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EU Fusion Experiment's Financial Woes Get More Concrete

Posted by timothy on from the next-year-in-a-fusion-reactor dept.

fiannaFailMan writes "An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges. 'Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.' Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."

10 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Bussard by Garrett+Fox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?

    Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.

    --
    Revive the Constitution.
    1. Re:Bussard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      IIRC as far as time frame and cost goes, the EMC2 team (Bussard's team) expects that an energy positive full scale system will take 6 years and somewhere in the $100 - 200 million range. The team is mostly funded by the Navy which is interested in the research as a future power source for ships.

      For those that don't know, the Polywell design is a rethinking of the old "Fusor" design which has been successfully performing fusion for decades, even in garage settings, but at an energy loss. The Polywell design works on the idea that instead of trying to crush atoms together with magnets like a tokomak (hard to do) you confine electrons with magnets (easy to do) and release ionized atoms into the device which are accelerated towards the confined electrons and smack into each other.

      Typical "Fusors" and the current prototype Polywell devices use Deuterium and Tritium, which when fused result in Helium plus an extra neutron. The extra neutron can stick to components inside the device causing them to become radioactive over time (much of the radioactive waste associated with existing nuclear power is caused by equipment being bombarded with neutrons). The ultimate goal of the EMC2 group is to perform Hydrogen/Boron-11reactions instead, which only result in Helium, however this reaction requires significantly stronger magnetic fields, higher currents, and a larger area.

    2. Re:Bussard by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Personally I'm gunning for Sandia Lab's Z-Pinch device, though mostly because the original looked so unbelievably fucking cool.

      The last I'd heard from them, they had built a small module that could do inertial fusion, and could fire rapidly and for many cycles. They could be stacked to increase power, and in theory all they had to do (simplifying of course) was stack a bunch of these modules to make practical power generation, and a test product was supposed to be done in a few years.

      Sadly, being small self-contained boxes and not a research toy they don't look nearly as awesome as the original.

      But yeah. Bussard could work too. In any case, ITER seems like the real long shot.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    3. Re:Bussard by KliX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Please, please, please tell me you're not a scientist of any sort! I really hope the late Bussard's ideas come to fruition, but the data from their previous experiments is awful (check those error bars people), and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut). ITER on the other hand is an engineering problem; we've done plasma containment. We don't know if a full scale polywell can work, and things look bad - we know tokamak fusion systems will work (better than break even), but we've no idea if we can engineer a reactor/generator system that's provides cheaper energy than say fission, with workable maintenance (how many times a decade will we have the reactor shield/energy recovery system destroyed by the neutron flux etc).

      ITER will "work", but may not be a practical mass energy source. The polywell, is pretty much a yes/no experiment that nobody has done yet. I just wish someone would throw $200 million at EMC2 to build a full scale prototype so we can see if the physics is good or not.

    4. Re:Bussard by Jerf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)

      and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut)

      The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.

      Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.

  2. What ever happened to this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    nuclear google

    1. Re:What ever happened to this? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Navy picked up the option to fund the next step.

      Now it's funded the step after that, and included a request for a proposal for it to fund the third and final step.

      At the end of that step (if it all works) we have a practical first demo power plant - about 100 megawatts of fusion power out from cheap and very abundant fuel. Proof of concept, a practical design good enough to displace fossil fuel and fission power plants (and perhaps aircraft carrier and battleship engines) that can be replicated, and probably enough engineering data to design something much better.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  3. Re:100 Years, My Ass by hbr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    To me 100 years sounds like a precursor argument to cutting funding.

    As fusion seems to be the only single approach that is capable of solving the energy/climate/etc crisis by itself, we should be doubling the funding.

    For the promised benefits, nuclear fusion research funding seems disproportionately small to me.

  4. How to make simple fusion reactor by laughingskeptic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A back of the envelope calculation says that a paraffin sphere with a 200m radius can absorb the energy of a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb by melting. So we build ourselves a nice strong containment vessel out of a granite mountain, fill the hole with paraffin and set off a bomb, melt paraffin, boil water for a couple of months and then repeat. There is probably a better material than paraffin, but the basic idea is the same. Just a few minor engineering issues to work out and we could have one of these suckers in production in a couple of years. Or we could just start making better use of the monster fusion reactor that is already in the neighborhood.

  5. More wasted money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You can drill a stupid hole in the ground, about 1 Km deep, use conventional (20 year old technology) directional drilling technology to make it a circle 1 Km in diameter, and then drill a second hole back up to the surface. You can then pump water (regular, every day ordinary garden-variety water) into the ground, and have it come up hot (steam). This can then be used to turn a turbine, and the water sent back down to do it all again. Such a system can be used to generate between 10MW-100MW. Repeat. 100 of these can be built for the cost of 1 tokamak. The difference is that 100 of these can produce between 1000MW-10000MW, whereas a tokamak produces 0MW. At least the scientists are not yelping 'oh, just 15 more years' anymore. I think research is really wonderful, but it had better be something tangible. They have said "only 15 years out" for about 60 years now. Except now they are saying 100 years. Between now and 100 years from now, we need something. A tokamak reactor won't. Geothermal will. Oh, and while we're at it, build about 2 or 3 dozen new nuclear plants. Create a mine about 10560 feet down (2 miles deep), and store waste down there. Use concrete and steel for support, and store at least 1000 tons of high-level waste down there, then seal it all up. Make sure there is no possible way it can get to the surface, and put a geothermal station above it with cooling lines 1 mile deep. If it starts to react and give off a lot of heat, you just let it react and get real hot. Siphon off all the heat, and remember to turn it into electricity. If you don't think 2 miles is deep enough, go 3 miles. This isn't that hard, is it?