobyl way of really trying) to make them suffer a melt down.
Everyone knows this except for the greenies. They just cover their ears and keep on screaming.
Oh, links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
it's in my head
I think it's important to realize as well that Chernobyl was not as bad as it easily could have been. So, the fact that '*only*' 56 people were killed directly does not mean that a larger scale accident should be ruled out. It's one of the few datapoints we've got on nuclear power station accidents with direct fatalities, so it could be good news, it could be bad news. More data = more knowledge.
MP3 Search Engine
So are you actually willing to store nuclear fission waste in your apartment or your back yard?
"[...] and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement"
Now there is a good example of the self-serving nature of bureaucracy: Overspending on managers to manage spending.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Instead of spending billions on a theoretical power generation source, why doesn't the government invest in geothermal plants? These have already been proven to work (you can even get a plant setup big enough to run 2 family homes for around $40,000USD), and will provide energy for about the next 10,000 years. I'm sure with the final price tag of the 14 billion or whatever, a geothermal company could have created some pretty cheap and efficient commercial versions of these plants.