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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!
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"
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.
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.
Bullshit - it'll come from clean coal. That's completely different, because it's been... polished.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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."
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
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
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.
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 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.