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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.
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!
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 you have some difficulties understanding scale. Let's take a look at an example fusion reaction, combining two deuterium atoms into tritium and a proton (note: This only occurs in 50% of deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions, but the numbers are similar for the other outcome, helium and a neutron). Deuterium has a molar mass of 2.01410178, trituim has 3.0160492, and a proton has 1.00727646677. That means, fusing two moles of deuterium gives a net mass change of 0.00487789323g. You can get the energy released from this directly by plugging it into e=mc^2 (ignoring momentum for this back-of-an-envelope calculation). The output is around 4.4e11 J. The current global energy consumption is around 5e20 J. To get this amount of energy from deuterium fusion, you would need to burn around 2e9 moles of deuterium per year.
2e9 moles sounds like a lot, but it's only around 1.1e9g, or 1.1e3 tonnes. It's around Deuterium is a naturally-occurring isotope of Hydrogen, and accounts for around 0.015% of all hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, accounting for about 75% of the total mass. 76% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. How much water would you need to get this much deuterium?
The molar mass of water is 18.0153, so you need 18.0153g for one mole, which contains two moles of hydrogen. We need just under 6667 moles of hydrogen to get one mole of deuterium, so we need about 1e13 moles of water. Now we're at some big numbers, around 2.4e11 kg of water. Because the density of water is roughly 1g:1cm^3, that's around 2.4e8m^3.
Still sounds like a lot? The volume of Earth's oceans is around 1.4e18m^3. At our current energy consumption rate, it would take around 5.7e9 years to burn it all. Note that this is longer than the current age of the Earth. Note also that this would only have a tiny effect on the oceans even after using all of the deuterium, since we would only be removing 0.015% of the hydrogen.
Of course, these are just rough figures. Fusion efficiency is likely to be low enough that we've only got enough readily-accessible deuterium for a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. It's a short-term solution, but only in as far as staying living on a single planet around a single star is.
Or possibly when the helium concentration will become high enough to be a concern.
This is even more funny. The reason helium is so expensive is because it floats to the top of the atmosphere and is lost to space if you release it. Having helium as a by-product of fusion would be nice, as it's currently in relatively short supply. Unlike other wastes, it's trivial to dispose of. Just let it into the atmosphere, and a short while later the solar winds will scatter it into interstellar space. It's sufficiently valuable that you probably don't want to do that, however.
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The OP was probably referring to the Polywell concept developed by Bussard, which indeed sounds quite interesting. Research is going on after Bussard's death, but you don't hear much due to most of it being military funded.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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